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Research Outline

Prepared for Matt J. | Delivered October 15, 2020

U.S. Trucking Industry

Goals

To provide a breakdown of the total U.S. trucking fleet with a list of all trucking companies and the number of trucks they operate. Alternatively, if a breakdown for all companies is not available, provide a breakdown of the industry by size (e.g. the top 10% of trucking companies operate 40% of all the trucks). Also provide any helpful cases studies or primers elaborating on the U.S. trucking industry, if available.

Early Findings

  • According to the American Trucking Associations, over 36.9 million trucks (excluding government and farm) were registered and used for business purposes in 2018.
  • In addition, 3.91 million Class 8 trucks (including tractors and straight trucks) were in operation in 2019.
  • Recent data from the U.S. Department of Transportation indicates that "the number of for-hire carriers on file with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration totaled 928,647, private carriers totaled 799,342 and other interstate motor carriers totaled 84,763. "
  • While a complete list of all transport companies by the number of trucks they operate was not available in the public domain, Transport Topics provides a "Top 100 For-Hire Rankings" list which ranks "common and contract freight carriers operating in the United States, Canada and Mexico" based on annual revenue. This lists also provides the total number of "tractors" (includes company-owned, lease-to-own and owner-operator tractors) and trailers owned by each company.
  • The complete list has been compiled in the shared spreadsheet.
  • Transport Topics also provide a list of Top 100 Private Carriers in North America along with their sales and number of tractors , trucks, pickups/cargo vans, and trailers. This list can be found here.
  • In addition, we came across several lists of top trucking companies in the US. However, these lists were either outdated, included only information on the trucking companies' 2018 or older revenues, or were not available for free.
  • In our initial research, we were unable to find any case studies/primers/reports covering the overall trucking industry in the US. Some reports offered by the American Trucking Associations are not available for free.