Shippers’ Summit Reveals Why Today’s Trucking Market Remains Fragile

At shippers’ confab, defining a “fragile” trucking market

NEW YORK — The U.S. trucking market is not showing the explosive demand seen during the COVID-era freight boom, but it may be more vulnerable to disruption than recent stability suggests.

That was the central message from FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller and Zach Strickland, the company’s director of market intelligence, during a shipper gathering hosted by SONAR Tuesday at the TWA Hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. The event was sponsored by SONAR and Cass Information Systems.

Fuller and Strickland described the current freight environment as “fragile,” a term they said should not necessarily be interpreted as negative. Instead, they used it to describe a market in which capacity is tight enough that relatively small disruptions could quickly affect service.

“Capacity is so tight that any disruption could cause a significant increase in rejections, a significant tightness in capacity, trucks not showing up,” Fuller said. “So I think the word fragility is important to define because when I hear fragile, I usually think bad.”

The discussion centered in part on the SONAR Tender Rejection Index, or STRI. The index tracks the percentage of contracted loads that carriers decline to haul under their agreements and is used as an indicator of the balance between freight demand and available truck capacity.

Strickland said tender rejections can provide a useful measure of market strength because they are less directly affected by inflation than freight prices.

“Rates have inflationary pressure on them,” he said. “Tender rejections do not. So it’s a little bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison.”

The STRI had risen beginning in November 2025, reaching more than 17% in June before falling below 14%. In the days before the New York event, however, it moved sharply higher, increasing about 75 basis points in a single week.

That pattern raised questions about whether the market had reached a stable new level or was simply pausing before another period of tightening.

Strickland said the initial increase in rejections reflected carriers recognizing that the market had become more difficult to manage. Over time, carriers and shippers adjusted to that environment, allowing rejection levels to ease. But a series of disruptions, including Roadcheck week, the usual effects of the Memorial Day holiday and legal questions raised by Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, added pressure to the system.

The legal case has prompted renewed discussion about broker liability, carrier selection and how those issues could affect available capacity. Strickland said the market’s ability to remain stable despite those pressures should not be mistaken for a lack of risk.

“This market is so fragile,” he said, “even though we’re having these periods of stability.”

A different kind of market than COVID

Both analysts distinguished the current conditions from the freight disruption that followed the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that period, a sudden surge in consumer demand overwhelmed transportation networks, first producing widespread shortages and then contributing to one of the strongest trucking markets on record.

Strickland said the current market does not have the same demand surge. The SONAR Tender Volume Index has not indicated a comparable increase in freight activity, and the recent rise in rejection rates appears to be more closely connected to capacity constraints and operational disruptions than to a dramatic increase in shipment volume.

A shift of some freight from highway transportation to intermodal rail also may have contributed to the recent decline in truckload tender rejections, Strickland said. That change could help explain why the STRI eased even as the trucking market remained sensitive to disruptions.

Fuller said some Wall Street contacts have raised concerns about a “disorderly” supply chain similar to the early COVID period. He rejected that comparison as an indication of what is happening now, saying current conditions remain orderly and do not warrant panic.

Demand may also be affected by broader changes in consumer behavior and the labor force, Fuller said. He cited immigration cutbacks and deportations as factors that could reduce the number of consumers in the market. He also pointed to the growing use of GLP-1 medications, which he said may be influencing consumption of products such as food, beer and soft drinks.

Regulation adds pressure to capacity

Regulatory developments were another major part of the discussion. In addition to the questions surrounding broker liability, Fuller pointed to enforcement activity involving the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and its administrator, Derek Barrs.

Fuller said Barrs has emphasized the connection between carrier profitability and safety investment. According to Fuller, the administrator believes carriers that earn money are better positioned to spend on equipment maintenance, driver training and qualified, properly regulated drivers.

Fuller said regulators are likely to continue applying pressure to carriers that do not meet those standards. That pressure could remove some capacity from the market, particularly among operators that are unable to absorb higher compliance and operating costs.

For drivers and fleets, the result is a market in which freight may still move in an orderly fashion, but service can become less predictable when several pressures arrive at once. Road disruptions, holiday effects, equipment or driver shortages, regulatory enforcement and changes in freight routing can all affect whether a contracted truck is available when a shipment is ready.

The message from the New York gathering was not that another COVID-style freight crisis is developing. Rather, the market appears to have settled into a tighter and less forgiving operating environment—one in which stability can change quickly when capacity is interrupted.