The Freight Market Just Flipped

For most of 2024 and 2025, shippers had the upper hand. Capacity was loose, rates were soft, and carriers competed hard for volume. That market is gone. Dry van spot rates rose 45 percent year over year in June 2026, excluding fuel, and contract pricing is following the same trajectory. The freight market didn't drift into this shift. It moved fast, and a lot of budgets built on the old assumptions are already out of date.

Key takeaways:

Dry van spot rates were up 45 percent year over year in June 2026, with contract rates climbing 12 percent
Active carrier authorities entered 2026 about 12 percent below their 2022 peak, and the decline hasn't stopped
Tender rejection rates hit their highest level since 2022, meaning carriers are turning down freight because they have better options
The shift is being driven by supply leaving the market, not by a surge in demand
Companies still planning off 2025 rate assumptions are likely underbudgeting for the second half of 2026

What's driving this, and why it's different from past cycles

Freight cycles usually turn on demand: a strong economy pulls more freight into the market, capacity tightens in response, and rates follow. That's not what's happening in 2026. Freight demand has stayed uneven and, by most measures, muted. What's changed is the supply side. Carrier attrition accelerated through the past year, and active carrier authorities entered 2026 roughly 12 percent below their 2022 peak, a decline tied to tighter enforcement of English language requirements for commercial drivers, stricter rules around non-domiciled commercial licenses, and the closure of thousands of driver training programs. Each of those pressures looks modest on its own. Together, they've pulled meaningful capacity out of the market at a pace few forecasters expected heading into the year.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to plan around this. A demand-driven rate spike tends to correct once demand softens again. A supply-driven spike, where the carriers and drivers simply aren't there, corrects more slowly, because rebuilding capacity takes time regardless of what freight volume does next. ACT Research's July 2026 forecast characterizes the current cycle as primarily supply-driven, and notes that the usual lag between spot rate movement and contract rate movement has been shortening, meaning contract pricing is catching up to spot pressure faster than shippers are used to.

The numbers shippers should be tracking

Spot rates are the headline, but they're not the only signal worth watching. Tender rejection rates, the rate at which carriers decline freight they're contracted to move, reached their highest levels since 2022, which is a direct signal that carriers currently have better options than the freight a shipper is offering. That's a leverage shift, and it shows up in negotiations well before it shows up in a monthly rate report.

LTL tells a related but distinct story. The bankruptcy and shutdown of Yellow Corporation in mid-2023 permanently removed roughly 12 percent of national LTL capacity, and that structural gap never fully closed. Combined with the truckload capacity pressure spilling into LTL networks, rate increases in that segment have arrived faster and with more force than most analysts projected at the start of 2026, and carriers are expected to pursue additional increases in upcoming bid cycles rather than hold steady.

Flatbed is worth a separate mention for companies moving specialized freight. It's currently one of the strongest truckload segments, with spot rates hitting new records through the first half of 2026, which means shippers in flatbed-dependent categories are seeing even sharper pricing pressure than the broader dry van market.

Why this is a data problem before it's a negotiation problem

The instinct in a tightening market is to go straight to the carrier and negotiate. That works better when a company already knows its own numbers cold: which lanes are most exposed to spot volatility, how much of its freight is currently moving under contract versus spot, and where tender rejections are already happening in its own network before the next rate conversation starts. Companies that walk into carrier negotiations without that visibility are negotiating from a weaker position in a market where carriers already have the upper hand.

This is where clean transportation spend data earns its keep, especially in a volatile cycle. A company with normalized freight data across all carriers and modes can see rate movement by lane in near real time, instead of discovering it a month later when the invoice arrives higher than expected. Trax's Market Intelligence capability is built around exactly this problem, giving supply chain and procurement teams a current view of rate trends so budgeting and carrier strategy can react to what's actually happening in the market rather than what last quarter's contract assumed.

What to do differently for the rest of 2026

A few practical shifts make sense given where the data currently points. First, budgets built on 2025 rate assumptions need to be revisited now, not at the next quarterly review, because the gap between plan and actual is only going to widen the longer it goes unaddressed. Second, companies relying heavily on the spot market should reassess how much freight they want exposed to a market where rates are rising and rejection rates are climbing, since dedicated transportation and firmer contract commitments are becoming more attractive trade-offs in this specific environment. Third, any company that hasn't looked closely at its own tender rejection and on-time performance data in the past few months is likely missing the early signal that a carrier relationship is shifting before it becomes a bigger service problem.

The bigger picture

This isn't a temporary spike that resolves itself by the next earnings cycle. Structural capacity loss doesn't reverse as fast as it built up, and the regulatory and driver market pressures behind it show no sign of easing. Shippers who treat this as a short-term rate blip are likely to keep getting surprised by their own invoices through the rest of the year. Shippers who treat it as a real market shift, and adjust both their data visibility and their carrier strategy accordingly, are the ones who'll come out of 2026 with a transportation budget that actually held up.

Want a clearer read on how current rate and capacity trends are showing up in your own network? Contact Trax to see how Market Intelligence and normalized spend data can sharpen your carrier strategy for the rest of 2026.