Trucking Market Update - Week Beginning February 9, 2026

Welcome to this week's episode of FTR's Weekly Trucking Update podcast hosted by Avery Vice. Join Avery each week as he dissects everything from market trends to economic indicators to explore how these factors are shaping the trucking landscape. Download the graphics package at ftrintel.com/trucking-podcast and feel free to use those slides as you defend your transportation thought leadership within your own company. So buckle up as we embark on a journey through the dynamic and ever changing world of trucking. And now here's your host Avery Vice. Welcome to FTR's Weekly Trucking Market Update. I'm Avery Vice President of Trucking. This is episode 351 for the week of February 9th, 2026. Before we start, a reminder you can download a PDF for the graphics related to this discussion at ftrintel.com/trucking-podcast. So this week is very light on general economic indicators, but no worries, there's quite a bit to discuss specific to trucking and it's actually going to be a longer podcast than usual. Sorry about that. We'll start with the English language proficiency issue, which we haven't addressed in a while, and there is some news on the topic. As you might recall, we had a brief lapse in funding for much of the government last week, but Congress quickly passed legislation to fund most of the government through September, leaving funding for the Department of Homeland Security up in the air while Democrats in the White House wrangle over immigration policy and specifically the operations of immigration and customs enforcement. Anyway, as you might have already read, the continuing appropriations law includes a provision essentially writing into federal law, well, kind of sort of, I'll talk about that later. The policy that took effect in June making inadequate English skills and out of service violation for truck drivers. Specifically, the legislation states, quote, "The Secretary, this would be the Secretary of Transportation, shall update the Department's, that would be the Department of Transportation, regulation to ensure that noncompliance with Section 391.11, Pyrrhen B, close Pyrrhen, Pyrrhen 2, close Pyrrhen," of Title 49 Code of Federal Regulations, triggers and out of service order. It's not really clear what this provision means given that it's obvious that that was the policy and it wasn't going to change, at least not anytime soon. The provision arguably could be read to require that all English language proficiency violations or ELP violations result in and out of service violation, but that outcome would be extremely disruptive at the Mexican border and that is indeed where most ELP violations occur. Current guidance from the Federal Motor Care Safety Administration excludes drivers operating in the commercial border zone with Mexico from being placed out of service for ELP since the out of service policy took effect June 25th. Only about 29% of all violations have resulted in out of service orders because the other 71% occur in the border zones. However, given that Congress is tasking the Department of Transportation with executing the requirement, DOT or FMCSA arguably has the authority to decide whether exceptions are appropriate. Anyway, if I had to put my money on it, I would bet that nothing changes in how the regulation is enforced and that this language is just a matter of making it an official government requirement rather than, in effect, an enforcement decision by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance or CVSA, which it technically is currently, even though it was in response to an executive order from President Trump. I said currently, actually, that would be before the signing of the bill last week. There was some other news on this issue last week and I think it further in strongly suggest that there won't be any shift in enforcement policy at the border, at least not a shift in any way that tightens enforcement. Posted on FMCSA's regulatory guidance webpage were some frequently asked questions on the English language issue. Those were posted in response to questions that were posed by CVSA after a September training committee meeting. As noted earlier, FMCSA's May 20 guidance on this issue states that enforcement personnel should cite drivers for ELP violations when performing inspections of vehicles in the border commercial zones but should not place the driver out of service. CVSA sought clarification, including what drivers that applied to. FMCSA confirmed in the FAQs that the exception applied to all drivers inspected in the U.S. Mexico border commercial zones regardless of the home country of the driver or the carrier or whether the CDL was American, Mexican or Canadian. Frankly, that's what I had assumed based on the wording of the May 20 guidance but then I'm not a roadside inspector who clearly needs to be sure. The agency also confirmed that border commercial zones are the areas defined in 49 CFR Part 39 sub Part B, that are along the Mexican border. By the way, there are other commercial zones identified in the regulation that have exceptions to various regulations. Many of them are inland and around major cities like Chicago, New York. In an event because the provision I discussed earlier is contained within an appropriations bill, it has legal effect only until September 30. After that, the measure is no longer binding unless it is included in a subsequent funding bill as has been the case with the electronic logging device exemption for livestock collars. That provision has been in there for years and it was once again placed in the bill that was signed last week. But the fact that it's in an appropriation bill and not in statutory law is theoretically at least meaningful going forward. If for example a new congress were to disagree with the policy of requiring that EOP violations be automatically out of service violations, it could simply drop it from future funding bill or even insert a new provision that changed the policy by essentially tying it to funding. In a major funding bill, it's unlikely that something like that would result in a presidential veto, but it certainly is possible. It's already getting into the minutio federal legislative process. It was core to my job in the first decade of my career and I really can't seem to avoid thinking in those terms. Anyway, while we're on