General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Less Than Truckload (U.S.)

NAICS 2022 code 484122 · An industry primer for public- and private-market investors

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1. Overview

Less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers move freight that is too big for a parcel service but too small to fill a whole 53-foot trailer — typically one to a dozen pallets weighing a few hundred to a few thousand pounds. Instead of dedicating a truck to one customer, an LTL carrier consolidates shipments from many shippers into shared trailers and routes them through a network of local pickups, terminals, line-haul (inter-city) moves, sorting, and deliveries [1]. Think of it as a scheduled bus system for freight, versus truckload's charter-bus model.

Why it matters: LTL is one of the most capital-intensive, network-driven, and pricing-disciplined corners of trucking. Because it takes hundreds of terminals to run a national network, the barriers to entry are high, the field is concentrated at the top, and the best operators earn returns on capital that look more like a franchise business than a commodity hauler [2][6]. That makes it structurally more profitable — and more investable — than the fragmented truckload and local-delivery segments around it. It is also intensely cyclical, tied to the industrial and manufacturing economy, which is what creates the entry and exit points investors watch.

There are two ways in. Public markets offer several large, liquid pure-plays and diversified carriers with big LTL divisions (Section 4). Private markets matter even more here than in most industries: some of the largest carriers in the country — Estes, R+L, Southeastern — are family-owned and never went public, and the terminal real estate that underpins the whole system is a private asset class of its own.

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2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 484122 covers establishments that provide long-distance, general-freight LTL trucking — hauling mixed commodities over inter-city and interstate distances via a consolidation network [1]. "General freight" means standardized, palletized goods (not bulk liquids, cars, or refrigerated loads).

What it excludes — and the adjacent codes that catch those loads:

• 484121 — General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Truckload (TL): one shipper fills the whole trailer, point to point. This is the far larger, far more fragmented sibling.
• 484110 — General Freight Trucking, Local: short-haul, within-metro hauling.
• 4842 — Specialized Freight Trucking: tankers, auto carriers, refrigerated ("reefer") trailers, flatbeds, used-household-goods movers, and other non-general freight.
• 492110 — Couriers and Express Delivery (parcel/small-package) and 493 — Warehousing and Storage.

How a carrier runs. The core operating system is the terminal network. Freight is picked up locally, consolidated at an origin terminal, moved between metropolitan areas on line-haul lanes, separated at the destination terminal, and delivered locally. National carriers compete on coverage and consistency; regional carriers compete on dense territory, next-day service, and local relationships.

Ownership mix. Unlike much of trucking — which is dominated by tiny owner-operators — LTL is a concentrated, corporate industry because you cannot run it without a terminal network. Owners fall into four buckets: (1) public pure-play LTL carriers; (2) LTL divisions of diversified public logistics companies; (3) large, privately held family firms such as Estes, R+L, Southeastern, and Dayton Freight; and (4) regional independents [13][14][15][16]. There is very little "one truck, one driver" activity here — that lives in the truckload and local codes.

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3. How big it is

Our ground-truth U.S. federal statistics for NAICS 484122. Census uses "establishments" for physical operating locations and "firms" for businesses that may own several establishments.

What the concentration numbers tell you. The top four firms take 41% of revenue and the top 50 take 83% — extraordinary concentration for a transportation industry, and the opposite of the tiny-operator fragmentation you see in truckload. The HHI of 572 still reads as "unconcentrated" on the federal antitrust scale (below 1,500), but that is measured on the broad Census industry code and should not be treated as a precise antitrust-market measure — it reflects a long tail of small regional carriers beneath a heavily consolidated national tier.

The supplied federal file does not include fleet size, company-level market shares, operating profit, capital spending, debt, customer concentration, or average shipment yield, so those metrics are not reported here as federal figures.

