After nearly four years of a freight downturn, the balance of power is shifting in favor of carriers. We saw spot rates hit a record $3.83 per mile in early June as capacity tightened. An FMCSA enforcement crackdown has pulled roughly 40,000 trucks off the road over the past year, and tender rejections have climbed above 17 percent. Carriers who made it through this economic downturn over the last few years are finally seeing real pricing power. Whether that holds once the displaced capacity starts trickling back is a different question.
Typically, when carriers have capital, their first response is to buy more trucks. The rationale is simple: Everyone already knows the cost, drivers want to be in new equipment, and no one has to defend the decision to a board. The larger opportunity when carriers have capital isn't more equipment, it's fixing what the current technology stack is already costing the business. That return doesn't wait on the market to cooperate.
ATRI's 2026 operational cost benchmarking report put the average cost to run a truck at $2.336 a mile, the highest figure in the study's history. Truckload and refrigerated margins sit under 1 percent; flatbed carriers are running at a loss. No carrier with margins that thin takes a risk on an unproven return. For a lot of carriers, that's exactly what technology spending has felt like, a risk based on a vendor's promise. Too many providers over-promise and under-deliver, so the hesitation is fair.
Ask enough carrier owners why they haven't made the bigger tech bet, and the answer typically comes down to the same thing: they don't know if it will work, so they invest in buying trucks instead. The 2025 capital spending numbers back this up. Fleets running more than 1,000 trucks increased truck and trailer spend by 16 percent last year, according to the same ATRI report, while small fleets pulled back on both trucks and technology alike. Money keeps moving toward what's familiar, and for most of the industry, that's still a truck, not a software subscription.
One Magnus customer had a legacy EDI connection running through a third-party van, billing $23,000 a month to move a few hundred shipments for a single customer. No one questioned that bill for years, because the connection worked. When the carrier finally rebuilt it directly, the monthly cost dropped to a fraction of what it had been. The customer relationship didn't skip a beat. That $23,000 a month wasn't some hypothetical return on a future purchase; it was real money walking out the door every month, on a service nobody thought to check because it never broke.
Every carrier has a version of this hiding somewhere in the operation, whether it's a vendor fee nobody's revisited in years, a document management platform paying for functionality the TMS already includes, or a slice of revenue leaving through a process nobody was ever assigned to own. Carriers will renegotiate insurance and rebid fuel cards without thinking twice. Legacy tech somehow doesn't get the same treatment. Fixing it doesn't depend on rates staying high or capacity staying tight. That return is sitting in the P&L right now, provable regardless of what freight does next.
That kind of accounting should happen before the next truck order gets signed, not after it. A real audit isn't about whether a system works; it's about forcing carriers to contemplate the costs of the current tech stack, line by line, and ask whether anyone in the building can defend that cost against a real alternative. Add up the administrative headcount tied to manual re-keying, the EDI and van fees nobody has re-quoted in years, the redundant point solutions duplicating something the core system already handles, and the hours spent checking work a system should be trusted to do on its own.
This isn't an argument for ripping out every system at once. Carriers can't absorb ten disruptions in a single quarter. Change management is its own real cost. But there's a real difference between a change that can sit in the queue for later and a straight cost swap with no operational risk attached. The second kind shouldn't wait for a capital planning cycle. When the investment does get made, the payback math looks nothing like a truck. A properly scoped platform replacement usually pays for itself in under a year. A truck takes five years at best, sometimes closer to ten.
This pricing window is rare; it might not last. Enforcement has pulled tens of thousands of authorized carriers off the road, broker liability rulings are pushing more scrutiny onto who actually hauls the freight, and rate increases in the high single digits (double digits for some shippers) are already showing up in bid season. None of that is guaranteed to hold once displaced capacity starts creeping back in. What's more predictable is who comes out of this window ahead. Spend the capital purely on trucks, and a carrier ends up running the same operation, just bigger, with the same cost leakage compounding underneath it. Spend part of it fixing what the technology is already costing, and that carrier enters the next cycle with a lower cost base and an operation actually built to hold up.
Buying trucks feels like progress because the yard tells the story at a glance. A cost audit doesn't photograph nearly as well. But it's the decision that actually moves a carrier's economics, and it's still sitting undone at most fleets. Run it before the next equipment order gets signed, and this window becomes the moment a carrier gets fundamentally more efficient. Skip it, and it's the same business, just bigger, with the same money walking out the door.
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