Still looking for unicorn drivers? A look at the critical driver pay trends you need to know — especially for your specialty jobs

By Leah Shaver, President & CEO of The National Transportation Institute

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If you read nothing beyond this line, this should hit home — the more nuanced the job, the greater challenge to recruit and retain. In 2024, NTI has completed more wage studies for folks in waste and recycling than ever before and there’s a common denominator with all of them: fleets like yours need qualified CDL holders that can responsibly operate your equipment and perform the myriad of other meaningful tasks of their jobs that don’t take place behind the wheel of the truck.

?Unicorn drivers like that can be created and trained, grown through upskilling or poached from peer companies – but regardless, finding these drivers and then keeping them onboard is a challenging prospect. ?

?One factor compounding these challenges is that the industry has and continues to quickly transition to where every driving job is becoming unique, more nuanced, more specialized and holds more tasks than just driving the truck and performing pre- and post-trip inspections.

?As always, it’s a unique time in trucking. The industry has changed, shifted and evolved dramatically over the past two years, five years and even 10 years. No two jobs are alike. No two locations (or markets, as we refer to them at The National Transportation Institute) are alike. No two pay models are alike. That’s especially true for private trucking fleets, dedicated 3PLs and the myriad of for-hire trucking companies working anything outside of general truckload in OTR and long-haul. And even those jobs are shifting, too.

?No longer is a trucking job just a trucking job, and I’d venture to say that no one knows that better than NORA members! While the “driver market” and “trucking economy” are often spoken of, referred to and thought of as a monoculture (or… mono-economy? mono-market? Hopefully you’re catching my drift) — it absolutely is not. Every job is unique, and every market poses different challenges.

?Driver compensation benchmarking activity by fleets of all types — especially those with specialty or nuanced jobs like those reading Liquid Recycling — in recent years has shifted to focus directly on the job types fleets are hiring for within the locations where they’re hiring and retaining drivers. Companies have become highly granular and detailed with their pay adjustments due to how the industry and the driving job have evolved, as well as how fleets are pricing their business with shipper partners, how they’re structuring their driver pay models and how these changes are used to attract and retain the drivers they need, when and where they need them.

?Let’s dive further into what I mean: I’ve sketched out for you here the trends our analysts at The National Transportation Institute are documenting that have enveloped the market for professional truck drivers, as well as where those trends are headed in the coming years, how they are and will continue to impact the wages and total rewards you offer those drivers, and of course a few best practices and policies you can consider and evaluate to help you navigate and thrive amid these cultural, societal and economic changes.

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Driver availability and pay trends — what fleets are contending with

The underlying dynamics that caused so many headaches for fleets trying to hire drivers to maintain or grow their headcount from late 2020 through early 2022 are still here in 2024. Those trends caused driver pay to spike nearly 20% in a short time. The same factors are lurking in the background, and they’ll be front and center again as soon as this freight cycle correction ends. Those trends revolve around two primary factors that affect driver availability: The macro labor market and constraints on driver supply.

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The macro labor market: The defining issue, in my opinion, for businesses of all types, stripes and sizes over the past five years centers on one word: Labor. Availability thereof, people willing to do jobs at the wages offered, retention of those people once they’re hired, hiring their replacement(s) once they depart — The labor market has been stuck in a spin cycle since early 2020, and the revolutions continue. Unemployment remains near record lows, while job openings remain at record highs. Jobs are plentiful throughout the economy, limiting interest in trucking careers among new entrants and drawing workers away from trucking, especially at the local, market level where your company is competing for drivers against other industries and jobs.

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Driver supply and demand: Are drivers in demand? That’s rhetorical. Of course they are. People are still eating, clothing themselves, furnishing their homes, building homes, shopping for themselves and others, buying cars, and so on. There are massive construction projects underway across the country from the infrastructure funding bill, which moves freight. And of course the manufacturing elements and import/export of all of the aforementioned activities contribute heavily to freight volumes, as well as those like your company that collect and haul away liquids, wastewater, chemicals, recycling, etc.

?Trucks obviously don’t just deliver the end products. They deliver all the raw goods, parts, and pieces along the way, too. At a conference a few years ago, I heard a trucking economist say that every finished product we buy or use has been on a truck in some form or fashion seven different times.

