No shortage of drivers. A shortage of drivers willing to stay.
The American Trucking Associations built the driver-shortage statistic, published it for two decades, and watched it peak at 81,258 drivers in 2021. By 2023 the estimate had fallen to roughly 60,000. In October 2025, ATA chief economist Bob Costello reframed the whole claim: "What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number."
Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 2,235,100 people employed as heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers and projects 237,600 job openings a year through 2034. Those two pictures only look contradictory until you notice they describe different things. The shortage number measures unfilled seats at long-haul truckload carriers. The employment number measures how many Americans drive trucks for a living. One of those has a problem. The other does not.
- 2,235,100 heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers were employed in the United States in 2024, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- $58,640 was the median annual wage for the occupation in May 2025, or $28.19 an hour (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics).
- 237,600 openings are projected each year through 2034, against occupational growth of 4 percent. Most of those openings replace people who leave rather than adding seats.
- 3.58 million professional drivers work across all trucking segments, supporting 8.4 million industry-related jobs, per ATA's American Trucking Trends 2025.
- 81,258 was ATA's peak shortage estimate, recorded in 2021. It fell to 78,000 in 2022 and roughly 60,000 in 2023.
- 92.7 percent average annual turnover at truckload carriers above $30 million in revenue, measured from 1996 to 2023, against 11.8 percent at less-than-truckload carriers, per the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in a 2024 report for the US Department of Transportation.
- One-sixth to one-fourth of all heavy and tractor-trailer drivers work in the long-distance truckload segment where the shortage narrative originates, per Burks and Monaco in the BLS Monthly Labor Review.
- Roughly 400,000 new commercial driver's licenses are issued annually against about 800,000 to 900,000 long-haul jobs, which works out to roughly three recent CDL holders per seat, per OOIDA.
- 194,000 non-domiciled CDL holders were expected to lose eligibility under the FMCSA rule that took effect March 16, 2026, out of roughly 200,000 total.
- 202,345 CDL and commercial learner's permit holders sit in prohibited status in the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, and 159,226 of them have taken no step toward returning to duty.
Five methods, five different answers
Ask "is there a truck driver shortage" and the answer depends entirely on what you decide to count.
| Approach | What it counts | Answer it gives |
|---|---|---|
| ATA shortage model | Unfilled seats in the for-hire over-the-road truckload segment, measured against what carriers say they want to hire | Yes. Peaked at 81,258 in 2021 |
| Labor-economics test | Whether driver pay rises relative to comparable blue-collar work, and whether anything blocks entry to the occupation | No. The market clears normally |
| National Academies for USDOT, 2024 | Price signals, turnover by segment, whether wages behave like a market short of workers | No persistent shortage. Long-term shortage claims called "spurious" |
| OOIDA supply test | New CDLs issued per year against long-haul jobs available | Oversupply. Roughly three CDL holders per seat |
| 2026 regulatory arithmetic | Drivers removed by non-domiciled CDL, English proficiency, and Clearinghouse enforcement | A real contraction, unrelated to the old debate |
ATA's model asks a fair question: can carriers fill the trucks they want to run? The economists ask a different one: does this labor market behave like a market with a shortage? A shortage shows up as wages climbing faster than comparable work and as barriers to entry. Neither shows up here. Burks and Monaco, writing in the BLS Monthly Labor Review, concluded that the market "appears to work as well as any other blue-collar labor market, and while it tends to be 'tight,' it imposes no constraints on entry into (or exit from) the occupation."
| Year | ATA shortage estimate |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 50,000 |
| 2018 | 60,800 |
| 2021 | 81,258 (peak) |
| 2022 | 78,000 |
| 2023 | ~60,000 |
| 2024 | No figure published |
| 2025 | Reframed as a "quality" problem |
Source: ATA statements and reporting in Trucking Dive and Commercial Carrier Journal. ATA has not published a comparable annual estimate for 2016 or 2019 through 2020 in the same public series.
Turnover is where the argument actually lives
The most useful number in this debate has nothing to do with unfilled seats. It is the gap between what happens at large truckload carriers and what happens everywhere else in trucking.
| Segment | Average annual turnover | Period measured | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large truckload (over $30M revenue) | 92.7% | Q3 1996 – Q1 2023 | The roster turns over almost completely every year |
| Small truckload (under $30M) | 77.6% | Q3 1996 – Q1 2023 | Same structural pattern, slightly less severe |
| Private fleets | 15.0% | 2005 – 2022 | Same labor pool, different job design |
| Less-than-truckload linehaul | 11.8% | Q4 2000 – Q1 2022 | Comparable to ordinary blue-collar work |
Source: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries (TRB Special Report 355, 2024). These are long-run averages, not single-year figures. The large-truckload rate is worse in recent years than the average suggests: it fell to 39 percent during the Great Recession and has averaged 106 percent since late 2012. Burks and Monaco reported a nearly identical spread over 1995 to 2017: 94.0 percent at large truckload carriers against 11.7 percent at LTL carriers.