the topic, let's review the latest enforcement data related to English language enforcement. As of February 3rd, I say ish because we do have data for that date, but it's clearly not all the data from all the states. Anyway, the latest data shows that 13,475 out of service orders for EOP violations had been issued since June 25th. Of those, a little more than 12,000 were for unique vehicle identification numbers, which is the closest we can get in the publicly evaded available data to estimating the number of individual drivers affected. I have previously stated that the maximum run rate making EOP as an violation would take 25,000 drivers out of the market in a year, assuming of course that none of the drivers who failed were able to learn English well enough to re-qualify. I have to reassess that number, though, because as of the beginning of this year, California is now enforcing violations without a service orders. Based on the first month of enforcement and allowing for some lower enforcement around holidays, it appears that California alone will remove somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 to 4,000 drivers per year, and none of that was assumed in the prior estimate of 25,000. Already, and just over a month, California has gone from not enforcing EOP to ranking 15th in enforcement among all states. At some point this year, probably before summer, California will overtake all states other than in Texas again based on the current run rate. By the way, that 25,000 to 29,000 drivers does sound like a lot, and it's certainly meaningful, given how much capacity is tightened. However, that level alone would not be a market mover nationwide. It might have regional impacts in places like Texas and California, maybe, and we might actually speculate on that a little bit later. Spoiler alert. Anyway, the slide deck accompanying this podcast includes several charts on this topic, including a view of how California's newly added enforcement changes the weekly total of out-of-service violations, and a table showing the 15 jurisdictions with the most out-of-service violations for ELP and the 15 with the fewest since it became an out-of-service violation on June 25th. Okay, moving on, there are a few other topics I want to address before we get to the usual weekly and very little monthly data. First, FTR's trucking conditions index. You probably have noticed that I don't discuss FTR's own data in this podcast, and that's because we reserve our estimates in forecasts regarding volume capacity in rates to the products and services we give to our clients, or sell to our clients, I should say. However, we publish a press release every month on our trucking conditions index or TCI, so it's kind of silly that I haven't been discussing it in the podcast routinely, and I plan to rectify that starting this week. Before we get into the numbers, though, let me explain what it is. The TCI is an assessment of how favorable or unfavorable the current environment is for trucking companies based on five specific facts. freight volume, capacity utilization, freight rates, diesel prices, and financing costs. Index's base is zero, which represents neutral market conditions. Negative numbers are unfavorable for trucking companies. Positive numbers are favorable. And as you probably assume, the larger the number, the more favorable or unfavorable conditions are, as the case may be. Okay, with all that out of the way, let's get to the data. FDR's trucking conditions index rose to 4.85 in December from the 2.14 reading in November, driven largely by stronger freight rates and utilization. As measured by the TCI, overall market conditions are the most favorable for carriers since February 2022, though not nearly as positive as they were in February 2022. And are largely expected to remain favorable over the forecast horizon. How favorable? Well, we don't give everything away. You can see the data through December in the slide deck accompanying the podcast. The forecast and more analysis are in our monthly trucking update, which you can find more about at FTRIntel.com. Okay, another piece of data we make public each month is the number of class eight truck quarters. We had not traditionally talked about that either in this podcast, but we're going to start doing so. And actually we did in our first podcast of the year. If you don't recall that, orders rose quite sharply in December to the highest level since October of 2022, since England, there. 22 is now sort of the benchmark by which we're comparing the current data, which is kind of as strong as it was then. Okay, FTR reported preliminary data showing that North American class eight truck contractor net orders decreased 24% from January or from December. I'm sorry, I should say, but at 32,500 units in January were up a solid 27% year year in December net orders had totaled 42,200 units. That had been the highest order total since October of 22, as I mentioned January marked the second straight month of year year order growth. That is the first time that has happened since April and May of 2024 and orders were well above the 10 year average of 26,300 units. While the on highway market made up most of the month of a month decline both on highway and vocational markets contributed significantly to the year of a year increase in orders. Now, economic data is beginning to point to a freight market recovery this year. The strong year of year performance in both December and January likely, however, were more of a function of greater clarity over both the year for related truck pricing and the environmental protection agencies 2027 NOx regulations. We don't know how February is shaping up, but there have been some positive developments in trucking and the broader economy that we will discuss later in the podcast that could bolster solid orders. And of course, as we discussed, overall market conditions that have improved for carriers and are expected to continue doing so. So the final thing I want to talk about before getting to the weekly data is the latest report on the FMCSA drug and alcohol clearing house, which includes figures for December. Our main focus always is on the number of pre-employment queries of the clearing house because it serves as sort of a check on the strength of hiring of drivers required to hold CDLs. Frankly, the data usually doesn't tell us all