A caveat on the federal figures (over-/under-allocation, not undercount). These statistics are employer-based, so they can miss nonemployer businesses and some independent-contractor activity — but that is a minor distortion in LTL, which is far more employer- and network-based than truckload [4]. The more relevant distortion runs the other way: several of the biggest LTL operations are divisions of diversified parents (FedEx, Knight-Swift, TFI International, ArcBest) whose corporate revenue may be classified under a different primary NAICS code, so a clean 484122 tally can misplace some LTL activity. Independent industry trackers that sum carrier-reported LTL segment revenue put the U.S. LTL market at roughly $52–53 billion in 2024 [6] — below the $65.7 billion Census "receipts" figure, which counts the total revenue (including non-LTL lines) of establishments primarily classified as LTL. Read the Census number as the size of the establishment base, and the ~$52 billion as the size of the LTL service line itself.

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4. The investable universe

LTL has an unusually deep bench of investable names for a trucking niche — and, unusually, some of the biggest players are private.

Public companies (pure-play and diversified with major LTL):

The FedEx Freight separation created the single largest publicly traded pure-play LTL carrier; FedEx Corporation (FDX) retains only a residual, shrinking ownership stake.

Major private and other owners:

• Estes Express Lines — the largest privately held LTL carrier, third-/fourth-generation family-owned (Virginia); ~$5 billion in LTL revenue and the strongest 2024 growth of the top carriers (+12.4%) [6][13]. Bought 24 ex-Yellow terminals [17].
• R+L Carriers — family-owned (Florida) national carrier, ~$3.8 billion, LTL plus truckload [6][14].
• Southeastern Freight Lines — privately owned regional leader across the Southeast and Southwest [15].
• Dayton Freight — privately owned, union-free regional LTL carrier [16].
• Averitt Express, Pitt Ohio, Central Transport, Ward Transport — additional regional and multiregional independents worth considering in private-market diligence.
• Yellow Corporation — defunct. Once the No. 3 U.S. LTL carrier (~$5 billion revenue, ~30,000 employees), it filed Chapter 11 and ceased operations on July 30, 2023 in the largest bankruptcy in trucking history [17][18].

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5. How the money works

LTL is a fixed-cost network business, and its economics revolve around one number.

The operating ratio (OR) — operating expenses divided by revenue — is the master metric. Lower is better: an OR of 75% means the carrier keeps 25 cents of every revenue dollar as operating profit. The spread across the industry is wide and revealing:

• Elite: Old Dominion runs an OR around 75% — a figure most industrial companies never touch [7].
• Strong: XPO in the low-to-mid 80s [15].
• Integrating / higher-cost: Knight-Swift's young LTL unit near 97%, and unionized ABF in the high-80s-to-low-90s, reflect the cost of building scale or carrying a Teamsters wage base [9][10].

A sub-80 OR is the sign of a genuinely great LTL franchise; a mid-90s OR means the carrier is barely covering its costs.

Why density and networks drive the OR. Every terminal, dock door, and line-haul lane is a fixed cost. Push more freight through the same network and the cost per shipment falls — this operating leverage is why national LTL is a scale game and why capacity that leaves the market (see Yellow) is so valuable to survivors. It is also the risk: because so much cost is fixed, a drop in volume produces a disproportionate drop in profit. Two physical realities shape pricing:

• Freight density (pounds per cubic foot). LTL trailers usually "cube out" (fill with pallets) before they "weight out." Low-density freight wastes trailer space, so carriers charge much more per hundred pounds for bulky, light goods.
• Weight and revenue per shipment. Heavier, denser shipments spread fixed handling costs over more pounds.

The metrics owners actually track [7][16]:

• Yield = revenue per hundredweight (per 100 lbs, "CWT"), especially excluding fuel surcharges — the cleanest read on pricing power.
• Revenue per shipment — Old Dominion's preferred benchmark, because it blends price and freight mix [7].
• Weight per shipment, length of haul, and shipments/tonnage per day — the volume and freight-mix signals.
• Cargo claims, on-time performance, and terminal productivity — the service-quality and efficiency signals.
• Fuel surcharges — a mostly pass-through line that rises and falls with diesel; timing and contract terms can create a temporary mismatch between fuel cost and recovery.

