Let me tell you what I’m seeing on my desk this week, because I think it’s the thing your procurement team should be looking at too.
The volume numbers say the freight market is fine. Outbound tender volumes are tracking with last year. Manufacturing is showing signs of life. By any traditional read of the macro data, this should not be a stressful month. And yet I’m watching shipper after shipper come back to us this quarter with routing guides that aren’t covering, with first-tender acceptance numbers sliding from the low 90s into the mid 80s, with spot exposure that’s running 25% or more above what their procurement assumed when they wrote the bid.
Something is off. The volume data and the acceptance data are telling opposite stories, and I want to walk you through what I think is actually happening.
The Phrase That Made Sense of It
A few weeks back, Zeid Houssami at Uber Freight gave an interview to FreightWaves about the U.S.-Mexico market, and he used a phrase that stuck with me. He called what’s happening “phantom capacity.” His point, more or less, was this: when you look at the count of trucks and drivers in the market, the number looks healthy enough. But when you look at how many of those trucks and drivers can actually be tendered the load you need moved, the number is a lot smaller. As Houssami put it, the issue is not really a driver shortage. It’s a compliant driver shortage.
I’ve been calling it something less catchy on my desk, but he’s pointing at the same thing I am. Let me lay out what I mean.
What I’m Seeing in the Numbers
A few data points worth sitting with.
First-tender acceptance, according to Uber Freight’s Q1 outlook, has dropped from 92% last year to about 85% now. That seven-point slide does not sound dramatic if you say it fast. On a routing guide doing meaningful volume, it’s huge. Every rejected tender is a load you’re paying to re-cover, often at a spot premium, sometimes with a service problem attached.
National tender rejection rates pushed past 14% in February. Werner’s CEO Derek Leathers called that COVID-era territory at the Stifel transportation conference, and he’s not wrong. SONAR’s threshold framework has always treated anything above 10% as a market where shippers struggle to cover and brokers are working the phones. We’re well past that line nationally, and certain regions and modes are running hotter than that. Flatbed rejections briefly hit 32% in late February, which has happened only twice in eight years.
Spot rates, per Uber Freight’s April update, are tracking more than 25% above last year. DAT’s Q1 commentary shows the climb steepening through the quarter rather than flattening out.
Bureau of Labor Statistics puts trucking employment at 1,465,100 in February 2026. That’s down from a peak of about 1,588,600 in October 2022. Capacity has been leaving the market for three years, but that’s not new information. What’s new is the gap between the capacity that exists on paper and the capacity I can actually book your freight on.
Where the Trucks Went That Aren’t Really Gone
Here’s what I keep running into when I try to cover loads. The truck is in the system. The carrier is authorized. The driver is licensed. And yet, for one reason or another, that truck cannot legally or practically take the load.
English-language proficiency enforcement is one piece of it. The estimates I’ve seen put 20,000 to 25,000 carriers in the impacted range, and on cross-border lanes especially, I’m watching that filter tighten week by week.
The FMCSA non-domiciled CDL rulemaking is the bigger swing factor. Depending on how it lands and survives court challenges, the number of carriers affected could run to 200,000. I’m not going to pretend I know how that plays out. What I do know is that I’m already seeing carriers exit on the front edge of the uncertainty, not waiting for the final ruling.
Cross-border into Mexico has its own version. Security requirements, documentation requirements, carrier vetting on identity and CSA scores. Freight that carries compliance weight, food, pharma, high-value cargo, is getting screened harder than I’ve ever seen it screened. Cargo theft and identity-based fraud have made loose vetting commercially untenable. The pool of carriers I’m comfortable putting your high-value load on is smaller this year than it was last year, and I expect it to be smaller next year than this year.
Add it all up and you get the gap between what looks like capacity and what’s actually available. That gap is what Houssami means by phantom.
Why Your Volume Index Isn’t Helping You
For most of the last decade, outbound tender volume was the procurement signal that mattered. I built rate strategies around it. So did you, probably. Volumes climbed, we tightened the routing guide. Volumes softened, we went back to market. The signal worked because volume and capacity tracked each other closely enough.
That relationship has broken in 2026. SONAR’s outbound tender volume index has been rising for most of the year. TRAFFIX clocked a nearly 10% year-over-year jump in outbound tender volumes in its Q2 update. And none of that has made it easier for me to cover your loads.