Every one of those segments hires from the same pool of CDL holders. Private fleets and LTL carriers keep their drivers. Long-haul truckload carriers do not. Whatever explains a 92.7 percent turnover rate, it cannot be that America ran out of people willing to drive trucks, because the LTL carrier down the road holds onto 88 percent of its drivers every year.
The National Academies committee put it plainly: "claims of long-term driver shortages are spurious." It attributes the churn to the industry's competitive cost structure rather than to any lack of available labor.
A supply contraction with nothing to do with the old debate
Three enforcement actions are now removing drivers from the eligible pool for reasons that have nothing to do with pay, retention, or recruiting. Reporters covering capacity in 2026 need to keep this separate from the twenty-year shortage argument, because the mechanisms are unrelated.
| Mechanism | Drivers affected | Source and status |
|---|---|---|
| Non-domiciled CDL rule, effective March 16, 2026 | ~194,000 of ~200,000 holders expected to lose eligibility | DOT estimate |
| Same rule, modeled over one to three years | 214,000 to 437,000, or 5% to 12% of the CDL workforce | J.B. Hunt's own analysis. A carrier's model, not a government figure |
| English language proficiency enforcement | ~20,000 a year annualized, from 19,000+ violations and 5,000+ out-of-service orders between June and September 2025 | FMCSA enforcement data |
| Drug and alcohol Clearinghouse | 202,345 in prohibited status, of whom 159,226 have started no return-to-duty process | FMCSA Clearinghouse data, via FreightWaves analysis, March 2026 |
| Actually removed to date | ~28,000 | Avery Vise, FTR Transportation Intelligence |
The projections and the observations are far apart. Modeled removals in the hundreds of thousands come from carriers and consultancies with a commercial stake in tight capacity. Vise counted roughly 28,000 drivers actually removed under the non-domiciled rule as of mid-2026. His read on the market: "The capacity situation was not really created by either the non-domiciled issue or the English language proficiency issue."
What the wage and licensing data show
A genuine labor shortage leaves fingerprints. Wages climb faster than in comparable occupations, because employers bid against each other for scarce workers. Openings go unfilled, because not enough people want the job. Neither pattern holds here.
Burks and Monaco found that "point estimates of the earnings of heavy truck drivers exceed those of other blue-collar workers throughout the period" they studied, from 2003 to 2017, and that people move in and out of the occupation in the way you would expect when relative pay changes.
On the supply side, OOIDA counted roughly 400,000 new CDLs issued in a typical year, surging past 800,000 in 2022, against roughly 800,000 to 900,000 long-haul jobs. That is about three recent license holders for every long-haul seat. The people are entering. They are leaving again: OOIDA reports that about 30 percent of new hires quit within three months and fewer than 40 percent last a year.
The federal overtime exemption is the mechanic behind much of this. Long-haul drivers are typically paid by the mile, so time spent waiting at a dock, fueling, or filing paperwork is unpaid, and a 60- to 70-hour week carries no overtime premium. Subsidized CDL training programs push the cost of replacing a departing driver off the carrier's books, which weakens the financial case for fixing retention. A carrier that can replace a driver cheaply has less reason to make the job worth keeping.
Common questions about the truck driver shortage
Is there a truck driver shortage in 2026?
Not in the sense of too few licensed drivers. The United States has roughly 3.5 to 4 million CDL holders and 2.2 million people employed as heavy and tractor-trailer drivers. What exists is a retention failure at long-haul truckload carriers, plus a 2026 regulatory contraction that is removing eligible drivers for compliance reasons.
How many truck drivers are there in the US?
BLS counted 2,235,100 heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in 2024. ATA counts 3.58 million professional drivers across all segments, a broader figure that includes delivery and other commercial driving.
What is the truck driver turnover rate?
It depends entirely on the segment. In the National Academies' 2024 report, large truckload carriers averaged 92.7 percent annual turnover between 1996 and 2023, and have averaged 106 percent since late 2012. Less-than-truckload linehaul drivers averaged 11.8 percent and private fleets 15.0 percent.
Why do carriers say they cannot find drivers?
