Private fleets have long dominated the employment of light-duty truck drivers, although the revolution in home delivery has cut private fleets’ share of those drivers from about two-thirds traditionally to barely more than half today, assuming we consider parcel and local delivery businesses to be “for-hire.”
In the employment of heavy truck drivers — those operating Class 7-8 vehicles — private fleets historically have trailed for-hire operations by a wide margin. But that’s changing.
Private fleets began to close the gap in the latter part of the last decade. In recent years, they have employed more heavy truck drivers than for-hire trucking companies have (at least as they are defined by the federal government.)
These BLS statistics don’t include self-employee drivers, so in reality, for-hire trucking still has more heavy truck drivers than private fleets do. But that doesn’t negate the trend of more private fleet drivers.
How the Government Defines Trucking Employment
The Bureau of Labor Statistics each year publishes the findings of its Occupational Employment and Wages Statistics (OEWS) data collection, estimating employment levels by both occupation and industry across the U.S. economy. In early April, BLS released data for its 2024 survey, which was conducted in May of last year.
The OEWS data is the definitive source for these detailed estimates, although it has some significant limitations.
For trucking, the biggest limitation is that the OEWS figures do not include self-employed workers, which means they don’t count leased owner-operators or very small trucking firms unless they are organized in a way that their drivers are payroll employees.
Still, the OEWS data offers great insights into employment trends if you understand what it represents.
To interpret the data, we also need to define what we mean by “private” and “for-hire.”
The BLS term for what we consider for-hire trucking is “truck transportation,” so you could argue that everything except truck transportation and government is “private.” That definition would show a very strong trajectory, putting private fleet employment of heavy truck drivers ahead of for-hire as early as 2018 and more than 250,000 drivers ahead of for-hire today.
FTR’s Take on the Definition of Private Fleet in BLS Data
FTR’s definition of a private fleet is narrower, however.
We consider a private fleet to be one that moves its own product and is not in the transportation business. Therefore, we exclude parcel and local delivery — what the federal government calls “couriers and messengers” — as well as warehousing and storage as a business.
In 2012, the “truck transportation” category of the BLS numbers, largely the for-hire sector, made up about half of truck driver employment (not counting self-employed drivers).
We recognize the fuzziness of this definition, depending on how BLS might categorize businesses. It might mean, for example, that we are treating Amazon as being in the transportation business rather than as a company delivering its own product. However, treating couriers and messengers as private would mean counting UPS and Federal Express as private fleets, which clearly would be even more misleading.
Even by our tighter accounting, private fleet employment of heavy truck drivers caught up with truck transportation in 2021. By 2024, our analysis shows, private fleet drivers exceeded for-hire by more than 65,000.
By 2024, the share of for-hire vs. private truck driver employment was nearly reversed.
Of course, the truck freight market has far more than 65,000 self-employed heavy truck drivers, so in reality, for-hire trucking has more heavy truck drivers than private fleets do. But it is still an interesting phenomenon that illustrates a trend.
Over the past decade, all major private fleet categories have outpaced “for-hire” truck transportation except for mining, which has seen a big drop in its heavy truck driving force.
The wild ups and downs in the freight market in 2017-2018 and 2020-2021 likely fueled corporate desires to exert more control over their distribution and other trucking-related activity.
Although not at all surprising given the e-commerce revolution, even more impressive is the growth in heavy truck employment for warehousing and storage and, especially, couriers and messengers — the latter seeing job levels surge from under 30,000 in 2014 to nearly 110,000 in 2024.
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