Tender Rejections Hit 16.5%, Market Won't Balance Until Late 2027

How long will the current tight truckload market last?

Carriers are rejecting 16.5% of tenders in June 2026, up from just above 4% in June 2023, while accepted tender volumes remain essentially flat year-over-year. That 12-to-14% capacity shortfall, combined with deeply negative net authority filings through April and large fleets still cutting trucks in Q1, points to a tight market that will stretch into late 2027 before returning to balance.

The current tightening is widely described as supply-driven, meaning supply is the variable that shifted most. But the rejection rate tells the cleaner story. Carriers have no incentive to turn down loads: rejections damage customer relationships without the upside of a rate increase. When rejection rates climb above 10%, it signals carriers lack sufficient capacity to cover existing demand.

Accepted tender volumes in June 2023 stood at 10,600 on the SONAR Accepted Truckload Volume Index, with the rejection rate just above 4%. The most recent weekly reading averaged around 10,450, with rejections above 16%. Even well-supplied markets run a 2-to-4% rejection rate as baseline. Netting the current 16.5% against that baseline brings the shortfall into focus: carriers are roughly 12-to-14% underserved relative to demand.

Why isn't demand growth driving this cycle like 2017 and 2020?

Demand improved over the past year, driven in part by hyperscaling AI data centers, defense spending, and reduced inventories that prompted shippers to shorten order lead times. But the uptick has not reached the scale seen in 2017 or 2020, when strong government stimulus pushed tender volumes up around 60% from early March to August 2020. Accepted volumes are flat year-over-year now, with total tender volumes up around 9%, compared to total tender volumes up roughly 36% in the back half of 2020 and accepted volumes up around 19%.

Demand shocks were the primary drivers of the most recent market tightening events in 2017 and 2020. Both cycles were preceded by freight recessions that pushed carriers into defensive pricing and fleet investment strategies, reducing both rates and fleet sizes. When demand increases rapidly, it has the same potential to collapse similarly. The current increase is more subtle and possibly more sustainable, but it also means the supply side will dictate how long the cycle runs.

How fast can capacity grow to rebalance the market?

In a relatively unregulated carrier environment, like the one that existed prior to last year, rejection rates fall just over 1% per month as capacity grows at its fastest pace. At that rate, the market would return to balance in roughly a year if capacity were growing steadily.

But this is not that environment. Most large fleets have been reducing capacity through the first quarter of 2026, with net changes in operating authorities tracked by the FMCSA remaining deeply negative through April. The Montgomery-Caribe Supreme Court ruling further complicates things, as brokers have to be more mindful in their vetting processes, reducing their options beyond simply finding active operators. There are few signs that carriers are committing to capacity growth.

Shippers have struggled to produce reliable demand forecasts, and uncertainty has been the defining theme of the past 18 months. The base case keeps demand relatively stable to slightly higher, assuming inflation pressures ease in the coming months. But supply-side conditions are much slower to move, and the regulatory and vetting environment makes capacity additions harder than in past cycles.

What does this mean for a 5-truck fleet?

Anyone expecting a sharp easing or a short-lived tight cycle, based on current data, may be setting themselves up for a difficult second half of 2026 and start to 2027. Rejection rates above 16% with flat accepted volumes and negative authority filings suggest the market will stay tight longer than the 2017 or 2020 cycles, which were demand-driven and collapsed faster when stimulus ended.

For small fleets, that means spot rates will likely hold above contract through the rest of this year and into next. The gap between spot and contract widened in June as capacity exits tightened supply. Carriers with the equipment and safety scores to stay in the game have pricing leverage they haven't had since early 2022. The question is how long they can hold it before new capacity enters, and right now, the data says late 2027 at the earliest.