Because at the individual carrier level, the experience is real. A long-haul truckload carrier replacing most of its roster every year is always recruiting. The disagreement is over whether that reflects a national labor shortage or the economics of one specific job design.
Does the driver shortage affect shipping rates?
Capacity affects rates, but driver availability is one input among several. FTR's Avery Vise attributes the 2026 capacity picture mainly to carriers exiting during the freight recession rather than to driver removals. Freight demand, carrier count, and equipment supply move rates more reliably than any shortage estimate.
How much do truck drivers make?
The median annual wage for heavy and tractor-trailer drivers was $58,640 in May 2025, or $28.19 an hour, according to BLS. Long-haul truckload pay is usually per-mile, so hours worked and hours paid diverge.
Is the non-domiciled CDL rule causing a driver shortage?
It is removing drivers from the eligible pool. How many is contested. DOT estimated roughly 194,000 would lose eligibility; J.B. Hunt modeled 214,000 to 437,000 over one to three years; FTR counted about 28,000 actually removed as of mid-2026.
Which statistic should a reporter cite?
For workforce size, use the BLS figure and name the year. For the shortage claim, cite ATA's peak of 81,258 in 2021 and note that ATA reframed the claim in October 2025. For the mechanism, cite the turnover spread between truckload and LTL carriers, which is the finding both sides implicitly agree on.
What the number actually tells you
The driver shortage was never a measurement of how many Americans can drive a truck. It measured how many seats long-haul truckload carriers wanted to fill and could not, in a segment holding somewhere between a sixth and a quarter of the country's heavy-truck drivers. Read that way, the figure was always defensible and always narrower than the headlines it generated.
BLS economists and the National Academies committee both dismantled the broader claim years apart, and neither dented it much. What finally moved it was ATA reframing its own position in October 2025, alongside ATRI's survey dropping driver shortage to twelfth. When the organization that publishes a statistic stops leading with it, that is the story.
For an operator, the practical read is that recruiting is not the lever. The LTL carrier and the private fleet draw from the same labor pool and keep their people, and what differs is how the job is built: predictable schedules, home time, paid detention, hourly structures. For a reporter, the number worth citing is the turnover spread. It is the one figure in this argument that both camps accept, and it points straight at the mechanism.
The 2026 enforcement actions are a separate story and anyone writing about capacity this year should keep them separate. Something real is happening to driver eligibility, the projections are wide, and the observed removals are an order of magnitude below the loudest forecasts.
How we built this
Employment, wage, and projection figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the Occupational Outlook Handbook for the 2024 employment count and 2024 to 2034 projections, and the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for the May 2025 median wage. Turnover figures come from TRB Special Report 355, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for the US Department of Transportation in 2024. Those are long-run averages over the windows shown in the table, not single-year rates. We cross-checked them against the 1995 to 2017 series in Burks and Monaco's Monthly Labor Review analysis, which found nearly identical figures.
ATA's shortage estimates are drawn from the association's own publications and from contemporaneous trade reporting, since ATA has not maintained a single continuous public series. Years without a published figure are marked as such rather than interpolated. CDL issuance and long-haul job counts come from OOIDA's 2025 analysis. The 2026 enforcement figures come from FMCSA and DOT statements, FMCSA Clearinghouse data reported by FreightWaves, and modeling published by J.B. Hunt, which is labeled as a carrier's own estimate wherever it appears.
Where sources disagree, both figures appear with the methodological reason for the gap. No estimate here is an average of competing numbers.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Heavy and Tractor-trailer Truck Drivers
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025
- Stephen V. Burks and Kristen Monaco, "Is the U.S. labor market for truck drivers broken?" BLS Monthly Labor Review, 2019
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries (TRB Special Report 355), 2024
- OOIDA, The Churn: A Brief Look at the Roots of High Driver Turnover in U.S. Trucking, 2025
- American Trucking Associations, American Trucking Trends 2025
- American Trucking Associations, "The truth about trucking turnover"
- Commercial Carrier Journal, "Trucking has a 'quality' driver shortage, not 'quantity'," October 2025
- Trucking Dive, "Driver shortage eases again in 2024 'for all the wrong reasons'," October 2024
- American Transportation Research Institute 2025 Top Industry Issues, via Commercial Carrier Journal, October 2025
- FreightWaves, "The industry is focused on 200,000 non-domiciled CDLs," March 2026
- J.B. Hunt, "Immigration policy and enforcement impact on U.S. commercial driver supply"
- The Trucker, "Capacity crunch: freight demand is rebounding, but driver availability may constrain future growth," July 2026
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