Through 2023 and 2024 the trade press ran a steady drumbeat of stories about collapsing freight rates. Capacity had flooded in, spot rates cratered, carriers went under. If you shipped truckload, that story matched your invoices.
If you shipped LTL, it did not, and the federal data explains why.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes separate producer price indexes for long-distance truckload and long-distance less-than-truckload carriage. Both are based to December 2003 = 100, which is unusual and useful: it means the two numbers can be read directly against each other without any rebasing.
- Less-than-truckload, long-distance (PCU484122484122)
- Truckload, long-distance (PCU484121484121)
- Couriers and express delivery (PCU492110492110)
The headline
| Dec 2003 = 100 | Jun 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Couriers and express delivery | 395.0 | +295.0% |
| LTL, long-distance | 308.0 | +208.0% |
| Truckload, long-distance | 204.6 | +104.6% |
Same roads. Same fuel. Same driver shortage. Same regulatory regime. Twice the price growth.
The part that should change how you budget
Averages over twenty-two years are easy to dismiss. The recent behavior is harder to argue with.
Truckload peaked in March 2022 at 211.1 and fell to 160.3 by November 2024, a decline of 24.1%. That is the freight recession everybody wrote about, and it was real.
Over those exact same months, LTL rose 1.6%.
Not fell less. Rose. The mode that everyone agreed was in a historic downturn never reached the LTL half of the market at all. And LTL’s worst drawdown from its own running peak, across the entire twenty-two year series, is 11.8%. Truckload gave back a quarter of its value in under three years.
The spread between the two indexes tells the story on its own:
| Dec | LTL minus TL |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 30.4 |
| 2022 | 32.8 |
| 2023 | 58.5 |
| 2024 | 71.7 |
| 2025 | 86.2 |
| Jun 2026 | 103.3 |
The gap more than tripled in four and a half years.
Why this happens, stated carefully
The tempting explanation is the July 2023 collapse of Yellow Corporation, which removed a large block of LTL capacity from the market more or less overnight. The timing fits: the spread jumps hardest between December 2022 and December 2024.
Timing that fits is not proof, and this is worth being careful about. LTL and truckload have genuinely different cost structures. LTL depends on a terminal network with fixed costs that do not shrink when volume does, so LTL carriers have both less incentive and less ability to cut price into a downturn. Truckload capacity, by contrast, is one owner-operator with one truck, and it enters and exits the market fast. That structural asymmetry would produce some version of this divergence with or without Yellow.
The honest statement is that both forces point the same way and this data cannot separate them.
The 2026 move is fuel, mostly
Both indexes jumped sharply in the first half of 2026: LTL up 15.2% and truckload up 13.0% in six months. That is not a repeat of the divergence above, it is a fuel event showing up in both modes at once.
Diesel went from $3.897 per gallon in the week ending March 2, 2026 to $4.859 the following week and stayed above $5.00 through July. Fuel surcharges are formula-driven, so a move of that size passes into freight rates in both modes within weeks. If you are comparing 2026 invoices to 2025 invoices, separate the fuel component before concluding anything about base rates.
What to do with this
Three things follow, and none of them require trusting our interpretation above.
Stop benchmarking LTL against truckload market commentary. They have not been the same market for at least four years. Rate-trend coverage that does not say which mode it means is not usable for an LTL budget.
Budget LTL for structural increase, not cyclical relief. The last twenty-two years contain no period where LTL gave back more than 11.8%. Planning on a downturn to fix an LTL cost problem is planning on something that has not happened in the length of the series.
Separate fuel before you compare years. The 2026 increase is largely a diesel event in both modes and will reverse when diesel does. The 2023 to 2025 divergence is not, and will not.
Limits of this analysis
These are national averages of what carriers charged, not what you were charged. A producer price index is a benchmark. It cannot tell you whether your specific carrier applied your specific contract correctly, which is a different question and the one your invoices answer.
Preliminary values revise. BLS marks the most recent months provisional. June 2026 figures can move.
Index construction is not lane construction. BLS samples carrier revenue across shipments. Your lane mix, accessorial profile and freight class distribution can move very differently from the national index, and often do.
That last caveat is the useful one. If the LTL index rose 15% and your LTL spend rose 40%, the difference lives in your classifications, your accessorials, or your fuel table rather than in the market, and all three are checkable line by line.