National capacity numbers can lie to you, or at least they can tell you a story that has almost nothing to do with your actual freight.
Look at the country as a whole this year and you’ll see a market that looks healthier than it’s been in years. The Outbound Tender Rejection Index, the number that tracks how often carriers turn down freight they already agreed to haul, sat at 14.2% in March, up from 8.5% the same month last year. National linehaul spot rates climbed 27% above where they were twelve months earlier. Those are the headline numbers, and if you only read the headline, you’d assume every lane in the country got tighter by roughly the same amount.
It didn’t. Carrier exits since 2022 have hit well over 39,000 carriers and nearly 50,000 drivers, and that attrition never spread evenly across the map. Three regions absorbed most of the pain: the Southeast, Texas, and the Mountain West.
Why Texas Is the Clearest Case
Texas moves more freight tonnage than any other state in the country, so any capacity shock there ripples further than the same shock somewhere smaller. It also has one of the largest immigrant driver populations in the industry, and a federal CDL rule that took effect in March pulled a meaningful share of those drivers off the road. Layer on booming freight demand out of data centers, energy, and construction, and you get a market where the truck you were counting on last quarter might not be there this quarter.
South Texas has felt this the hardest. As produce season peaked this spring, some lanes out of the region moved 19% to 59% week over week, the kind of swing that blows past any budget built on last year’s numbers. That’s a produce-driven spike, not a permanent condition, but it’s a preview of how fast a tight region can move when demand and driver supply hit at the same time.
Florida’s Produce Season Drags the Whole Southeast With It
Florida’s produce season alone pulls reefer capacity out of the regional pool for months at a time, and when that capacity leaves, dry van and general freight feel the squeeze right behind it. Add a driver population that skews older (the average age of a U.S. truck driver is now around 46) and a shortage that isn’t filling itself, and Southeast lanes are running tighter than the national average would ever suggest.
Why the Mountain West Can’t Absorb Even a Small Dip
Low population density means a shallow pool of local drivers to begin with, so even a small dip in carrier count shows up fast in lane availability. There’s no seasonal spike driving this one. It’s structural, and it’s not going away on its own.
If your freight touches any of these regions, this is the part that matters. A national capacity number telling you the market is stabilizing doesn’t mean your specific lane is stabilizing. It means the average is stabilizing, and averages are terrible at representing extremes. If you’re shipping into or out of Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho, you’re not shipping into “the market.” You’re shipping into one of the three tightest corners of it, and your routing guide should reflect that, not the national headline.
That gap between the national number and the regional reality is exactly where routing guides fail. A guide built a year ago, on a bid cycle that assumed even national conditions, doesn’t hold up when driver turnover at large carriers is running 90 to 95% annually and more than a third of newly hired drivers quit within their first 90 days. The carrier you awarded a lane to in January might not have the driver to cover it in July. And with 92% of carriers operating ten trucks or fewer, a lot of your backup plan probably rests on companies with almost no slack to absorb a bad month. Small and mid-size shippers feel this first, since larger volume shippers usually get first call when a carrier has to choose who gets covered.
What to Do About It
Three things, and none of them require waiting for the market to calm down.
Pull your own lane data before your next bid cycle. If a meaningful share of your freight runs through Texas, the Southeast, or the Mountain West, treat that exposure as its own planning problem instead of folding it into a national average that was never built to represent it. Whether that freight moves as a full truckload or as LTL, the same regional exposure applies to both.
Compare more than one carrier on those lanes, every time. If a carrier in your Southeast lane is rejecting tenders because reefer demand is eating their capacity, you want to see that in the rate the moment you request a quote, not three days later when your shipment is still sitting on a dock.
Build the backup relationship before you need it. Diversifying who you can book with costs you nothing extra to check, and it’s the fastest way to find out whether your lane is as tight as the region suggests, or whether there’s still capacity available if you know where to look.
You don’t need to abandon a region or pay whatever the spot market demands to get ahead of this. Treat your riskiest lanes like the specific problem they are, and give yourself the runway to plan around them, before a rejected tender forces the decision for you.
Get a live quote across multiple carriers and see exactly where your lanes stand right now.