Costs include wages and benefits, fuel, purchased transportation, maintenance, depreciation, terminals, insurance, claims, technology, and corporate overhead [7][8][9].

Pricing mechanics. Rates come from published tariffs and negotiated contracts, layered with annual general rate increases (GRIs) that have historically run mid-single-digit percentages. Freight is priced off the National Motor Freight Classification (NMFC) — see Section 7 — which scores each commodity on density, handling, stowability, and liability. Because national LTL is concentrated and disciplined, carriers have tended to protect price over chasing volume in downturns — a key reason the segment stays profitable through soft demand.

Capital intensity. Owners must fund terminals (real estate), tractors, trailers, and dock doors. That heavy fixed-asset base is the moat and the risk: it magnifies profits when volumes rise and punishes carriers when they fall.

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6. What drives demand

LTL freight is overwhelmingly industrial and business-to-business — machine parts, components, building products, auto parts, durable goods, and packaged goods moving to stores and distributors. That ties demand to:

• Manufacturing and industrial activity, watched via the ISM Manufacturing PMI (Purchasing Managers' Index); readings above 50 signal expansion [18].
• Industrial production, GDP, construction, and wholesale/retail replenishment, including e-commerce and omnichannel shipments of bulky goods.
• Inventory restocking after destocking periods — freight volumes can fall during inventory corrections even when end-consumer demand holds up.
• Cross-border trade with Canada and Mexico.
• Truckload spillover: when truckload capacity tightens and TL rates rise, some smaller shipments migrate into LTL networks, adding volume [18].

The broader freight system has long-term support from population growth, domestic production, trade, and the central role of trucking in moving goods [21]. But the segment is highly cyclical, and LTL carriers face substitution from truckload, parcel, rail, private fleets, and freight brokers. The U.S. freight market has been in an extended downturn since 2022 that industry leaders have called the softest in a generation, with tonnage down across most carriers into 2025–2026 [15][18].

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7. Regulation

Economic deregulation (the founding fact). The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 stripped the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) of its control over trucking rates and routes. That unleashed price competition, drove decades of consolidation, and killed off most of the old unionized general-freight carriers — the through-line that explains today's concentrated structure. LTL is a competitive transportation business, not a regulated utility; there is no federal rate-setting.

Safety regulation is federal, via the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT):

• Hours of Service (HOS): property-carrying drivers may drive up to 11 hours within a 14-hour on-duty window after 10 hours off, must take a 30-minute break after 8 hours of driving, and are capped at 60/70 on-duty hours over 7/8 consecutive days [19].
• Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs): mandatory automated HOS recording for most carriers; they limit scheduling flexibility but improve enforcement. FMCSA tightened ELD vetting in 2025 [19].
• Commercial Driver's License (CDL) standards, a drug-and-alcohol clearinghouse, and carrier safety scores.

Freight classification. The National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) maintains the National Motor Freight Classification (NMFC) system that assigns each commodity a "class" — based on density, handling, stowability, and liability — used for pricing [20]. In 2025 the NMFTA rolled out its biggest overhaul in over 15 years (Docket 2025-1, effective July 19, 2025), shifting thousands of items from commodity-based to density-based classification — aligning pricing more directly with how much trailer space a shipment consumes [20]. Shippers and carriers spent 2025 re-rating freight under the new scheme.

Emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Phase 3 greenhouse-gas standards apply to heavy-duty vehicles and tractors for model years 2027 through 2032. They could raise equipment costs and accelerate investment in fuel efficiency, alternative powertrains, and charging infrastructure [22].

