Downward drift in truck transportation employment continued in February

The February truck transportation employment report was yet another step in a downward slide that has led to an industry stuck in a fairly tight range in the number of people it employs.

Seasonally adjusted jobs in truck transportation are down 15,400 from February 2024. It’s not the biggest year-to-year gap in recent years. But after jobs in the sector plummeted in August 2023 as a result of the closure of Yellow – the first big drop after several years of post-pandemic growth – the number of job holders in truck transportation has continued to drift lower.

After the Yellow closure, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported truck transportation jobs at 1,531,600. A year earlier, it had been 1,586,900.

Since then, jobs have continued to fall. In the past 14 months, the total has been below the prior month 11 times.

The end result is that the total reported Friday of 1,515,100 jobs in truck transportation is the lowest since October’s 1,514,500. But putting that month aside, the latest numbers are the lowest since July 2021, when the industry was shaking off COVID and going on a hiring binge that ultimately took the figure to a peak of 1,587,700 in December 2022. The total for February is 72,600 jobs fewer than that.

The size of February’s downward move and its total compared to prior months were exacerbated by a revision in the initial January report. January truck transportation jobs had originally been reported as 1,521,900. The revision put that at 1,517,000. The February estimate is 1,900 jobs fewer than that.

The total decline since the December 2022 peak also got a downward push from the annual update by the BLS to its underlying model. The changes, released last month, moved the baseline down significantly.

Although the year-on-year comparison is significantly negative, most of that decline comes from the baseline revision and month-to-month declines reported last summer. Since a job total of 1,516,600 jobs was reported last July, totals have ranged from a low of 1,514,500 in October to 1,517,800 jobs in November.

David Spencer, vice president of market intelligence at Arrive Logistics, in his monthly commentary on the report said the numbers reflect stability and weakness at the same time.

“There was a more positive outlook for trucking conditions throughout the fourth quarter and early January, but seasonal slowdowns in February and clarity around the impact of tariffs brought expectations back down to reality,” Spencer said in an email to FreightWaves. 

But looking at the larger picture, Spencer said there had been “relatively stable overall employment since summer of 2024.”

“Yes, there are ups and downs as sentiment swings back and forth, but ultimately as rates bottomed out, employment has leveled off as well,” he said. “The most likely scenario moving forward is a gradual downward trend in total employment as trucking companies continue to fight off lower levels of profitability and rightsize their operations to be as efficient as possible until we see a meaningful shift in market conditions.”

Mazen Danaf, an economist at Uber Freight, also noted that employment levels may be down from a year ago but have been mostly stable since the summer. When pairing that with the BLS revision in the model announcement last month, Mazen said, there has been “a shift in the narrative resilient supply to a largely completed capacity correction.”

Aaron Terrazas, an economist formerly with Convoy who still tracks the monthly employment data, noted a huge jump in the couriers category. It rose by 23,500, to 1,181,700 jobs from 1,168,200.

Terrazas said it was the fifth-biggest gain in that category since data was first collected in 1990, and three of those were related to COVID. The fourth was the resolution of the 1997 UPS strike.

But Terrazas said the bigger impact of the courier rise could be that in a report that showed an increase of 151,000 jobs, about 13% came from couriers.

“The most obvious explanation for the February 2025 anomaly in my mind is parcel delivery workers returning to payrolls in February after being off payrolls due to weather related disruptions during the mid-January winter storms,” Terrazas wrote in an email to FreightWaves. “If that’s indeed the case, what looks like a big contributor to headline payroll growth in February was actually just a weather distortion, making headline payrolls about 20,000 softer than they appear.”

In other highlights from the report:

• Warehouse jobs, which have often been subject to wild swings, were quiet. They dropped 3,100 jobs, to 1,837,400, down from 1,840,500. That January figure was revised upward by 2,300. Warehouse jobs are now down by 1,600 from a year ago.

• Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation held steady at $30.16 in January. That data lags the broader figures by one month. Average weekly hours fell to 40.2 for that category from 40.8.

• Although the February revision model increased its estimate of rail jobs significantly, they are still running well below where they were a year ago. Rail jobs totaled 154,000, down 600 from a month earlier. But a year ago, that total was 157,600.

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