Carrier Geography Analysis

Analysis

· as of June 1, 2026

The sharpest divergence in this dataset is between where carriers are registered and where fleet capacity is actually concentrated. Georgia, ranked fifth by carrier count at 134,322 (4.95% of the national total), holds 7,209,572 total power units — more than Texas, which has 247,784 carriers but 7,154,764 power units. That gap implies Georgia's carriers average 58.7 power units per entity, nearly double California's 33.8 and nearly double Texas's 31.5. Florida follows a similar pattern: 189,188 carriers average 48.4 power units each, yielding 8,311,763 total power units, second only to California's 9,773,910 despite California having roughly twice as many registrants. The divergence likely reflects the geographic clustering of asset-heavy truckload and dedicated contract carriers around major southeastern logistics corridors and port infrastructure, while coastal population centers like California and New York attract a higher share of small, owner-operator-scale registrants.

Massachusetts is the most pronounced outlier in fleet-size composition: 47,886 carriers average 98.2 power units each, producing 4,415,161 total power units — more than Ohio (2,465,809), North Carolina (2,895,626), or Minnesota (2,851,371), each of which has substantially more registrants. This is consistent with a concentration of large logistics and intermodal operators registered in Massachusetts rather than reflecting the state's proportional share of physical freight movement.

At the national level, 2,712,220 carriers are on file across all jurisdictions as of June 2026, representing a carrier base served by approximately 15,768,441 drivers. The dataset also captures a long tail of non-US jurisdictions: Canadian provinces (Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and others) account for roughly 24,000 combined registrants, while a scattering of Mexican state codes and overseas territories adds several hundred more, underscoring that FMCSA operating authority extends meaningfully beyond the 50 states.

The extreme outliers in average fleet size — Yukon Territory at 2,972.2 and the Virgin Islands at 464.4 — almost certainly reflect data artifacts from a small number of registrants with unusual reporting rather than genuine fleet concentrations, and should be interpreted cautiously. Over a five-year horizon, the distribution of carrier registrations across states has remained top-heavy, with the same handful of states consistently holding the majority of both registrants and licensed capacity.