Trucking earnings Q3: Pricing up, spending down, and cautious optimism ahead
Key takeaways
- Freight demand remains soft into Q4, with most carriers seeing weaker peak-season volumes and fading month-to-month momentum.
- Fleet executives expect recovery by 2026, citing stabilizing policies and shrinking capacity.
- Carriers are tightening 2025 budgets while planning rate hikes, aiming to offset costs and prepare for the next freight upcycle.
Four times a year, the earnings conference calls from publicly traded trucking firms come thick and fast, giving investors, analysts, and competitors a look at how many of the biggest names in the sector are reacting to market trends and where they see things headed.
Fall’s reporting season typically delivers an extra twist or two because some leadership teams are prepared to talk at least preliminarily about plans for the next year, be it in terms of capital spending or pricing they’d like to push through come bid season. Below, we’re summarizing a few takeaways from a hatful of recent calls. Some echo commentary from industry leaders such as FedEx Freight and J.B. Hunt, which reported a few weeks ago, while others are—while not nearly predicting a full market turn—more upbeat on some topics.
Freight volumes weaken through Q4 as peak season demand stalls
A peak season truly worthy of the name doesn’t appear to be in the cards this year: Darrell Campbell, CFO of Schneider National, told analysts that the company’s intermodal business likely won’t show many peak surcharges late this year.
“We believe there was some degree of pull-forward in the third quarter, which could drive an earlier end to peak season than is typical,” Campbell said.
Similarly, Knight-Swift Transportation CEO Adam Miller said his team hasn’t seen “demand grow like we would typically see from third to fourth [quarters] when you have a strong peak season.” Some customers, he said, are investing in large projects, while others are being quite careful.
Most fleets’ month-to-month numbers show momentum fading into the fall. Saia’s data is representative of several of its peers: Tonnage was down 2.2% in August, 3.3% in September, and about 4% in most of October. XPO put up better numbers, with October tonnage expected to be down about 3% thanks to the company’s push to add local customers.
Standing out in a not-good way were TFI International and Old Dominion Freight Line, which reported October tonnage down 7% and more than 11%, respectively, from a year ago. Analysts at Stifel offered a touch of perspective on Old Dominion’s numbers, though, saying that they were in line with historical trends relative to September and were “implying no meaningful deterioration in underlying demand.”
Fleet leaders forecast long-term recovery and stronger freight outlook by 2026
A little optimism is par for the course on many conference calls. But the source of upbeat sentiment on the morning of October 31 was rather unexpected: TFI Chairman, President and CEO Alain Bédard—who has been downright grumpy about the state of trucking for a while—said this summer’s passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act should soon start to catalyze business investment and deliver tax refunds to consumers. And that will flow back to trucking.
“We feel way, way, way better about ’26 than what we went through about 2025,” Bédard said. “I think that finally, the sun is going to start coming up in ’26.”
Saia President and CEO Fritz Holzgrefe also likes many of the macro things he is seeing, some of which are coming from the White House, others from the Federal Reserve.
“We’ve kind of got a view of what the tariff landscape is. We’ve got a view of what tax policy is. We’ve got a view around interest rates. All that is incrementally positive, right?” Holzgrefe said October 30. “I’m waiting to see it in the numbers. We haven’t seen that yet but […] we’re kind of ticking off the uncertainties, which is good.”
Other executives echoed Holzgrefe’s desire to “see it in the numbers” before wanting to commit to truly better times. There’s consensus that both regulatory enforcement actions around driver capacity are helping shrink supply—something J.B. Hunt executives called out two weeks ago—and that true demand growth isn’t here yet.
“If you just roll normal seasonality out from kind of the current trend where we are,” Old Dominion CFO Adam Satterfield said, “it certainly would lend itself [to the idea] that, if we don’t have a major inflection, we could be looking at continued declines on a year-over-year basis, at least for the first quarter.”
Carriers scale back 2025 capital spending and pause new equipment orders
And until demand truly grows, spending will be given extra scrutiny. Several carriers’ executive teams said they’ve been trimming their workforces throughout this year, and Schneider and Saia leaders discussed more specific cuts, too.
Schneider’s Campbell told investors his team now expects the company’s 2025 capex to total around $300 million, a $50 million drop from its previous guidance. Schneider, Campbell said, has paused its tractor orders for the last two months of this year, which won’t help the fortunes of truck original equipment manufacturers. (See the sidebar on the right.)
At Saia, CFO Matt Batteh said his team is “being a little more discerning” with some real estate projects—many of them part of a major push centered around the acquisition of dozens of former Yellow Corp. properties. The company has opened 39 terminals since the beginning of 2022 but is tapping the brakes on some others in its pipeline.
“It’s not that we’re never going to do them,” Batteh said. “It may just be that we’re delaying a little bit. So you’ve seen us push a little bit of that out.”
LTL carriers push rate increases as pricing strategies align across networks
Another area of consensus—one being powered in part by that shrinking supply—is that prices need to rise. Knight-Swift’s Miller said the company is taking a two-step approach: Contracts his team signs early during bid season will get low-single-digit price increases, but those signing on later should expect that “that pricing will grow if the capacity tightens like we think it will.”
The leaders of both Saia and XPO have been on a multiyear journey to get their rates closer to those of peers such as Old Dominion. And both Holzgrefe and XPO CEO Mario Harik see a path to more price increases.
“We have another five years, call it, of incremental price we can get given the great service product we are offering,” Harik told analysts on October 30. “The way we think about it, it’s a big opportunity. It will take us a number of years to get there.”
Saia rolled out a 5.9% general rate increase on October 1 that affects about a quarter of its business. On the contract side, deals the company renewed a year ago are now generating roughly 4% more revenue, Batteh said.
Almost every executive who spoke to investors recently said they will use a broad market upturn to push through more price increases. Their businesses, they said, are still having to absorb cost increases, and the supply shrinkages now underway could well create a crunch soon.
As Old Dominion’s Satterfield explained: “I think what we know was a capacity-constrained environment in 2022 will be even more capacity-constrained when we do eventually get into the upcycle.”
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of experience in business journalism. Since 2021, he has written about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications FleetOwner, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, Oil & Gas Journal, and T&D World.
With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector and many of its publicly traded companies.