Is there really a driver shortage?

You have seen the headline number. You have probably also seen someone in a comment section say the shortage is a myth invented to keep wages down. Both of those come from real sources, and the disagreement is not really about the data. It is about what the word "shortage" means.

This matters to you specifically, because you are about to spend a few thousand dollars on a license based partly on how you read it. So here is both sides, without a thumb on the scale.

What the ATA says

The American Trucking Associations, the industry's largest trade group, publishes a driver shortage estimate built by its chief economist. It put the shortage at a record 81,258 drivers in 2021, around 78,000 in 2022, and 60,000 or fewer in 2023. In October 2024, ATA's Bob Costello told the group's annual meeting that the number had eased again but, in his words, "for all the wrong reasons" — because freight demand fell, not because recruiting or retention improved. He expected it to return when demand recovered.

ATA's underlying argument is demographic. The average driver is older than the average American worker; ATRI, the industry's research arm, put the average truck driver's age at 47 in July 2025. Retirements are steady. Relatively few women enter the field. Federal rules keep most drivers under 21 off interstate routes. The pool of people who are willing to be away from home for weeks, can pass a drug test, and can clear an insurer's driving record standard is genuinely smaller than the job count.

ATA also argues that turnover is misread. Annual turnover at large truckload carriers has for decades run near or above 90 percent, and ATA's position is that this measures drivers moving between carriers, not people leaving trucking. Churn within the industry, not attrition from it.

What the critics say

The most cited counterargument is not from an activist group. It is from economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a March 2019 Monthly Labor Review article, Stephen Burks and Kristen Monaco asked directly whether the U.S. labor market for truck drivers is broken and concluded that it is not. Their finding was that the market "works about as well as that for other blue-collar occupations," that drivers respond to pay differences the way economics predicts they will, and that there is "no reason to think that, given sufficient time, driver supply should fail to respond to price signals in the standard way."

Their important qualification is that the problem is real but local to one segment. Long-distance truckload — the over-the-road work where most new drivers start — showed persistent turnover averaging 94 percent annually at large carriers from 1995 to 2017. That segment is between one-sixth and one-fourth of all heavy truck drivers. Everywhere else in trucking, the churn is ordinary.

A 2024 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, commissioned by FMCSA, reached a similar conclusion. Its reasoning was that a genuine, persistent labor shortage should produce a sustained wage premium, and long-haul truckload pay has not shown one relative to comparable blue-collar work. It also noted that ATA's estimate rests on a self-selected survey sample and proprietary methods that are not publicly specified, which makes it hard for anyone outside ATA to check.

The critics' version, then: there is no shortage of people with CDLs. There is a shortage of people willing to stay in the hardest, lowest-paid corner of trucking under current pay and working conditions, and the industry solves it by recruiting replacements rather than by changing the conditions.

Where the two sides actually agree

More than the argument suggests.

Both agree that turnover in long-haul truckload is extraordinarily high and has been for thirty years. Both agree the workforce is aging. Both agree that a large share of new entrants leave quickly. Both agree that experienced drivers with clean records are in real demand and have choices.

The disagreement is about the diagnosis, and it has a practical shape. If ATA is right, the fix is recruiting more people. If the BLS and NASEM analyses are right, the fix is making the first year of the job better. That distinction is about industry policy. It is not really about whether you personally can get hired.

What this means before you pay for school

Strip out the argument and look at what is verifiable.

Employment is large and turnover is constant. BLS counts around 2.2 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers and projects about 214,500 openings per year through 2035, most of them from replacement rather than growth — projected employment growth is 4 percent over that decade, which is about average. That means jobs exist regardless of whose framing you accept.

Entry-level hiring is real but narrow. The openings a brand-new CDL holder can actually get are concentrated in exactly the segment both sides agree is the hardest: long-haul truckload. That is why choosing between OTR, regional and local before you sign matters more than the shortage debate does.

The market cycles, and right now it is soft. Trucking capacity contracted sharply through the freight downturn — FMCSA's count of property carriers fell more than 11 percent between December 2022 and December 2025, and truck transportation employment fell too. A soft market means carriers are pickier, sign-on bonuses are smaller, and miles are harder to get than in a boom. It does not mean nobody is hiring. It means your record and your willingness to run matter more than they would in a hot market.

Pay is knowable. Do not take a shortage headline as evidence that pay is about to jump. Look at the actual distribution: BLS put the median annual wage for heavy and tractor-trailer drivers at $58,640 as of May 2025, with the bottom 10 percent under $40,140. A first-year driver starts low in that range. What a first year really pays goes through why the advertised figure and the settlement sheet disagree.

The decision that is actually in front of you

The honest framing is this. Trucking will hire you. It will not necessarily pay you well in year one, and the first job will probably be the hard version of the job. Whether that is worth it depends on what the license costs you, how fast you can get through school, and whether you can get to year two, where the options widen considerably — the paths a Class A opens up are much broader than the entry-level ones.

So treat the shortage debate as background, and make the decision on numbers you can check. What does the license cost, all in, including the road test and the medical card? The real cost of CDL school lays that out. If a carrier is offering to pay for it, what do you owe back and for how long — company-sponsored training is a loan repaid with your labor, not a gift. How long until you are earning?

One thing to do next

Ask any school you are considering for their actual placement outcomes and the names of the carriers that hire their graduates, then call one of those carriers yourself and ask what they pay a first-year driver. A school that cannot answer, or a carrier that will not, has told you something. If you want to run that test on us, start an application and ask on the phone — the price is already printed on this site so there is nothing left for us to hide.