Just Dispatched
A growing chorus across fleets says the issue isn’t bodies with CDLs: it’s qualified, reliable, professional drivers. At ATA’s 2025 MCE in San Diego, ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello called it directly: the U.S. has a quality problem, not an absolute numbers problem. CCJ reports that driver shortage has even fallen out of ATRI’s overall Top 10 this year, while fleets still rank finding and keeping qualified drivers as core concerns.
What Fleets Are Seeing
Applicant volume is up, but pass rates are low after safety and professionalism screens. If quality weren’t scarce, Costello argued, fleets wouldn’t have raised driver pay during a freight recession, signaling that top-tier drivers remain in short supply. Freight market slack may temporarily ease the “shortage” headlines, but TruckingDive notes that easing happened for the wrong reasons (weak demand), not because recruiting qualified drivers suddenly got easier. Meanwhile, research summarized by FreightWaves points to driver churn, not a structural headcount deficit, as the truckload sector’s chronic pain. Safety and compliance shrink the “hireable” denominator.
FMCSA’s Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse shows the scale: as of April 1, 2025, 291,664 drivers had at least one violation on record, and 184,400 were in prohibited status. That’s a meaningful slice of license holders absent from the safe, eligible pool today. Add in high churn and TL’s historically elevated turnover of 92.7% and 77.6% from Q3 1996 - Q1 2023, and experience thins out even when seats are filled on paper.
What's Working Now
Fleets winning this cycle are optimizing for quality: tighter screens, finishing programs that pair rookies with veteran mentors, and coaching (scorecards, in-cab data used to train—not just police—on speed, distraction, and hard events). On the retention side: more predictable lanes or home time where possible, transparent pay plans, and a real driver voice. The goal is fewer seat fillers and more true professionals - drivers who protect safety scores, insurance premiums, fuel economy, equipment life, and shipper relationships.
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