Owner-operator income gained less than 1% on average among business services firm ATBS's clientele in 2025, yet strong year-over-year performance for owner-ops in the last months and market signals this year so far suggest a trucking recovery in the offing.
That's according to parallel updates delivered Tuesday, March 24, by ATBS CEO Todd Amen and firm Vice President Mike Hosted for fleet partner owner-operator programs and owner-operator clientele, respectively.
- Income gains were driven by leased dry van, flatbed and tanker owners among ATBS clients. Other segments posted losses for 2025.
- A "capacity-driven recovery" is likely to play out through 2026 and beyond, with pressures on "illegal capacity" from federal and state enforcement and regulatory changes playing a large part.
- Fuel efficiency and full attention to cost-offset needs with fuel surcharges and rate adjustments will be key to taking full advantage of trucking market demand gains, given recent price spikes after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and the inevitable retaliation.
"The last three years," said Amen, have "been painful," simply put.
For each of those years, many among the carriers contracting leased owner-operators that ATBS works with have since 2023 advised him not to visit "until you have better news. We've been waiting for the day when things got better. And I really think the day is here, and a lot of us are excited about it."
Capacity crunch on the road to trucking recovery
Spot market metrics show load-to-truck ratios far higher than the level around which they've been hovering for most of the the last painful years. On Truckstop.com, which Amen's been monitoring for close to a couple decades, "two weeks ago it was 151 loads per truck looking for a load," he said. "If we’re below 100," generally speaking, he added, "that’s not a good market. Good news is that we’ve spiked above that break-even."
Contract freight's showing evidence of turning, too, after a low point in January of this year, Amen added.
The trucking recovery is under way, he said. Yet with fuel-cost headwinds just up over the front bumper and no big freight uptick in sight, Amen said he tended to agree with American Trucking Associations Chief Economist Bob Costello that this year would present a "capacity-driven recovery" fueled by market exits of the last years -- and ongoing.
Amen noted the obvious for small businesses who've been unable to optimize operations and hold on through anemic demand to reap the results.
"These are very hard, and take a long time," he said, paraphrasing Costello's point of view on capacity reductions sufficient to truly move demand.
New authorities granted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration have been outpaced by revocations of authority for much of the last three years. Yet pain hasn't been felt just by small businesses.
For a full 12 of the "last 15 weeks large fleets have slashed their truck counts," Amen noted. Big-trucking-company capacity is down 21% from a peak in mid-2022, Amen noted. It amounts to the "lowest truck count level at large carriers since 2006," 20 years ago, "and that says a lot."
Mike Hosted put it this way: "We don’t like to see companies go under. We don’t like to see people fail." But the bloodletting of recent years for the wider market he nonetheless called a "necessary rebalance" that should deliver better conditions for trucking companies of all sizes.
Pressures on the "illegal capacity" out there, too, continue to mount from a federal government clearly motivated to shore up its rules and regs enforcement. Amen did his best to dive into what watchers mean by the term itself with this slide.
While Amen noted pinning down impacts over the next years of enforcement moves against drivers with insuffucient English skills or non-domiciled CDLs are difficult to truly forecast, all of these areas, already seeing action, would serve to limit the wider industry's ability to service demand, delivering long-term potential upsides. Evidence of the potential extent of ELD tampering was on offer as recently as this week, with depositions in a court case in Cook County, Illinois, involving a 200-plus-truck fleet.
[Related: 'Foreign driver capacity' hit incoming? Fleets watch, as owner-op income back on slow rise]
Owner-op net income poised for further gain in 2026 -- with the fuel-price caveat
ATBS' computation of bellwether averages across different segments among owner-op clients got a bit of an update for this first 2026 presentation, part of the firm's semi-annual series. Amen and Hosted described it as essentially eliminating from the pool of contributors to the data some part-time operations that were dragging down the averages, likewise some of the higher-end multi-unit or team fleets that could skew averages upward.
Numbers are thus slightly different from past updates, given after the data-methodology recasting the firm applied that to the past number as well. "We’ve taken churn out of it" to answer this question, Hosted noted. "What matters is it’s going to be very consistent."
The picture for owner-operator income for 2025 showed those late-year gains but a generally small increase overall for the year, with variation among a variety of broken-segments.
