The non-domiciled CDL debate won’t rescue your operating ratio. Neither will any other version of “more drivers are coming.”
Capacity isn’t your problem in this trucking market. Margin is. Non-fuel costs just hit a record $1.78 per mile. Spot rates have trailed contract rates for three and a half years. You’re staring down $2.26 all-in per mile while customers still expect 2019 pricing.
Adding a few thousand drivers to a pool of 2.235 million doesn’t change any of that.
Yet the industry keeps chasing labor supply narratives because they’re easier to talk about than the blunt truth: Most carriers and brokers are bleeding out on inefficiency they’ve learned to live with. Manual processes. Scattered data. Decisions made on gut feel instead of numbers. The kind of drag that doesn’t show up on one load but compounds across thousands.
2026 isn’t going to reward whoever has the most trucks or the cheapest drivers. It’s going to reward whoever runs the tightest operation.
So, let’s stop pretending policy is the answer and talk about what actually is.
Why ‘More Drivers’ Was Never Going to Save You
Let’s play devil’s advocate. Say the non-domiciled CDL debate lands in your favor. Restrictions loosen. A wave of new drivers enters the market. Capacity expands.
You still lose.
Not because more drivers wouldn’t help at the margins. They might. But because the math problem eating your business has nothing to do with how many CDL holders exist and everything to do with what it costs to move freight profitably.
Until you fix that, you’re rearranging deck chairs.
You Can’t Build a Business Plan on a Court Docket
The non-domiciled CDL conversation isn’t a settled policy. It’s a legal food fight. The FMCSA issued an interim final rule on September 29, 2025. Six weeks later, an administrative stay froze it. That’s not “capacity planning.” That’s hoping the right people win an argument you have zero control over.
Any 2026 strategy that hinges on regulatory outcomes is a 2026 strategy built on sand. You’re handing your P&L to agency guidance and court rulings while your competitors focus on what they can influence.
A Few Thousand Drivers Won’t Dent 2.2 million
The U.S. already employs roughly 2.235 million heavy and tractor-trailer drivers. Estimates put non-domiciled CDL holders at around 5% of that total.
Even if that number doubled overnight, you’re talking about a fraction of a fraction.
Meanwhile, your insurance premiums don’t care. Your equipment costs don’t care. Shipper procurement teams definitely don’t care. None of the structural expenses crushing your margins will suddenly reprice themselves because the driver pool grew a few percentage points.
The Numbers Are Already Ugly
Costs aren’t “easing,” or stabilizing. They’re only rebalancing upward while rates stay flat.
Truck and trailer payments climbed to 39 cents per mile. That’s a record. Non-fuel operating costs rose 3.6% to $1.78 per mile. Also, a record. Overall, truckload carriers averaged losses just north of 2%.
That’s not a capacity problem. It’s a profitability crisis that no influx of drivers will fix.
The ‘Shortage’ Isn’t Really About Head Count
Here’s the part that makes the whole debate frustrating: The driver shortage was always a misnomer. Industry analysts have said for years that the real issue is churn and job quality, not raw numbers. Drivers leave because the job burns them out, pay doesn’t keep up, and working conditions haven’t improved.
Loosening CDL restrictions doesn’t fix turnover. It doesn’t improve service quality or safety outcomes. It just adds bodies to a system that already struggles to retain the ones it has. And those bodies still cost money to recruit, train, insure, and manage.
No Cavalry Coming: Demand and Rates Won’t Save You Either
So, more drivers won’t fix your margins. Maybe the market will.
Except it won’t. Not in 2026. Probably not in 2027 either.
The freight rebound everyone’s been waiting for keeps getting pushed back like a delayed appointment that was never on the calendar to begin with. And even when rates tick up, your cost stack doesn’t care. It keeps climbing anyway.
If you’re banking on external relief, here’s why that bet isn’t paying out.
The Rebound You’re Waiting For Isn’t Coming
DAT’s 2026 outlook said it plainly: Transportation providers should not expect a dramatic rebound. ACT Research echoed the sentiment. Supply has outpaced demand for long enough that the market stays loose, carriers keep fighting for volume, and nobody gains pricing leverage.
You’ve heard “next year will be better” for three years running. At some point, you have to stop building plans around a turnaround that keeps not showing up and start building plans that work if it never does.
Shippers Hold the Leverage, and They Know It
Welcome to the extended buyer’s market.
Shippers can squeeze you on price while still demanding premium service. They don’t have to choose. Capacity is available, options are plentiful, and procurement teams have zero incentive to give back the margin they clawed away during the soft market. Plus shippers are “under the gun” in their own businesses as they themselves face shrinking margins because of tariff and other inflationary cost increases.
Even if capacity tightens slightly, that leverage doesn’t flip overnight. Shipper behavior lags market conditions by quarters, sometimes years. You’ll feel the cost pressure long before you see any pricing relief.
Rates Going Up Doesn’t Mean You’re Making Money
Here’s the cruel joke. Spot rates can improve, and you can still lose money.
When spot trails contract for three and a half years, your pricing power atrophies. You’re not negotiating from strength. You’re grateful for loads that break even. Meanwhile, your costs don’t wait for rate recovery. Insurance premiums keep jumping. Equipment financing stays elevated. Maintenance, labor, compliance. None of it gets cheaper because the market “improves.”
A rising tide lifts all boats, supposedly. But your boat has a hole in it, and the tide is rising more slowly than water’s coming in.
