Amazon Relay Expects 300,000 Weekly Loads by December, Up 11%

How much freight is Amazon Relay moving this peak season?

Amazon expects to move more than 4 million loads through the holidays, with weekly volume reaching 300,000 by December, about 11% more freight than last year. The company announced the forecast Sept. 9 at RelayCon 2026 in Las Vegas, where more than 1,000 carriers gathered, double the 600 who attended in 2025 and four times the 500 who came to the first event in 2024.

The volume picture framed everything else carriers heard that week. John Hartland, Amazon's director of North America surface transportation, and Maneesh Jyoti delivered the keynote Thursday morning, followed by FreightWaves founder Craig Fuller on where the freight market is heading. The hallway between 10:15 and 10:45 was full of carriers doing something you don't usually see at conferences: talking about what to do with the forecast. Should they add a truck before peak or wait? Is their best driver ready to run a second unit? Which of the new load types actually fits the equipment they already own?

That implementation talk started before anyone had even found their breakout room, and it captured the shift from last year. In 2025, a lot of the conversations started with some version of "should I grow?" This year, almost nobody asked that. They asked how, when, and what it would cost them.

What changed in Amazon's fuel and maintenance discount programs?

Amazon expanded its Deals & Discounts program across the three expenses that hit carriers hardest. Enrollment barriers came off the Comdata fuel card program, where carriers are averaging about 10% savings, with added regional providers and discounts reaching up to 66 cents a gallon at Petro and 40 cents at Love's. Maintenance savings are targeted at 15%, with Red Classic added as a vendor. On equipment, a three-year Ryder leasing option with a 10% discount joined the existing 40% rental discount, plus a $10,000 discount on used trucks.

Safety rewards expanded as well, with free dash cams for eligible carriers and 2 to 5 cents extra per collision-free mile, up to $14,000 a year.

The cost side matters more this year than it did 12 months ago. Carriers came in knowing their cost per mile. They knew what their trucks were costing them sitting still. Some had already mapped out their next equipment purchase and wanted someone to poke holes in it. Several carriers on the floor had been in business for 25 years, not 25 months, and what they kept coming back to wasn't rates. It was time and flexibility. After decades of chasing loads and living on the road, they'd found a way to run a real business on their own terms.

What's new in Relay Assistant and the Scorecard?

Relay Assistant is expanding well past its original role as a chat tool for negotiating rates and pickup times on certain spot loads. It can now resolve common over-the-road issues on the spot, including trailer availability, site closures and basic trip information, with the ability to reroute and release drivers rather than sending someone digging through FAQs or waiting on support. By the end of this year, carriers will be able to ask it to repeat Post A Truck orders instead of relisting manually, and Amazon says more features are coming around load availability, schedule changes and route patterns.

When the assistant can't solve something, it hands the carrier to a live operator with the full conversation attached, and Amazon says performance disputes are now being resolved 20% faster.

The Scorecard is changing too. Safety, compliance and required actions now sit on one page instead of being split across hauling performance alone, and new AI-generated focus areas point carriers to which sub-metric to work on first. For a small fleet without a back office, knowing what to fix before it costs you load access is the whole game.

What freight is Amazon opening to Relay carriers?

Amazon Supply Chain Services opened the Relay network to shippers of all sizes and industries, meaning the loads on the board aren't only Amazon's own packages anymore. Contract offers now run longer than the previous six-month maximum, and intermodal, reefer, hostler and less-than-truckload options are all growing.

The announcements point the same direction. Longer contracts, a broader shipper base, new equipment types and better cost programs all reward carriers who can plan past next week. The tools only pay off for operators who know their numbers well enough to use them.

How did Amazon change the RelayCon format?

Carriers had said open mixers made it hard to find peers running similar businesses, so 2026 introduced three breakout tracks built around build, scale and optimize, putting carriers in rooms with operators at the same stage. That track structure matters more than it sounds. When a three-truck operator sits next to another three-truck operator instead of a 60-truck fleet, the conversation gets honest fast.

Right after the keynote break, FreightWaves Editorial Director Adam Wingfield led the first session of the scaler track, "Growing from strength, how to know you're ready for what's next." It drew a full room for a session largely about when not to grow.

The premise was simple. Opportunity and readiness aren't the same thing. The market can hand a carrier an opening, and that carrier can still be the wrong business to take it. The session walked through the real cost of adding equipment, not just the truck payment, but insurance, maintenance reserves, driver cost, and the weeks a new unit sits before it earns. It also covered ways to grow that don't require another truck at all, like tightening utilization, cleaning up a safety profile, and getting more out of equipment already on the ground.

Every carrier scored their own readiness and left with one move and a date attached to it. Not a vision board. A decision.

The pushback was the best part. People argued with their own numbers. One carrier worked out, out loud, that adding two trucks before the new year would have wiped out his cash reserve in a single slow month. That's the kind of moment that saves a business, and it happened because he came in ready to look at it honestly.

What the 300,000-load-per-week forecast means for small fleets

The volume picture is real, but the carriers who treated RelayCon as a working session, not a sales pitch, are the ones most likely to still be standing, and growing, a year from now. Growth isn't a strategy on its own. Readiness is.

The carriers who've lasted 25 years know something the rest of the industry is still learning. Growth isn't the goal. A business that pays you, fits the life you want, and survives the next downturn is the goal. Growth is just one tool for getting there, and sometimes the smartest move is putting that tool down for a quarter.

RelayCon has grown every year, but the bigger shift this time was the quality of the room. Carriers came prepared, knowing their costs, their cash position, and what they wanted to leave with. That's a sign the small carrier segment isn't just surviving this market, it's maturing inside it. When 25-year veterans say time and flexibility are what keep them running, that's a reminder that longevity in trucking is built on a business you can sustain, not just the rate on the next load.