The reason, when I sit with it, is that volume data measures one thing and your actual coverage problem is a different thing. Volume tells me how much freight is being tendered. It does not tell me how many of the carriers I’d want to tender it to can take it. In 2024, those two questions had roughly the same answer. In 2026, they don’t.
If your procurement function is still anchored on volume metrics, you’re working with a signal that’s gradually disconnecting from the market you’re actually buying capacity in. The fix isn’t a better data subscription. The metric itself has stopped describing your problem.
What I’d Be Looking At If I Were Sitting at Your Desk
Three things, and I’d want them in front of me weekly.
First-tender acceptance by lane, not blended. The blended number is comforting. It also hides everything. A lane that ran at 95% last year and dropped to 78% this year is not the same lane anymore, no matter what your contract says. The lane-level number tells you where your routing guide is actually working and where your contracted carriers have quietly stopped taking your freight.
Rejection reason codes by carrier. If the codes are clustering in capacity categories (no truck, no equipment, driver out of hours), what you’re looking at is phantom capacity, and you cannot price your way out of it. If they’re clustering in economic categories (rate too low), that’s a pricing conversation, and the fix is different. Same symptom, different disease.
Spot premium by quarter, not annually. Annual averages will smooth over the trajectory. The quarter-by-quarter view shows you what your H2 looks like if the current trend holds, and the current trend holding is the part I’d plan for.
What I’d Be Working On
A couple of things would be on my whiteboard if I were running procurement somewhere in May 2026.
I’d be auditing my carrier base for compliance exposure. If a meaningful share of my contracted capacity is concentrated in carriers running heavy on non-domiciled CDL drivers, cross-border specialization, or English-proficiency-sensitive lanes, I’d want to know what my routing guide looks like if 10% of that capacity becomes non-tenderable inside six months. For a lot of the shippers I work with, the honest answer is that the routing guide collapses into spot market exposure faster than they’ve modeled.
I’d be working hard on the operational side of carrier preference. When phantom capacity tightens, the carriers I still trust to take loads are choosing which shippers to run for. Detention windows matter. Facility throughput matters. Payment terms matter. So does whether your dock contacts answer the phone when one of my drivers has a problem. None of this is soft stuff in 2026. It’s the input that determines whether the carriers I have left prioritize your loads or somebody else’s when they can’t cover everything.
And I’d be reading my tender acceptance data the way I used to read my volume data. As the primary signal. The thing I check first thing Monday.
The Short Version
The freight market in 2026 is not telling you what it told you in 2024. The volume index has stopped doing the job it used to do. The routing guide you built off that old signal is going to crack in places you weren’t expecting it to, and the cracking has already started for some of the shippers I talk to.
Phantom capacity is the explanation. Your tender data is where the evidence lives. The procurement teams that get ahead of this in May and June will be operating on better information than the ones still watching volume indices in August.
That’s what I’m seeing on the desk. I figured it was worth telling you.
Questions about how your tender acceptance trends and carrier exposure are positioning you for the back half of 2026? Let’s talk.
📞 (931) 200-5601 | nfc@nationalfreightconnection.com
Research and reporting drawn from: FreightWaves May 2026 interview with Zeid Houssami on phantom capacity in U.S.-Mexico trucking; Uber Freight Q1 2026 Market Update and April 2026 Monthly Economic and Market Update; SONAR Outbound Tender Rejection Index and Outbound Tender Volume Index methodology and historical data; FreightWaves State of the Industry May 2026; TRAFFIX Q2 2026 Freight Market Update; Trucking Dive coverage of Werner Enterprises and Schneider National commentary at Stifel’s 17th Annual Transportation Conference; Bureau of Labor Statistics April 2026 trucking employment data; Land Line Magazine May 2026 analysis of spot rates and trucking job growth; DAT Freight Analytics Q1 and May 2026 commentary; ATA American Trucking Trends 2025; C.H. Robinson research with MIT-CTL on tender rejection rate impacts; IndexBox flatbed tender rejection analysis February 2026; FMCSA non-domiciled CDL rulemaking commentary and English-language proficiency enforcement coverage.