Carrier Load Rejections Quadruple Amid Driver Shortage
Tender rejection rates have tripled since 2023 to roughly 14% as carriers reject four times as many loads despite only a 9% rise in freight volumes over three years.
Freight market tender rejection rates have surged to roughly 14% in 2026, about three times their 2023 levels. Carriers are rejecting nearly four times as many loads on roughly the same volume of freight, revealing a severe imbalance in the spot market. Truckload volumes across the past three years have grown just 9%.
Driver constraints and regulatory barriers are suppressing fleet expansion
Driver availability is limiting fleet growth at major carriers like Knight-Swift, Werner, and Schneider. These firms are now prioritizing yield and utilization over expansion. Regulatory pressures are tightening the labor pool. More than 202,000 commercial driver's license holders are sidelined for drug and alcohol violations. English proficiency enforcement removes roughly 2,700 drivers from service each month. The non-domiciled CDL rule affects more than 194,000 drivers over time.
Authority growth is misleading as a sign of real capacity
Net carrier authority additions hit a five-year high, exceeding 2,000 per week in late August and September 2026. This positive turn is deceptive. Julie Van de Kamp warned against interpreting it as proof of genuine capacity expansion. She linked much of the 2026 surge to noise around the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's new MOTIS system, which paused deactivations and cleared application backlogs. Only about two in three new interstate registrants obtained liability insurance in 2026, compared with nine in ten during the 2019 cycle. Insurance premiums rose about 4% in 2025 and another 4% to 6% in early 2026.
Market indicators point to prolonged tightness ahead
Key physical capacity metrics are declining. The total number of for-hire tractors fell by roughly 51,000 in August alone. New fleet tractor counts peaked at about 47,000 in mid-2022 and have kept falling since. This mismatch between paper authorities and real trucks is historic. In the previous capacity boom, authorities increased 51% while actual tractor counts grew only 12%. Van de Kamp noted that under a normal cycle, the gap between rejections and volume would narrow as new trucks arrive. That has not occurred. "The price signal is there, but capacity response isn’t," she said.
She recommends stakeholders track tractor counts, fleets reporting miles, and the gap between tender rejections and tender volumes as leading indicators. Estimated new authority grants in 2026 ran about 17% below first-quarter levels. About 10% of carrier trucks are parked. Van de Kamp expects the market to remain tight at least through early 2027, and potentially considerably longer.
