Definitive Guide to Commercial Trucking
A focused guide on hiring, licensing-verification, and retaining CDL drivers and fleet staff. Role-specific recruiting playbooks and a candid look at what actually works in a licensing-bottlenecked labor market.
What's inside
- Why this labor market runs through licensing, not job postings - and what that means for how you hire
- The four checks every driver candidate needs before an offer: CDL class, MVR, DOT physical, FMCSA Clearinghouse
- The 10 most-recruited roles across driving, dispatch, safety, and fleet operations
- A practical hiring playbook built around verification instead of resume claims
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Download Definitive Guide to Commercial TruckingThe commercial trucking market this paper is about, in federal numbers.
Every claim the paper makes sits on top of these. They are published, they are free, and we would rather you saw them first.
There were 126,670 general freight trucking companies in the United States in 2023, employing 1,095,187 people at an average of $65,587 a year. Against 2018 that is +49% employers, +6.4% employment, +23% average pay - five years, before inflation is taken out of any of it.
Where the work is most concentrated.
- Stockton, CA — 2.63× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 10,110 employed
- Memphis, TN — 2.40× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 19,460 employed
- Lakeland, FL — 2.22× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 7,820 employed
- Riverside, CA — 1.77× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 40,230 employed
- El Paso, TX — 1.75× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 7,850 employed
- Little Rock, AR — 1.67× the national rate of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, 7,910 employed
Concentration is not the same as volume. A metro can be the densest market in the country for a trade and still be a small one - which is exactly the condition that makes a search hard, and is why the paper treats the two separately.
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2018 and 2023 annual averages, private-sector employers. Concentration from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
