Article Summary
Why were trucking costs so high in 2025?
- Widespread line-item increases: Expenses rose across nearly all major categories, led by significant spikes in tolls (13.2%), repair and maintenance (8.6%), driver benefits (6.6%), and tires (6.4%).
- Aging equipment and maintenance pressures: Due to sluggish freight volumes and high equipment prices, fleets deferred replacing assets, which caused the average truck age to rise and increased the frequency of breakdowns, ultimately driving up maintenance costs.
- Unseated trucks and capacity cuts: Severe market stagnation forced carriers to execute aggressive capacity cuts, leaving 10% of their trucks unseated on average, which diluted fixed overhead costs across fewer revenue-generating miles.
- Prolonged driver detention: Unproductive dwell time at shipper and receiver facilities increased to an average of 1 hour and 49 minutes per stop, causing significant cascading financial losses for both carriers and drivers.
The average cost to operate a commercial truck rose 3.4% (an increase of 7.6 cents) in 2025 to a record $2.336 per mile, according to a benchmarking report released Wednesday by the American Transportation Research Institute.
Trucking costs have jumped in three of the last four years. The 2025 increase follows a 0.4% decline the year before, but costs remain above the $2 per mile mark – a level first crested in 2022.
ATRI
The 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, the institute's flagship annual study, found that even minus fuel, costs jumped 4.2% to $1.854 per mile – an increase that outpaced the year's 2.7% consumer inflation rate by 1.5 percentage points.
Cost increases were documented across all major line-items in 2025. The steepest percentage gains occurred in tolls, which surged 13.2%, followed by repair and maintenance at 8.6%, driver benefits at 6.6%, and tires at 6.4%.
This was the second year in a row in which the rate of growth in driver benefits costs outpaced driver wages as one of the fastest-rising line-items, ATRI found, following an increase of 4.8% from 2023 to 2024.
Only fuel and driver pay rose at sub-inflationary rates, with driver pay growing at a slower pace for the second consecutive year. Driver wages are on track for a third consecutive year of growth that lags inflation (2024-2026), reversing some of the real, inflation-adjusted income gains drivers made during the pandemic freight boom's aggressive wage hikes from 2021 through 2023. In the first two months of 2026, motor carriers reported that driver wage costs rose by an average of just 1.6%.
Truck and trailer procurement costs varied significantly by fleet size amid high equipment prices and low freight volume. Small fleets spent less on trucks and trailers in 2025 than they did in 2024, whereas truckload fleets with more than 1,000 trucks spent 16.1% more. Preliminary data from the first quarter of 2026 indicate that most of the 2025 cost trends continued into this year.
Faced with rising expenses and stagnant freight rates, motor carriers last year executed their largest capacity reduction since the current freight recession began in 2022, cutting their total truck counts by an average of 2.4% and leaving another 10% unseated.
"Freight rates are finally turning a corner in 2026, but the acceleration of industry-wide costs means that fleets must continue with aggressive cost discipline," said Chad Marsilio, chief operating officer of PGT Trucking.
The prolonged freight downturn also took a toll on other operational metrics. The average age of trucks and annual truck mileage both increased, deadhead mileage remained elevated, and non-driver staffing levels were slashed by 7.8%.
The average truck age in 2025 rose for the first time since 2022, to 3.6 years. The average age of most trailer types was lower in 2025 than in 2024. Not because of an uptick in trailer replacement, ATRI noted, but because fleets operated fewer trailers and, in doing so, retired older trailers sooner.
Despite these aggressive austerity measures, carrier profitability remained weak. Operating margins in the truckload and refrigerated sectors improved slightly but remained below 1%, according to ATRI. Tanker carriers averaged a 4% operating margin.
Less-than-truckload fleets and operations with more than 1,000 trucks maintained healthy margins, though they were flat compared to the previous year. Flatbed carriers fared the worst, posting an average operating loss of minus 0.5%.