Gold bars here show 2025 month performance and detail on the bottom right the segments that drove the overall improvement. Namely, dry van, flatbed, and tanker. Independents with motor carrier authority and leased reefer and specialized owners were down a bit compared to 2024. ATBS
Contrary to the last several semi-annual presentations, ATBS found miles trended down overall in 2025 compared to 2024. Owner-operators may have wanted to run more to make up for reduced rates through the exceedingly tough parts of the year, yet the freight situation simply wouldn't be an enabler in that case, Amen and Hosted both guessed, with more time spent sitting.
Deadhead miles were up as a share of total miles, too, which could be yet more evidence of anemic freight, and willingness to run farther to get to the better-paying markets.
Mercifully, fixed costs were stable, and fuel costs were a net positive for 2025 (a dynamic certain to shift) even as fuel-efficiency on average declined for the first time in a while among ATBS clients to an average 7.28 mpg, losing a tenth of a mile per gallon.
(It's almost certain to rise with the next update, Amen bet, with prices as high as they are and no end in sight, clearly illustrating the profit benefit of greater fuel economy.)
[Related: Spot rates surge for reefers, flatbeds as diesel adds another 30 cents/gal.]
And though miles were down, variable costs ticking down with them, maintenance costs considered alone were on the rise, higher year-over-year in every month but November, noted Hosted.
"You need to hyper-focus on this," he said. Big maintenance failures have long represented the "number one reason owner-operators go out of business" in ATBS' experience.
Owner-ops have hung on to aging equipment in the face of anemic truckload rates, and maintenance spending just keeps increasing for the average owner, who spent $14,222 a year in 2025, at least 1,000 monthly. "Back into that math," Hosted noted, to determine how much you need to set aside per mile run in your own operation -- roughly 250 a week if you're at the average spent, yet a 2025 truck under warranty might necessitate as low as 5 cents/mile. The average independent with authority among ATBS clients, however, is spending far more -- roughly 20 cents/mile, said Hosted.
ATBS asked clients what technology advancements had most benefited their business in recent history were unequivocal: The proliferation of good discount fuel networks tied to payment cards and mobile systems were the No. 1 advancement noted.
"If you’re not using a company’s fuel tech benefits" for per-gallon discounts and fraudulent payments detection, among perks, Hosted noted, take advantage of what's available. "Fuel's the name of the game," the No. 1 expense for any one-truck business.
For owners with adjusting fuel surcharges in shipper contracts, or paid a surcharge routinely by their leasing motor carrier, staying aware of your real cost for fuel can help minimize the shock of big price swings. Hosted shared this "surcharge matrix" showing the profit gains for especially fuel-efficient owners benefiting from a surcharge based on 6.5 mpg, with fuel at $5/gal.
The better the fuel mileage (left column), the more the owner stands in benefit in revenue (right).
Longtime Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs recommends keeping the emotions out of massive costs by separating your fuel surcharge revenue from freight revenue in your accounting for analysis, keep those surcharge entries close to your fuel-cost entries, and do the math per-mile run to see what you're really paying for fuel, minus the surcharge revenues.
As shown in the matrix above, you might find you're actually making money. Higher the fuel price gets, the bigger those numbers will be.
Yet Hosted knows the current fuel-price situation will hit different owners differently. Fuel surcharges that update just monthly, for instance, will be a problem for cash flow when big spikes occur. Even the common weekly update is problematic in a time like the present.
And for owners commonly negotiating with brokers with no surcharge in question on the spot market, "You need to be able to back into your numbers," he said, to know what fuel surcharges are based on (typically price of a gallon of diesel above a $1.25 base, and the aforementioned 6.5 mpg, with variation).
As with this week, when diesel's national average posted a 30-cent gain, such an owner might tell himself, according to Hosted, "I know my basis has gone up 30 cents, so now I need to get $2.30 as a rate instead of $2/mile."
As small fleet owner Jamie Hagen put it in last week's Overdrive Radio edition, "I'm not bashful about asking for more money."
Keep tuned for more from Hosted's walk through more of the ATBS firm's data in an edition of Overdrive Radio.
[Related: Small fleet 'gun-shy' about biz investment amid extreme fuel volatility]