Driver supply and labor rules. Beginning June 25, 2025, federal enforcement placed commercial drivers who cannot demonstrate English-language proficiency (ELP) out of service; DOT reported more than 20,000 drivers taken off the road in the following months [21]. Combined with an aging driver base, this tightens labor supply. Unionized carriers (ABF; formerly Yellow) also operate under Teamsters national contracts, adding wage-cost and strike considerations.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

National LTL is effectively an oligopoly: a handful of carriers with coast-to-coast terminal networks, plus a fringe of regional players. The top 25 carriers control roughly 91% of the U.S. LTL market [6]. Competition is fought on service quality and network density more than raw price: the durable advantages are terminal and route density, consistent pickup-and-delivery performance, low cargo-damage rates, accurate pricing and classification, strong shipper relationships, and efficient labor and equipment use. National networks offer broader coverage; regional carriers can be more efficient within dense territories and often win on next-day service. Old Dominion has been ranked the No. 1 national LTL carrier for quality for 15 consecutive years [7].

The defining recent event was Yellow Corporation's July 2023 collapse. Yellow's failure removed a top-three carrier and roughly a tenth of national LTL capacity overnight. Its freight scattered to survivors, and its terminals — the scarcest, hardest-to-replace asset in the business — were auctioned for about $1.9 billion to XPO (~$870M, 28 sites), Estes (~$249M, 24 sites), Saia ($235.7M, 17 sites), and others [17][18]. Old Dominion largely sat it out. The net effect: less capacity, more pricing discipline, and a rare chance for expanding carriers to buy terminals that would otherwise take years to permit and build.

Two structural forces are reshaping the field: (1) diversified parents pushing into LTL — Knight-Swift assembling a national network through acquisitions, TFI buying UPS Freight (now TForce) — and (2) the completed FedEx Freight spin-off, which put the largest carrier on the market as an independent public company in June 2026 [11]. Consolidation should continue selectively, particularly where terminal networks overlap or private owners seek liquidity — though integration risk, labor relations, capital intensity, and antitrust scrutiny limit how fast the market can consolidate.

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9. Risks

• Cyclicality. Earnings track the industrial economy; the current freight recession is among the deepest in a generation, and a recovery's timing is uncertain [18].
• Overcapacity. Carriers absorbed Yellow's terminals into soft demand; some analysts expect excess capacity to weigh on the market into 2027 [23].
• Operating deleverage. The heavy fixed-cost base that lifts margins in good times crushes them when volumes fall.
• Labor. Driver availability, wage inflation, ELP-driven supply tightening, and — for unionized carriers — Teamsters contract and strike risk.
• Fuel. Surcharges cushion but lag diesel-price swings, and recovery is imperfect.
• Pricing/classification disruption. The 2025 density-based NMFC change re-rates freight and can shift revenue between carriers and shippers [20].
• Competition and pricing pressure. Large shippers and freight brokers, plus substitution from parcel, truckload, rail, and private fleets, can compress rates.
• Capital and emissions costs. Terminals, equipment, maintenance, and EPA Phase 3 compliance require heavy, continuous investment [22].
• Real-estate and interest-rate exposure. Terminal networks are large property portfolios sensitive to rates and industrial land values.
• Execution. Poor acquisition integration or overpayment for network assets, customer concentration, and — for private targets — limited financial disclosure.
• Safety, insurance, and compliance. Cargo damage, accidents, litigation, data security, and regulatory failures.

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10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes. LTL offers a rare set of clean public vehicles for a trucking niche: pure-plays (FedEx Freight, Old Dominion, Saia), LTL-led diversified carriers (XPO, ArcBest, and TFI International's TForce), and truckload operators building LTL (Knight-Swift). The June 2026 FedEx Freight spin-off added the largest pure-play LTL name to the market [11]. When comparing names, judge results through the freight cycle rather than on one strong quarter — focus on ex-fuel yield, shipment and tonnage trends, operating ratio, claims and service quality, terminal productivity, capital spending, leverage, free cash flow, and labor exposure. A note on valuation: because the best LTL carriers earn high returns on capital and hold pricing power, pure-plays like Old Dominion have historically traded at premium earnings multiples versus the rest of the transport sector — investors pay up for the network moat, which also means the stocks can be expensive at cycle peaks.

