Tariffs, crackdowns squeeze fleets amid prolonged freight slump

By late July, the timing had become clear: Fleet Owner reported that tariff fallout from 2025 was still suppressing 2026 freight conditions because “tariffs paralyzed corporate decision-makers,” causing “stalls, reorganizations, and overall timidity” that “kept freight movement low.” Jeremy Wolfe said, “Once the smoke cleared,” tariffs had not helped domestic manufacturing and instead kept freight demand “disappointingly flat for longer than expected,” while even apparently better signals required caution, since if you “base the strength of the trucking industry solely on rates and truck orders,” conditions “have looked pretty good” through June 2026, but “do not tell the whole story.”

By August and September, enforcement had turned those weak conditions into visible operating constraints: speakers describing the market said crackdowns had been “ongoing for about 12 months now,” were “structural in nature,” and amounted to “the largest structural change to occur in the market since deregulation in 1980,” spanning non-domiciled CDLs, English-language proficiency, CDL mills, ELDs, and cabotage. The result was a market where “spot rates… are up anywhere between 30 and 50% year-over-year despite muted demand,” showing how much capacity had exited, yet profitability remained pinched because “while rates did go up,” they were not keeping pace with a truck operating cost base “up 26%.”

The cost squeeze is reducing usable capacity through the shop before it shows up on the road. FreightWaves reported maintenance costs “have climbed 8.6%” in the latest ATRI data, with pressure tied to “parts inflation driven by tariffs” and “a shortage of diesel technicians”; as fleets respond by extending trade cycles and deferring work, they face more breakdowns, more downtime, and harder replacement decisions just as cross-border tariff escalation raises equipment costs further—“Saturday morning, 50% tariffs took effect” on Canadian goods, and at that level “that’s really expensive,” with potentially lower margins for American companies.

That pressure compounds because fleets are trying to manage older assets and thinner labor benches with fragmented systems and weak early support structures. FreightWaves said deferred maintenance backlogs “built up over the past three years are still creating noise in the numbers,” while Love’s FleetView users that “import repair and parts invoices automatically” with VMRS-coded line items have “cut invoice-processing time by up to 60%”; Bournes also described an “AI audit layer” checking invoices against repair history, benchmarks, warranty conditions, and rework flags, underscoring how badly fleets need integrated processes when turnover and knowledge loss leave technician and driver shortages harder to absorb.

The freight recession did not arrive as a normal cyclical dip; it followed the post-2020 boom that pulled in capacity and inflated equipment values beyond what underlying demand could sustain. In the August 2026 analysis, Kirk said, “I think it was the longest for sure,” adding that what made it unusually hard was that in “2122” fleets faced intense demand and equipment shortages, then “an asset bubble of enormous proportions,” where a four-year-old Freightliner Cascadia worth about $45,000 had been financed at roughly “100 110,” with used prices swinging from about $34,000 to $120,000.

By 2026, that overexpansion had translated into a market still defined by too much capacity chasing too little freight, not a clean rebound. IBISWorld said “the flood of entrants drawn in by the freight surge from 2020 through 2022 created a capacity glut that took years to unwind,” and that “weaker-than-expected demand and market oversaturation led to a freight recession that lasted through most of 2025”; even with revenue up 9.2% in 2026 to $331.6 billion, five-year growth was just 0.1% CAGR, while profit fell from 8.9% in 2021 to 7.1% in 2026.