Trucking generated $906 billion in revenue and moved 11.27 billion tons of freight in the most recent year measured by the American Trucking Associations — more than 72 percent of all domestic freight tonnage. It is also overwhelmingly a small-business industry: 91.5 percent of carriers run 10 trucks or fewer.
How big is the U.S. trucking industry?
The American Trucking Associations' Trends report is the standard reference, and its most recent full year shows industry revenue of $906 billion on 11.27 billion tons of freight. Both figures were down from the prior year, when revenue reached $1.004 trillion on 11.41 billion tons — the tail end of a freight recession that squeezed spot rates hard.
Scale is easier to grasp through share than through dollars. Trucks move more than 72 percent of all domestic freight tonnage, 67 percent of surface trade with Canada, and 85 percent of goods crossing the Mexican border. The industry employs 8.4 million people in trucking-related jobs, including 3.58 million professional drivers.
How many trucking companies are small businesses?
Almost all of them. 91.5 percent of carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks, and 99.3 percent operate fewer than 100 power units. As of mid-2025 there were roughly 580,000 active U.S. motor carriers registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that own or lease at least one tractor.
That structure explains most of what is distinctive about trucking finance. A five-truck carrier is competing for freight against fleets with hundreds of units and the balance sheet to wait out a soft market, and it has essentially no pricing power on a given load. Its edge is overhead, routing discipline, and how quickly it turns a delivered load into cash. Our guide to owner-operator trucking funding covers the one-truck end of that spectrum.
What freight volumes look like in 2026
The ATA's seasonally adjusted For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index read 113.1 in June 2026 against a 2015 base of 100, up 0.1 percent on the month and down 0.1 percent from June 2025. Through the first half of 2026 the index was 1.4 percent ahead of the same period in 2025.
The shape of the year matters more than the average. Tonnage posted five straight year-over-year gains early in 2026, including a 2.1 percent February increase that was the largest since October 2022, then contracted year over year in each of the last two months measured. For a small carrier that pattern is the whole story: a first quarter that felt like a recovery, followed by a second quarter that did not, with fixed truck payments running straight through both.
How small carriers manage cash between load and payment
The structural problem in trucking is that fuel, tolls, insurance, and driver pay all come due before the broker or shipper pays the invoice, which is commonly 30 to 45 days out. Growth makes it worse, because taking more loads means funding more weeks of expenses in advance.
That is why invoice factoring is so widely used in this industry — it converts a delivered load into cash within days rather than weeks — and why equipment financing is the normal way to add a tractor, since the truck itself secures the deal. Our guides to small business funding for trucking and the best trucking business funding compare the structures on total cost rather than on approval speed alone.
The Broker Shop is a funding broker, not a funder — we put more than 50 lenders in competition for one application instead of lending money ourselves. That means you see the structures you actually qualify for side by side and pick the payment schedule that matches how the money comes back in. It is free to apply, and checking your options won't affect your credit score.
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See What I Qualify For →The bottom line: Trucking is a $906 billion industry made almost entirely of small carriers, and in a year when tonnage is roughly flat the carriers that survive are the ones who shorten the gap between delivering a load and being paid for it.
Sources: American Trucking Associations — American Trucking Trends (revenue, tonnage, fleet size) · American Trucking Associations — ATA Truck Tonnage Index, June 2026 · American Trucking Associations — Economics and Industry Data
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