Are trucking employment numbers setting the stage for rate recovery?
Despite the chronically sluggish freight market, payroll employment in for-hire trucking rose in November and was basically on par with job levels a year earlier. Or was it?
The November employment numbers were an estimate published December 6 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the monthly jobs report. However, BLS will revise its estimates in early February — and it appears that the revision will show a smaller workforce.
Although payroll employment and the driver supply are not the same, drivers make up the majority of payroll workers in trucking. Presumably, they account for most changes in the workforce, as most other job positions do not rise and fall with freight demand.
Therefore, fewer jobs than currently reported suggests tighter freight capacity, which means that trucking companies might be better positioned for a recovery in rates in 2025 than the current BLS figures imply.
Why Are BLS’ Employment Numbers Off?
The day before the latest jobs report, BLS published its full data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for the second quarter.
The monthly jobs report that garners so much attention is based on sampling estimates. In contrast, the QCEW is a more comprehensive accounting of employment levels. But the QCEW takes time to compile. So, each February, the BLS uses the QCEW data to recalibrate its estimates.
For example, in February of this year, the BLS benchmark revision resulted in a 33,000-job reduction in the trucking estimate released just a month earlier.
This graph shows how the published job estimates vary from the more accurate but lagging QCEW figures.
According to the preliminary QCEW data, as of June, trucking employment was nearly 41,000 payroll jobs below the currently published BLS estimate for that same month.
The published estimates for that month show trucking employment down 2% year over year but up 4.1% compared to February 2020 (the month immediately prior to pandemic lockdowns and their huge distortion of employment.)
The QCEW estimate for the second quarter shows payroll jobs down 3.4% year over year and up just 1.9% compared to February 2020.
About half of the preliminary revision comes from general freight truckload, which had nearly 22,000 fewer employees in June than what BLS currently reports, according to the QCEW.
If the revised estimate holds, truckload employment in June was down 4.2% year over year, not 1.6% as currently reported in the official data.
The QCEW estimates for local operations — both general freight and specialized — also are notably weaker than current official estimates. However, the census data implies that less-than-truckload jobs are underreported modestly in the currently published data.
A Caveat Regarding Employment Data in Trucking
The just-released QCEW data is good news for trucking companies, but there’s a big caveat. The BLS payroll data captures only firms that have employees. Most very small trucking firms — those that accounted for the surge in new motor carrier entries in 2020 and 2021 — are not employer firms.
Although the surge in the carrier population peaked in the fall of 2022, FTR’s analysis of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data indicates that the market still has more than 91,000 active for-hire carriers than it had before the pandemic, an increase of nearly 36%.
Most of those operations have only a few trucks, but even if payroll employment in trucking were no higher than it was in February 2020, the driver supply clearly is still significantly higher than it was then.
Trucking capacity might be down from its peak, but it hasn’t plummeted.
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