Brokers Feel It Too
Trucking companies aren’t alone here. Broker profit margins have dropped below 15% in recent cycles, and every unnecessary touch on a load eats into what’s left.
When margins compress, cost-per-load becomes the entire game. Manual processes, redundant systems, and scattered workflows don’t just slow you down. They bleed you dry one transaction at a time.
The market isn’t coming to rescue anyone. Whatever you’re going to fix, you have to fix it yourself.
The Only Lever Left: Run Tighter or Bleed Out
More drivers won’t save you. The market won’t save you. Rates won’t save you.
So, what’s left?
You. Your operation. The stuff you can control.
2026 belongs to the trucking companies and brokers who stop waiting for external conditions to improve and start treating every load, every decision, and every process as if it depends on margin.
Because it does.
Speed Wins When Margins Are Thin
Macro debates about freight demand and policy changes are a waste of time at this point. The 2026 game is speed and precision.
How fast can you decide which loads to accept and which to reject? How quickly do you reposition assets when a lane goes soft? How long does it take from order to dispatch to invoice? Every hour of lag, every slow decision, every manual handoff costs you money you don’t have to spare.
Trucking companies and brokers operating on gut feel and spreadsheets are bringing a knife to a gunfight. The ones making faster, smarter decisions will take the loads worth having, while everyone else argues about when the market will turn.
Your Controllables Are Bleeding You Dry
You can’t control spot rates. You can’t control diesel prices. You can’t control what shippers are willing to pay.
But deadhead? That’s on you. One ATRI study pegged deadhead at 16.3% for non-tank operations during soft markets. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a direct tax on every mile you run.
Back-office drag? Also, on you. Fleets have already cut overhead, parked trucks, and squeezed operations because there’s no margin left to absorb inefficiency. The carriers still running bloated processes and manual workflows are funding their competitors’ survival.
Every controllable you ignore is money walking out the door. And you don’t have enough margin to keep pretending otherwise.
Humans for Exceptions, Systems for Everything Else
The goal here isn’t “buy more software.” Software doesn’t fix anything by itself. The goal is less manual work on tasks that shouldn’t require a human in the first place.
Let your people handle exceptions, relationships, and judgment calls. Let systems handle the repeatable stuff: workflow orchestration, load monitoring, carrier vetting, document management. Stop paying skilled employees to do data entry and email chasing.
DAT’s 2026 outlook specifically called out automation as the lever for both sides of the market. Brokers need to reduce operating expenses per load, strengthen vetting, and enable dynamic bidding. Carriers need to maximize utilization, improve cash flow visibility, and maintain discipline when the temptation to chase bad freight gets strong.
Five Places to Find the Margin You’ve Been Losing
Run tighter, automate more, get efficient. Great. But where do you start?
The answer isn’t some giant digital transformation or a consultant’s playbook. It’s finding the specific places where your operation leaks money and plugging them one by one. A few points here, a few points there, and suddenly you’ve clawed back 3% to 5% in margin that no policy change or rate bump was ever going to deliver.
- Kill Deadhead and Dwell at the Source: That 16% deadhead figure isn’t a market condition. It’s a workflow failure. Poor planning, sloppy communication, last-minute appointment changes, and weak exception handling all add empty miles. Tighten your appointment discipline, and you buy margin back immediately.
- Know Your Lane-Level P&L Before You Say Yes: When nonfuel costs run $1.78 per mile, “we’ll make it up on volume” is how fleets end up subsidizing shippers. Every accept/reject decision should have your true cost-to-serve baked in. Stop guessing. Start pricing with real numbers.
- Stop Paying Skilled People to Copy and Paste: Count the touches on a single load from order intake to dispatch. If your team is rekeying data from emails, PDFs, and carrier portals, you’re burning premium labor on work a machine should handle. Automation converts messy inputs into clean loads. Humans step in when something breaks.
- Shorten the Path From Delivery to Deposit: Cash flow is survival in a tight market. Document capture, POD validation, invoicing, and exception handling. Every manual step adds days to your order-to-cash cycle. Automate the repeatable pieces so you bill faster, dispute less, and stop chasing paperwork.
- Treat Compliance and Risk Like the Margin Line They Are: Insurance and claims hide in the back office, but they kill margin in plain sight. With premiums still climbing, tighten your safety workflows, carrier vetting, and documentation habits. You’re protecting what little profit the market left you.
Stop Waiting for a Bailout That Won’t Come
The non-domiciled CDL debate will keep making headlines. Regulators will flip-flop, industry groups will argue, and the press will keep churning out takes. But none of that changes your 2026 reality. Costs hit record levels. Rates stayed flat. The market rewards whoever runs the tightest operation and punishes everyone hoping for external relief. The only question left is whether you keep waiting for conditions to improve or start fixing what you control.
That’s the problem EKA Solutions was built to solve. Our Omni-TMS™ targets the exact places where manual work piles up, and margin disappears: order processing, load planning and dispatching, on-time delivery tracking and detention monitoring and compliance, load matching, document handling, invoicing. The platform automates the repetitive grind, so your team can focus on exceptions and relationships instead of data entry or shuffling paper. Some brokers on the system run 25 to 30 loads per person per day, while the industry average sits around 7 to 10. We’re not selling miracles. We just know where margin hides and how to help you claw it back.
Talk to us when you’re ready to stop hoping the market turns and start running a tighter operation.