- Private Fleet Trucking Companies: There are 799,342 private fleets in the U.S. (in-house teams of trucks that businesses use to move their own cargo). Private fleets generally use employee drivers.
- For-Hire Trucking Companies: There are 928,647 for-hire carriers in the U.S. (carriers who contract with shippers to move loads). Owner-operators fall into this category.
While we don’t have firm data for the precise number of drivers each of these segments employs, we can estimate that there aren’t significantly more than a million drivers working in the for-hire market.
This is due to extreme fragmentation of the for-hire carrier market — 97% of U.S. carriers operate fewer than 20 trucks.