Trucking market forecasts signal modest improvement in the sector in 2025 as rates, volumes and utilization improve from 2024, but utilization remains below pre-pandemic levels.
With a mixed ending to 2024, the trucking and transportation industry is looking at a slow start in 2025 before seeing improvement as the year goes on, especially in truck loadings, Avery Vise, vice president of trucking for Bloomington, Ind.-based transportation research firm FTR Transportation Intelligence, said during a Jan. 9 FTR webinar.
“We’re starting that way into 2025, but we do expect to see a little bit of seasonally adjusted improvement by the time we get to [the second quarter] and steady improvement,” he said. “We’re expecting to see overall truck freight volume up around a percentage point year over year. That doesn’t sound like much, but 2024 was up only two-tenths of a percent, so it’s a lot better.”
FTR expects an increase in total truck loadings from slightly more than 66 million to slightly less than 68 million loadings by the end of 2025, according to the presentation.
While the forecast for the overall market envisions improvement, some equipment types will show less strength and possibly weakness in 2025, Vise said.
“You have refrigerated and flatbed looking really strong growth in 2025, and in a lot of cases, flatbed is because it’s been so weak,” he said. “Dry van also being around what the average is, but we still see weakness in the short-haul, heavy-haul sector.”
Class 8 concerns
As a result, the active Class 8 truck population, or number of Class 8 trucks on the road at any given time, is expected to dip slightly, Vise said. The active U.S. Class 8 truck population is forecast to hit 3.8 million at the start of 2025 before falling below 3.8 million and remaining flat, according to the presentation.
“Our estimate is that we really haven’t seen much of a change in the population since the beginning of 2023,” he said. “It held very steadily, has come down a little bit during 2024, but also [is] kind of coming back up and staying fairly flat, so we really expect the change in the market to come from changes in the freight environment, not really changes from capacity.”
Truck utilization below pre-pandemic levels
Still, truck utilization, which includes freight demand and capacity, is forecast to improve in 2025 but remain below pre-pandemic levels, Vise said. During 2018 and 2021, truck utilization fluctuated around 100%, as demand for drivers surged due to high freight demand, according to the presentation.
“We do expect utilization to start improving from a carrier perspective, at least around the beginning of the second quarter. But even by the end of next year, you’re only looking at utilization of around 94% to 95%, which is not anywhere near what we were seeing during 2021 or 2018, and so on,” he said. “It will lead to a stronger rate environment, but not a big run-up, certainly not one that we saw like in the end of 2020 or during 2021.”
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