How Many Trucking Businesses Exist
Nearly 580,000 active motor carriers were registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as of June 2025, per the American Trucking Associations’ own industry data. That is the government’s own registered-carrier count, not an estimate of trucking companies broadly, and it sets the scale of the pool a broker or funder working this vertical is drawing from.
A motor carrier in this count spans everything from a single owner-operator running one truck to a large national fleet, which makes the size distribution covered next the more operationally useful fact than the headline count alone.
The Industry Is Built Almost Entirely on Small Fleets
The size distribution is stark: 91.5% of registered motor carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks, and 99.3% operate 100 or fewer, per the same American Trucking Associations data. Fewer than 1% of all registered carriers run a fleet larger than 100 trucks, meaning the large, nationally recognized carrier is genuinely the exception in this industry, not the typical business.
The single-truck or small-fleet owner-operator is, by these numbers, the modal trucking business rather than a marginal segment worth a footnote. That is direct, quantified evidence for why trucking gets named alongside restaurants as a classic MCA-heavy vertical: the industry’s own structure is dominated by exactly the kind of small operator who is also a typical MCA candidate.
What This Industry Moves
Scale-wise, this is not a niche industry. The trucking freight bill totaled approximately $906 billion in gross revenues in 2024, with the industry moving 11.27 billion tons of freight, representing roughly 72.7% of the nation’s freight by weight, per the American Trucking Associations. Nearly three-quarters of everything physically moved across the country by weight goes by truck.
That combination, a freight-moving industry generating close to $1 trillion in gross revenue, built overwhelmingly out of businesses running 10 trucks or fewer, is the concrete backdrop for why trucking shows up so consistently in MCA broker discussion as a vertical worth specializing in.
Why Small-Fleet Structure and MCA Reliance Go Together
This is reasoning, not a separately cited statistic. A one-truck or small-fleet owner-operator typically does not carry the kind of multi-year bank relationship, asset base, or credit history a larger, more established fleet does, even while generating real, steady freight revenue. That combination, real cash flow without the traditional credit-history depth a bank loan underwrites against, is precisely the gap MCA underwriting is built to fill, since it weighs daily deposit volume over credit-history depth.
The 91.5%-operate-10-or-fewer-trucks figure above is a direct, quantified description of how large that gap is across the industry as a whole, beyond the anecdotal pattern a few brokers happen to notice.
What Changes When You Are Underwriting a One-Truck Business
Underwriting a one-truck business looks different from underwriting a larger fleet in one specific way worth naming: revenue at that scale is concentrated in a single asset and, often, a single driver’s capacity to keep it moving. A truck in the shop for a week is a much larger percentage hit to a one-truck operator’s monthly deposits than the same repair is to a 50-truck fleet’s aggregate revenue.
That concentration is a real underwriting consideration distinct from the seasonal-revenue pattern more commonly discussed for restaurants and construction, worth reading a trucking merchant’s bank statements with in mind rather than applying a generic small-business underwriting lens.
Reading These Numbers Alongside Restaurant Data
Trucking and restaurants are named together repeatedly in industry discussion as the two classic MCA-heavy verticals, and the data behind each supports the pairing for different underlying reasons. Restaurants run tight, cost-pressured margins on steady daily transaction volume. Trucking runs a fundamentally small-operator industry structure, per the 91.5% and 99.3% figures above, where the typical business is genuinely too small to carry the credit depth a bank loan requires.
Both patterns point at the same underwriting gap from different directions, real, demonstrable revenue that traditional, credit-history-driven bank underwriting is not well suited to evaluate on its own terms.
The Numbers
Nearly 580,000 active motor carriers were registered with FMCSA as of June 2025.
91.5% of registered motor carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks; 99.3% operate 100 or fewer trucks.
The trucking freight bill totaled approximately $906 billion in gross revenues in 2024, moving 11.27 billion tons of freight, roughly 72.7% of the nation’s freight by weight.
Restaurants, the other classic MCA-heavy vertical, saw total operating expenses rise 36% from 2019 to 2026, with 42% of operators reporting no profit at all in 2025.
National Restaurant Association, Elevated Costs Continue to Pressure Restaurant Profitability
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- American Trucking Associations, Economics and Industry Data
- National Restaurant Association, Elevated Costs Continue to Pressure Restaurant Profitability