The outlook for the 2025 truckload market was defined by optimism. In 2024, people in our industry had the mindset of “stay alive until ’25.” It did not unfold quite like we all expected. The year's events reinforced a crucial lesson: success hinges less on the accuracy of long-term predictions and more on strategic agility. Tariffs upended demand projections, and CDL reform added volatility to the supply side. Predicting political and regulatory tail events is hard to do, but freight brokers already know this. They say even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Read on for some insight into what Triumph is seeing heading into 2026, but don't expect any firm predictions from us, optimistic or otherwise. Instead, we turned to our customers to understand how they are thinking about the current market, as well as their approach to pricing strategy in 2026.
Dissecting the Evolving Market Dynamics of 2026 – Triumph’s Perspective
While tariff related news consumed freight market headlines in the first half of 2025, the non-domiciled CDL regulatory reform usurped the conversation in the back half of 2025. The year ended with an unusual December, which saw measurable month-over-month and year-over-year rate inflation. This inflation, while deviating from the rest of 2025, is mild when compared to pandemic-era levels at 30-50% above current rate levels.
Despite optimistic end-of-year predictions of trucking market recovery in each of the last three years, we head into 2026 with the same uncertainty. The strengthening we saw in December 2025 alone does not provide sufficient evidence to support the conclusion of a sustained market shift heading into 2026.
Key Market Characteristics:
- Uneven capacity: Non-domiciled CDL policy and other carrier crackdowns are combined with the long-term freight recession to create a challenging environment for many carriers. A forced market correction is underway, contributing to less supply.
- Compressed broker margins: Less supply without marked improvement in demand leads to compressed margins. Brokers saw tightening margins in December as a result.
- An emphasis on flexible routing guides: As shippers adjust to market realities, the trend of revisiting routing guides more frequently is ramping up even more in early 2026.
How Brokers are Thinking About the Market
Brokers we spoke with feel a mix of skepticism and optimism heading into 2026. Either way, they offered an inside glimpse at how they are running their business in this environment:
Joe Schulz, Owner, Schulz Logistics
On current market conditions:
“Rates can go up because the amount of freight getting moved goes up, or rates can go up because capacity goes down. We're in a really weird spot now… the volume of freight being moved is either flat or even starting to go down, and we see a rate spike like this. This just tells you how much faster capacity is falling than the volume of freight.”
Rich Krul, CEO of Hoplite Logistics
On market conditions:
“For a couple years now, everyone's been thinking that things are going to turn or flip…but, by all accounts, people a lot smarter than I are saying it's going to be a lot of the same… Maybe a little bit of an inflationary period towards the end of the year in 2026. We're approaching it as things will remain relatively steady within a 5–8% up and down over the months for the year.”
Jeff Beckham, CEO & President, Kingsgate Logistics
On market conditions:
“We've got optimism headed into Q1. This is at least going to be a balanced or a healthy market really driven from the supply side, capacity's exiting the market. It's not demand‑driven to this point. Our margins are consistent with where they were in Q3 and Q4 of ‘25, and they're still below what our ‘ideal' margin would be. There's still enough competitive pressure in the market, you're not going to go out and get 15%, 16% margins in the transactional space right now.”
How Your Peers Are Preparing for 2026
Despite the mix in optimism/skepticism, Triumph customers did express some common themes in how they are approaching pricing strategy.
- A customer-centric approach to near-term margin compression
- Shorter-term contracts and more frequent shipper bid events
- Investing in best-in-class RFQ processes
Joe Schulz, Owner, Schulz Logistics
On Pricing in 2026:
“So, it's almost just like pull out the bazooka, get stuff covered, get through it, and then start adjusting back down… If you need to do shorter-term bids, do that. We don't necessarily want to be profiteering off today's market. Whatever we can find a truck for, if we get to that ceiling and cover it, just adjust our rate to that. Our operational cost that it's taking to move that freight; we'll eat that. Once we start getting into a little bit more predictability in the market, the volatility and turmoil is kind of over, we're settling in, and we'll start drifting down into alignment.”
Rich Krul, CEO of Hoplite Logistics
On Pricing Strategy:
“Over the last two months, we’ve had more contract wins, more RFQ wins and awards, than the rest of our company history combined—we’ve been heavily relying on the batch tool and the predictive data we’re getting from Triumph. A lot of customers aren't necessarily awarding annual bids anymore. A lot of them switch to shorter, you know, maybe quarterly or every 6 months. Shifting more to contract is a huge priority for us regardless of this market.”