that much because queries tend to be volatile month to month, but they're fairly stable on average except around the holidays, which invariably are weaker than the rest of the year. I think for obvious reasons, mainly downtime and focus on other things. The same was true for December of 2025, but there is a wrinkle there, or maybe a couple of ones. Since the clearing house launched in January of 2020, the December level had always, with one exception, been lower than the November level. The exception was 2020, and of course 2020 is a bizarre year. Until now, though, that had been the case. December's level was actually 4.7% higher than November's. Now, before we ascribe a whole lot of meaning to that, I must remind you as we discussed in a podcast some weeks ago that the month of our month drop in December was considerably larger than usual. So December's small recovery is off a lower base than we would have expected a few months ago. But there's another point that might be at least a little more reassuring about the strength of hiring that could imply stronger freight demand. The number of pre-employment queries in December were up 6.1% every year, and the highest of any December since the clearing house launched. So that's something. What else? Another interesting factoid is that the number of drivers completing their return to duty process in thus exiting prohibited status in the clearing house was the lowest since the December level. What does that mean? Well, December's and November's tend to be the lowest months for drivers exiting the prohibited status anyway, for presumably the same reason that pre-employment queries are also low in those months. As for being the lowest in four years, that could just be an outlier, but it could indicate that the number of disqualified drivers who are still interested in driving again or willing to is dwindling. Now, we're not going to jump to that conclusion until we see another couple of months of data that that matches or comes close to matching what we saw in the December data. I was in the discussion of the clearing house data with a summary of where things stand. As of the beginning of this year, 328,000 for 31 drivers had been flagged with at least one violation in the clearing house. And of those, 200 in 2,345 or 61.6% are still barred from driving. 5.3% of all unique query drivers have had a violation. Okay, let's get to the weekly data starting with diesel prices, which rose in the latest week, but not by much. The National average retail price of on highway diesel increased 7/10 of a cent to $3.68.8 cents a gallon during the week ended February 9. That is the smallest week of a week change in either direction since late September. The year of year comparison did not change significantly at a little over 2 cents higher than it was in the same 2025 week. As you can imagine with such a small change nationally, the regional changes were mixed. The biggest change was an increase of 12 cents in the Rocky Mountain region. But that is a low volume area that doesn't affect the national price all that much. The largest decrease was 2.3 cents in the lower Atlantic region. Meanwhile, crude prices are still running between $63 and $65 a barrel. All right, let's talk about the spot market for truck freight for the week ended February 6, which was week 5 of the year. And it's not as exciting as last week, but it is interesting. Total broker posted spot rates in the truck stop.com system increased slightly during the week as drive in and flatbed added to the gains in the previous week and refrigerated spot rates declined only modestly from the record surge of 45 cents a mile that we talked about last week. The total market spot rate did not quite match the rate at the end of 2025, but drive in spot rates did not do it last week or the week before, but did last weeks or past the year and rates and now are at the highest level since the end of 2022. Flatbed spot rates increased for the 11th time in 12 weeks. Let's look more closely at rates. The total market broker posted rate increased just under 2 cents. That was after rising a robust 9 cents or a little bit more than that in the previous week. Total rates were nearly 13% higher than in the same week last year for the strongest prior year comparison since late March of 2022. The winter weather that had triggered week 4's rate gains lingered into week 5, keeping a floor unnormalization from previous week. Also, both drive in and refrigerated saw their largest rate increases in the west coast region. And in fact, the west coast was the only one of the six principal regions we look at where refrigerated rates rose significantly week over week. Stronger rates on the west coast could be related to sharply higher demand for equipment in the east pulling away capacity. However, remember way back 05, 10 minutes ago when we were talking about how California started enforcing inadequate English skills as an out of service violation in January. And remember how out of service violations already were running in California at the second highest rate in the nation after Texas? Well, it's certainly plausible that this development is affecting the spot market in California. It's not really the actual number of out of service violations. Those would have been higher than or no higher than double digits last week. It would be driver's concerns that he or she might get an out of service violation and that might affect whether they would be willing to take a load into or out of the state. Anyway, with no warmer temperatures expected this week in the region's most affected by the recent winter storm, softening rates for a van equipment are likely. During the current week week six refrigerated spot rates historically almost always fall week over week drive in rates however are less consistent drive in rates fell during week six in the past three years but increased in each of the four years prior. Despite warmer weather lingering market disruptions during the past couple of weeks could slow normalization of rates. Okay, let's look at the other side. Look at rates by Equipment Type, Drive-Anne Spot Rates increased 3.6 cents after jumping 20 cents during the previous week. Rates were more than 22% higher than in the same week last year. That is the strongest prior year comparison since February 2022. Rates increased in all regions except the