About the CCJ Top 250

Commercial Carrier Journal has ranked the top for-hire trucking companies since the late 1960s. The CCJ Top 250 is the most comprehensive ranking of active carriers. Our ranking takes into account not only the revenues posted by a trucking company but also its fleet size and employment base.

Rankings based strictly on revenues often capture activities that have only an indirect relationship to transportation. Blending revenue, equipment and drivers also allows for a reasonable way to capture carriers that decline to disclose revenue.

The CCJ Top 250 ranking treats all carriers under one umbrella as a single entity. Carriers with significant ownership by an individual, family or company but not organized under a single management team are treated separately. Also, carriers that went out of business or were acquired by other companies in 2019 aren’t listed. Instead, only active carriers are displayed. For a detailed explanation of the CCJ Top 250 ranking methodology, see “Ranking Methodology” to the right.

The print version of the CCJ Top 250 information also provides some additional information on the carriers we rank, including revenues, power units and drivers. For a more comprehensive breakdown, go to CCJTop250.com.

The CCJ Top 250 begins with data provided by RandallReilly’s RigDig Business Intelligence based on data supplied by carriers to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on their required Form MCS150 filings. Because this data can be – although rarely is – as much as a couple of years old and because the MCS-150 does not include information on revenues, all carriers included in the ranking were given an opportunity to review FMCSA data for freshness and to supply information not included on the form. In some cases, CCJ supplements its data with other official sources, such as reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

If a carrier declines to verify or update the data that we provide it for review, we presume the publicly available data is valid and use it for ranking purposes. Carriers are never allowed to opt out of the ranking.

 

Ranking methodology

CCJ’s ranking of companies is a blended scale based on a combination of revenue, total power units and number of drivers rather than a ranking simply by revenue. Companies considered for inclusion in the CCJ Top 250 were ranked from high to low by revenue, power units (weighted based on the type of power unit as discussed below) and drivers and assigned a rank in each category.

The numerical rank stored in each of the three fields was added together (revenue rank + vehicle rank + driver rank) to provide a rank sum. This sum then was ordered to provide the overall ranking assigned to each carrier, with the lowest sum receiving the highest rank.

A number of carriers failed to report actual 2019 revenue. In order to be included in the blended ranking, they were assigned – for blended ranking purposes only – a calculated revenue figure determined by multiplying the carrier’s total number of power units by the average of the bottom 50 percent of revenue per power unit performers for the companies in that carrier’s primary segment.

Calculated revenue is discounted by using the average of the bottom 50 percent of performers so that carriers failing to report revenue are not given an undue advantage in the ranking. Calculated revenue almost always will differ from actual revenue, of course, but the effect on the blended ranking likely is slight.

The power unit ranking, which represents an investment as much as a physical-count measure of trucking assets, takes into account the difference between tractors and trucks. The assumption is that a for-hire carrier with 1,000 tractors has a greater investment in equipment than one with 1,000 straight trucks. For the purpose of the blended rank only, a truck was weighted at half the value of a tractor.