?However, while all of the above factors are true and freight is still moving, there has been a marked slowdown in the freight market over the past 18 months due to an imbalance in supply (trucking capacity) and demand (freight volumes), and those factors have also caused driver pay gains to mostly stall. We have tracked this cycle many times over our 30 years of research.

?One labor economist said in 2022 that transportation’s workforce “depleted.” The current down freight market is only masking that issue — it hasn’t gone away. In fact, the contributing dynamics have become even further entrenched:

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• We’re struggling to attract younger generations to replace those who are aging out and retiring.
• There’s is significant churn among new entrant drivers to our industry who enter seeking a rewarding career with good pay.
• Increasing regulation and oversight by federal and state governments, which creates frustrations and barriers.
• Unpaid, unproductive time in drivers’ schedules chips away at their earnings and makes trucking jobs less appealing.
• Lastly, changing attitudes and laws around marijuana. The U.S. DOT’s Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse has (rightly) sidelined an average of 5,000 drivers a month for nearly 4 years, and legalization laws at the state level allowing for recreational marijuana sale and use make federally regulated jobs even more unappealing to those who want to take advantage of those changes. We expect this trend to continue as 90% of US states have legalized marijuana use in some way, whether medical or otherwise.

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Looking ahead, the stage being set for another wage pinch

?NTI expects muted driver wage activity to continue through this year.

?Capacity is exiting the market in terms of carrier count and driver count, and several large publicly traded carriers have reported cutting vehicle counts intentionally to rebalance. However, carrier and driver supply still outweigh demand, and until those supply and demand dynamics rebalance more into carriers’ favor, companies will continue to conservatively approach the market, make decisions, and evaluate costs, including those related to driver pay changes.

?NTI sees private fleets and dedicated 3PL carriers continue to be active in benchmarking their pay and adjusting to attract the drivers they want and need. While capacity has exited the market in the for-hire segment, that has not happened for private fleets. Trucking companies are shrinking but private fleets like retailers, energy companies, manufacturers and food distributors are using the current market to hire and grow their fleet, and even to restructure pay models to simplify them, make them easier for drivers to understand, and to better market their job opportunities to prospective hires.

?One element NTI is watching within the next year to 18 months is what happens with wages when capacity and demand rebalance or shift the other direction.

?The timing of such a freight rebound and inflationary market could align with many drivers who are earning their needed one to two years of experience to qualify for higher-paying jobs, and they will likely be quick to jump to those jobs when hiring demand surges again.

?When a freight market rebound occurs, demand for capacity returns, and freight rates begin to climb, driver hiring activity will follow, and the need for newcomers will become a point of emphasis again. Thus, wages for drivers with one year of experience or less will also jump. Throughout the pandemic recovery era of late 2020 through early 2022, wages for drivers with one year of experience had the most momentum, with year-over-year percentage growth sometimes double that of cap earners (drivers with the most experience and the highest pay).

?The next freight market rebound will likely see eerily similar dynamics play out.

?Fleets also report on a daily basis to NTI that they continue to struggle with retention, particularly for-hire motor carriers, though private fleets have also reported that turnover remains higher than they would like, particularly within a new hire’s first weeks and months on the job.

?Data also shows driver hiring remains higher in 2024 than any year over the past five years.

Fleets aren’t trying to grow in this market — such as adding trucks and drivers to meet higher demand from customers. NTI contends the hiring activity signaled by the data is replacement demand driven by continued elevated turnover.

?With the new entrant pipeline being depleted and turnover still elevated, the trends spelled out above could converge to build strong pressure on driver pay across experience levels when the freight market begins a recovery and enters a more robust market.?

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So what can your fleet do amidst these challenges?

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NTI has prepared a punch list of best practices to aid in your ongoing employee endeavors. If you want free access, head to driverwages.com/contact and we will gladly send them over to you.

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Leah Shaver is President and CEO of The National Transportation Institute. NTI is the trucking industry’s authority on driver compensation, best practices and programs, providing comprehensive benchmarking reports for earnings, and nearly 200 other attributes that make up a driver’s total pay package, such as bonuses, safety and performance incentives, components like activities and detention, and much more. Learn more about NTI’s surveys and data solutions at DriverWages.com.