Northeast, where rates were flat week over week. Refredrated Spot Rates decreased almost 6 cents after soaring, as I said earlier, by a record 45 cents in the prior week. They were nearly 36% higher than in the same week last year for the strongest prior year comparison since February 2022. Rates rose in the West Coast region, but declined in all of the regions except the Northeast, which saw a marginal uptick. It was at the 100th of a cent place. Flatbed Spot Rates increased just under 4 cents to the highest level since the middle of 2025. Of course, that has been our benchmark for weeks now. Rates were 9% higher than they were in the same 2025 week. They were down in the West, but increased week over week elsewhere. We're not going to go into excruciating detail and load activity, but I will note that it ticked up 2.2% week over week, and that it was very strong year-to-year due to huge comparisons in all three of the principal Equipment Types. Week over week, Drive-Anne Volume was barely stronger than flat. Rates fell 11%, but flatbed loads increased nearly 6%. In any case, if you're curious, the charts on both rates and loads are in the slide deck as usual, accompanying the podcast. Okay, let's wrap up the weekly data with a quick look at mortgage rates, which, once again, barely changed. The average rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage ticked up 100th of a point to 6.11%, according to Freddie Mac. A year ago mortgage rates were 6.89%, and those rates have been in a range of 6.89%, 2 as low as 6.06% since then. Okay, as we move to monthly indicators after making a confession, somehow in last week's podcast, I forgot to address a really big economic indicator. Perhaps it was because I didn't have a visual to prompt me as the organization that publishes the data does not authorize third parties to display it without permission. In any event, the fact that I am a week late takes nothing away from the importance of the data. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index, which jumped 4.7 points in January to 52.6%. Indicating that the sector expanded for the first time in 12 months after 26 straight months of contraction before that. Now the ISM index did technically exceed the 50% threshold between expansion and contraction a year ago, but it did so only briefly and only by a very tiny margin. January's index level was substantially stronger. Components of the index most closely associated with freight volume were especially robust. The New Order's index surged 9.7 points to 57.1%, while the production component rose 5.2 points to 55.9%. Another freight-related component, backlog of orders, have been languishing in contraction territory for 39 months before. In January though, the Order backlog index rose 5.8% to 51.6%, which is in expansion, although not as strongly as production in New Order's. Although the ISM index is very encouraging for recovery in the manufacturing sector, one month is not a trend. Also the index is designed to assess how widespread changes are and not the scope of those changes. In other words, more supply managers reported improvement, but those improvements could be quite small. As with many other things, we will look for more data down the road. On the other hand, recent government indicators don't contradict the index. Manufacturing output is risen in 6 of the past 7 months and is roughly at strongest levels year-to-year since late 2022. New orders for core capital goods have been strong in nominal dollars for a while and have been begun rising even when adjusted for inflation. Okay, moving on. As I said last week, probably would be the situation we did not get payroll employment figures for January that would have been published on February 6th due to the brief government shutdown. But we do have some insights into the labor market in the form of job openings. Job positions fell for a third straight month in December to the lowest level since September of 2020. Job openings fell 5.6% month of a month from the downwardly revised November figure, which had been the lowest since December of 2020. Prior to the pandemic, job openings had not been lower than December's total since December of 2017. Now, that doesn't mean that job growth necessarily will be weak or non-existent in the near term, but it does suggest that pressure to hire workers is weak, at least compared to where it had been since the end of 2017. And that's it for government data, but as I will detail in a moment, we will make up for it next week. And the week after that's going to be pretty busy too, as we continue to catch up with data delayed by last year's government shutdown and cover data from January. Okay, let's recap some key takeaways for the week. This mandated out of service orders over EOP, at least until the end of September. FDR's trucking conditions index in December rose to its strongest level since February 2022. Class A truck orders fell month over month, but rose year over year. December's pre-employment queries of the drug and alcohol clearinghouse were higher than in any other December. Diesel prices edged higher in the latest week. Spot market rates remained elevated after the previous week's big jump in van rates. Organized rates barely changed again in the latest week. The ISM manufacturing index signaled robust gains for the sector and job openings for December were the lowest since September of 2020. So as I mentioned, we have lots to talk about next week. We will discuss the slightly delayed jobs report, which will include the annual revision of payroll employment estimates, including for trucking. We will review retail and food service sales for December and inventories for November. Both of those delayed by the first government shutdown. We will look at inventories for November. Actually, I just said that. Everything else is for January. Sales of existing homes, pricing for consumers and businesses and applications for new businesses. Plus, we will recap the week in diesel prices and the spot market for truck freight as usual. That's FTR's Trucking Market Update, episode 351 for the week of February 9th, 2026. Thanks for listening, stay safe, and we hope you will join us next week. Thank you for joining us for this week's Trucking Update podcast with Avery Vice. Be sure to check out FTR's additional complimentary market coverage at fray-fraight-today.