Private routes. More of this industry's revenue and capacity sits outside public markets than almost any comparable transport segment — Estes, R+L, Southeastern, Averitt, Dayton Freight, and dozens of regionals are privately held. The most direct opportunities are carrier acquisitions and regional roll-ups; indirect exposure comes through the terminal real estate carriers must lease or buy, fleet leasing, maintenance, and freight-visibility/dock technology. Private diligence should dig into audited earnings, customer concentration, terminal ownership versus leases, route density, freight-class billing accuracy, maintenance and safety records, insurance reserves, labor agreements, succession planning, working capital, and emissions-related capital needs. The Yellow terminal auction underscored how the underlying industrial real estate can be a distinct, durable asset even when a carrier fails.

Near-term drivers (forward-looking). The swing factor is the freight cycle turning. Entering 2026, the Manufacturing PMI moved back toward expansion territory, and forecasters expect LTL tonnage to stay slightly negative through the first half before turning positive in the second half as industrial activity recovers [18][24]. Pricing has stayed firm — rates are at record highs and mid-single-digit increases are expected — but lingering overcapacity is the counterweight [18][23]. The base case is an uneven recovery, not a straight-line boom: structurally, the post-Yellow reduction in capacity, disciplined pricing, and density-based classification favor the well-run, scaled operators; cyclically, the timing and strength of the industrial rebound will determine returns over the next year or two.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition: 484122 — General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Less Than Truckload." https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=484122&input=484122&year=2022
2. Journal of Commerce, "Top 25 LTL Trucking Companies," 2025. https://www.joc.com/resources/special-reports/top-rankings/top-25-ltl-trucking-companies
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023 (NAICS 484122): establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll (Histometrics ingested federal statistics). https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Concentration by Largest Firms (NAICS 484122): firms, receipts, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI (Histometrics ingested federal statistics). https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
5. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards, 2023 (NAICS 484122). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
6. Jindel Group / SJ Consulting, "Top 25 LTL Carriers (annual revenue incl. fuel surcharges)," 2025 (2024 data). https://jindel.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Top_25_LTL_2025.pdf
7. Old Dominion Freight Line, Form 10-K / FY2025 Annual Report and Form 8-K, U.S. SEC, 2025–2026 (revenue per shipment, operating ratio, service-center count). https://ir.odfl.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings; FreightWaves, "Old Dominion makes its favored LTL benchmark clear: Revenue per shipment," 2025. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/old-dominion-makes-its-favored-ltl-benchmark-clear-revenue-per-shipment
8. Saia, Form 10-K (FY2025), U.S. SEC, 2026; Trucking Dive, Saia volume/revenue coverage, 2025. https://saia.gcs-web.com/sec-filings; https://www.truckingdive.com/news/ltl-carriers-mid-q3-2025-performance-update/759790/
9. ArcBest, Form 10-K (FY2025), U.S. SEC, 2026; Trucking Dive / TTNews ABF Teamsters contract and site coverage, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/894405/000110465926019699/arcb-20251231x10k.htm; https://www.ttnews.com/articles/arcbest-layoffs-abf-freight
10. Knight-Swift Transportation, "Knight-Swift Adds LTL Growth Platform Through Acquisition of AAA Cooper," 2021, and Form 10-K (FY2025), U.S. SEC; Trucking Dive, Knight-Swift LTL segment coverage, 2025. https://investor.knight-swift.com/news/news-details/2021/Knight-Swift-Transportation-Adds-Less-Than-Truckload-Growth-Platform-Through-Acquisition-of-AAA-Cooper/default.aspx; https://www.truckingdive.com/news/knight-swift-truckload-ltl-intermodal-q2-2025-earnings/753951/
