By Rick Rover, Chief Operating Officer, Armada

What most shippers initially treated as a rough quarter is the culmination of a multi-year structural shift in trucking capacity. The strategies that worked in a loose market are actively makings things worse. The shippers who come out ahead won’t be the one’s who endure this cycle. They’ll be the ones who use it as the forcing function to engineer real structural changes in how their networks operate.

The causes of the current reset matter, because they point directly to what will and won’t work as a mitigation strategy going forward.

What’s Driving the Tightening

The freight market reset that’s now fully underway isn’t yet demand driven. Consumer spending is stable. Housing starts haven’t surged. The squeeze is coming entirely from the supply side, and several forces have converged at once.

The most durable factors are driver attrition and carriers leaving the market. The freight market is emerging from a historically long trough with depressed contract and spot rates. For three years, carriers struggled to make ends meet. Many smaller carriers closed shop and truckload supply has fallen steadily since the pandemic supply peak in late 2022.

More recently, driver attrition has accelerated. Obtaining an unrestricted Class A or B commercial driver’s license has become significantly more difficult under new federal credentialing standards. Drivers who can’t pass the tougher requirements are migrating to lighter-duty assets, like straight trucks and sprinters, that have lower licensing bars. Meanwhile, proposed hair follicle drug testing requirements, if enacted, would further tighten eligibility and could remove a meaningful share of the existing driver pool overnight. These aren’t fears, they’re policy directions with bipartisan support. The driver base is contracting, and it won’t rebuild quickly.

Compounding that, aggressive enforcement actions across several states have pulled trucks off the road in ways unrelated to national safety initiatives. Every week, it seems, is becoming driver safety week in one jurisdiction or another.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Montgomery decision, issued May 15, added further pressure. Brokers and 3PLs responded by tightening carrier vetting standards, which reduced the pool of carriers available for spot coverage at exactly the moment spot demand was rising. Its not the primary driver of rate increases, but it narrowed an already tight market. In today’s environment, balancing cost, service, capacity, and liability is becoming a competitive advantage.

Seasonal forces made everything worse. Produce season, Memorial Day freight demand, and CVSA’s Roadcheck Week all hit simultaneously. Tender rejection rates climbed into the low-to-mid teens nationally. Spot rates responded predictably: up sharply, and unlike earlier spikes this year, they haven’t come back down.

FTR is now projecting total 2026 truckload rates to increase 14.4% for the full calendar year. Contract rates are expected to rise 7.9%, while spot rates are tracking toward a 28.2% increase over 2025. (The preceding figures are from FTRs June 2026 Trucking Update.) Many contract rates have been renegotiated in the past 90 days, and the new numbers are coming in 6% higher on average than previous agreements. In some spot situations we’ve seen, the premium over contract exceeds 30%, which translates to $1,000 or more per load.

What Shippers Should Do Right Now

The instinct to chase the cheapest available truck is understandable. It’s also increasingly angerous. A broker who wins your load at a low rate in this market may not have a truck behind the bid. By the time they discover they can’t cover it at the committed price, your product is sitting on a dock and you’re scrambling at a 30% premium.

The Structural Play: Stop Optimizing Transactions, Start Engineering the Network

The mitigation steps above will reduce your spot exposure this quarter. But they don’t change the underlying math. The capacity crunch doesn’t resolve in six months. Driver credentialing requirements aren’t loosening. If anything, enforcement is becoming more consistent, not less.

In addition to better short-term strategies, the shippers who come out of this cycle in better shape than their peers will be the ones who treated this period as the forcing function to reshape their network. The winners will make deliberate, structural improvements.

That means a few things practically.

First, it means working with a partner who can analyze your freight network and identify areas for improvement, not just move loads through it. Where are you generating expensive LTL freight that could be consolidated with better order management? Where are your lanes performing below benchmark on cost and service. Why are particular lanes performing poorly and how can you address that? Armada’s supply chain engineers work through exactly these questions with clients using their data. The savings from network redesign typically dwarf what you can recapture through rate negotiation alone.

Second, it means rethinking where you hold inventory. Warehousing strategy and transportation strategy are the same conversation in a tight capacity market. The right inventory positioned in the right geographies reduces the length and urgency of the hauls you’re buying. Shorter lanes, with more options, cost less in any market. In this one, the difference is stark.

Third, it means building real carrier relationships, not just carrier lists. The carriers who will show up reliably year after year in all market conditions are the ones who see you as a partner worth protecting. That means predictable freight, reasonable lead times, and fair payment terms. Owner-operators who’ve been underwater for three years are now able to haul loads at spot rates that pay a premium above their break-even costs. They’ll commit to a shipper who gives them something to plan around. They won’t commit based on lowest-bid auctions.

At Armada, we’ve been having versions of this conversation with customers across food and beverage, packaging, CPG, automotive and manufacturing for the past several months. The shippers who are managing their freight costs most effectively right now aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re executing the fundamentals with more discipline, backed by better data, in partnership with carriers who have a reason to perform.

The window to get ahead of this is now, before the next round of contract renegotiations and before spot rates climb further. If you want a frank look at where your freight network is exposed, we’re glad to have that conversation.

Rick Rover is Chief Operating Officer at Armada, where he overseas transportation, warehousing, and inventory operations for some of the largest restaurant and consumer brands in North America.