Jeff Beckham, CEO & President, Kingsgate Logistics
On Pricing Strategy:
“We saw that shift in ‘23, that a lot of our customers moved to quarterly or 6‑month RFQs. As we prioritize shorter-term contracts in this environment, we lean heavily into predictive data when we're answering RFQs. Our data analytics team will pull in market data and then we look at confidence levels. We've got formulas, algorithms that we've built in the background that we model out these prices for 3–6-month windows to win awards.
For managed transportation, we adhere to index-based pricing which works well for us and our customers.”
Adopting a Nimble, Forward-Looking Pricing Strategy for 2026
With length of contract and frequency of RFQs top of mind, what can you learn from where these brokers are investing? Here are some tips you can use to build a more resilient and profitable pricing strategy:
- Replace "Tribal Knowledge" with Accessible Internal Data
Relying on the intuition of senior brokers creates operational vulnerability. To lead, you must move beyond scattered expertise and leverage your own transaction history as a strategic asset. Centralizing this data ensures that critical market insights are accessible to the entire team, driving consistent and informed decision-making across the organization.
Learn from your competition: The larger the broker, the more likely they are to have invested in data science and machine learning to model their data to predict where they will buy. Leading brokerages no longer wait for a senior broker to "feel" the market; they make predictive rate intelligence designed off of their network available to reps on day 1.
2. Not Historical Benchmarks or Predictive Rates, BOTH
To price freight, you need to know where the market just was, where it is today, and where it will be tomorrow. Lagging market averages cannot match the proprietary edge created by machine learning. Part of being prepared in 2026 is ensuring your reps have access to market benchmarks, internal data, and predictive rates modeled on your data AND the market.
- Develop Predictive Precision: Use verified rates to create lane-specific forecasts that anticipate market fluctuations.
- Maximize Margin Capture: Identify the "sweet spot" where your carrier network strengths meet market demand, uncovering profit opportunities others miss.
3. Embed Rate Intelligence for Pricing Scalability
Technology allows you to codify your brokerage's unique competitive advantages. Once you’ve invested in a better toolkit to monitor the market and leverage predictive rate modeling, invest in making that data easy to use and embedded in your pricing workflows, be that your TMS, a connected inbox, phone system, or other AI tools.
When your tech is connected, you can onboard new representatives faster and expand into new markets with the same level of precision and confidence as your most seasoned brokers.
- Learn from your competition: Fast-growing firms use automated quoting guardrails and decision tools to expand into new regions without the risk of "rookie mistakes" eroding their profitability. In addition to setting top-down rules and guidelines within their reps pricing workflows, they provide confidence scores and other signals to help the rep decipher how reliable their predictive rates will be to guide any given decision.
4. Differentiate the RFQ Process with Speed and Accuracy
Responding quickly and with a high degree of accuracy is critical as shippers move toward more frequent bid events. Brokers that offer a differentiated RFQ process know that technology is key, and that tribal knowledge needs to be balanced with reliable, accurate market data. When evaluating technology and market data to enhance your RFQ process, consider the following:
- Provide Data-Backed RFPs: Respond to shipper bids with advanced pricing models that ensure commitments remain both competitive and profitable.
- Invest in Bulk Pricing Tools: Leading technologies allow brokers to forecast rates for nearly unlimited lanes up to 12 months out in one go. Ensure you have the ability to generate thousands of lane rates in seconds.
- Prioritize Accuracy: Pricing in bulk isn’t helpful if you aren’t confident in the rates the tool spits out. Ensure you have a combination of your own historical coverage data and accurate market predictions. Tip: Ask your rate provider what their MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) is on their RFP forecasts as the time horizon increases.
- Monitor Performance: Track win rates and gross profit margins in real time to make immediate strategic adjustments.
- Enhance Transparency: Use service performance to demonstrate your market expertise and operation strength to customers, positioning your brokerage as a sophisticated, reliable partner.
Conclusion: Prepare for Improved Profitability in 2026
The strategies you implement in 2026 are not just about navigating the current market; they are about building an operation that is resilient enough to thrive in any condition. Future-proofing is an insurance policy against market volatility and a competitive advantage when opportunities arise.
"Ultimately, resilience in the truckload sector is not achieved by perfecting predictions, but by mastering the response to any disruption."
-Matthew Harding
SVP, Market Intelligence, Triumph
By grounding your decisions in real-time, clean data, aligning your team around efficient workflows, and modernizing your tech stack, you create an organization that operates with confidence. Fewer errors lead to better margins. Faster, more accurate quoting wins more loads. Stronger carrier relationships secure more reliable capacity.