11. FedEx, "FedEx Completes Spin-Off of FedEx Freight," 2026 (began trading June 1, 2026; 80.1% distributed, 19.9% retained). https://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/investor-news/investor-news-details/2026/FedEx-Completes-Spin-Off-of-FedEx-Freight/default.aspx; FedEx Freight spin-off investor page. https://investors.fedex.com/fedex-freight-spin-off/default.aspx
12. TFI International, Form 40-F / 2025 Annual Report, U.S. SEC / SEDAR, 2026; Trucking Dive, "Weak LTL market shrinks TFI International LTL revenue," 2026. https://tfiintl.com/en/investors/; https://www.truckingdive.com/news/tfi-international-q4-2025-operating-income-ratio-2026-outlook/812419/
13. Estes Express Lines, "About Our Freight Company," 2026. https://www.estes-express.com/about/
14. R+L Carriers, "About Us," 2026. https://www.rlcarriers.com/company/about-us
15. Southeastern Freight Lines, "Regional LTL Service," 2026. https://www.sefl.com/seflWebsite/services/regionalLTL.jsp
16. Dayton Freight, "Company Facts," 2026. https://daytonfreight.com/company-facts/; NMFTA, "2025 Q1 LTL Industry Performance and Beyond," 2025 (operating metrics). https://info.nmfta.org/2025-q1-ltl-industry-performance-and-beyond
17. Trucking Dive, "Yellow terminals net more than $1.8B at auction"; Logistics Management, "XPO, Estes, Saia among big winners in auction sale of ex-Yellow terminals," 2024. https://www.truckingdive.com/news/yellow-corp-terminal-auction-winners/701511/; https://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/xpo_estes_saia_among_big_winners_in_auction_sale_of_ex_yellow_terminals_odfl_sitting_it_out
18. Yellow Corporation, "Files Voluntary Chapter 11 Petitions," U.S. SEC, 2023 (ceased operations July 30, 2023); C.H. Robinson, "North America LTL Freight Market Update," Jan 2026; PLS Logistics, "State of LTL Freight 2026." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/716006/000119312523204370/d483482dex991.htm; https://www.chrobinson.com/en-us/resources/insights-and-advisories/north-america-freight-insights/jan-2026-freight-market-update/na-ltl/; https://www.plslogistics.com/blog/state-of-ltl-freight-2026/
19. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (U.S. DOT), "Summary of Hours-of-Service Regulations" and "Electronic Logging Device Rule," 2025–2026. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations; https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/hours-service/elds/general-information-about-eld-rule
20. National Motor Freight Traffic Association, "National Motor Freight Classification" and "2025 NMFC Changes for LTL Shipments" (Docket 2025-1, density-based classification, effective July 19, 2025). https://nmfta.org/standards/classification/nmfc/; https://info.nmfta.org/2025-nmfc-changes-for-ltl-shipments
21. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (U.S. DOT), "New Guidance to Enforce English Proficiency Requirement for Truckers," 2025 (out-of-service effective June 25, 2025; 20,000+ drivers cited); Federal Highway Administration, "Freight Analysis Framework." https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/newsroom/us-transportation-secretary-sean-p-duffy-signs-order-announcing-new-guidance-enforce; https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/faf/index.htm
22. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles — Phase 3 (Model Years 2027–2032)," 2024. https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/regulations-greenhouse-gas-emissions-commercial-trucks
23. Entourage Freight Solutions, "LTL Pricing Holds Despite Soft Demand; Overcapacity to Linger Through 2027," 2025. https://www.entouragefreightsolutions.com/rates-rise-despite-volume-pressures-overcapacity
24. Supply Chain 24/7, "2026 Market Update: LTL holds the line," 2026. https://www.supplychain247.com/article/2026_market_update_ltl_holds_the_line