December Freight Tonnage Inched Up Against Sluggish Market

"For 2025 in total, tonnage rose just 0.1% over the 2024 average, although it was the first annual gain since 2022,” ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello said. (vitpho/Getty Images)

Freight tonnage remained constrained with a slight sequential improvement in December, failing to overcome its generally lower levels, American Trucking Associations reported Jan. 20.

The ATA For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index increased 0.4% sequentially to 112.9 from 112.4 the previous month. The results also marked a 0.9% increase from the prior year. Not adjusting for seasonality, the numbers increased 4.3% from the prior month to 111.9. The index also showed that tonnage throughout the year was 0.1% above where it was by the end of 2024.

“Despite two consecutive gains, tonnage remains at low levels as the freight metric contracted a total of 2.7% in September and October,” said ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello. “Soft manufacturing and construction activity are continuing to suppress freight levels, as they did for much of last year. For 2025 in total, tonnage rose just 0.1% over the 2024 average, although it was the first annual gain since 2022.”

The Logistics Managers’ Index decreased 1.5 points from the previous month to 54.2 from 55.7, marking the lowest rate of expansion since April 2024. The majority of the downward pressure comes from inventory and warehousing markets. The index also found that transportation capacity moved back to contraction in a way favorable to carriers as it pushed transportation prices up to their highest reading since January 2025.

“All of these downward movements are due to firms continuing to move inventories downstream toward consumers, providing a final wave of relief to the firms that had been holding on to unprecedented levels of inventory throughout 2025,” the LMI report noted. “This downstream push catalyzed transportation metrics.”

Image

The Port of Long Beach handled a record 9.9 million containers in 2025, but numbers were trailing off as the year wrapped up. (Port of Long Beach)

President Donald Trump has made tariffs the main tool in his plans to rework international trade. The resulting frontloading of shipments earlier in the year led to especially strong results for ports; Long Beach handled a record 9.9 million containers in 2025. But activity tapered off toward year’s end because so much cargo had moved early.

Image

Dhawan 

“The port traffic responded to that, and as usual, when you have very high-level activity, you have what you call the hangover effect,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “Now the traffic at the ports is coming down because the holiday season is done, other things are done, so the issue would be the next spending season that will start Easter and later.”

Dhawan doesn’t expect port traffic to pick up much unless there are threats of new tariffs. He expressed particular concern over tariffs on China and other parts of Asia, and turmoil in the Middle East also could have an impact. But significant tariff pressure, he noted, could cause a new round of frontloading.

“If the stuff doesn’t land at the port, it’s not going to be put on the trucks or the rail, and then to the warehouses,” Dhawan said. “Everything depends upon how much stuff lands at the port. That depends upon the tariff regime, and the second important factor, what is the buying power of the consumer? Because of the government shutdown, we’ve been getting some limited data on how the consumers have spent in the last three months.”

The U.S. Census Bureau showed in its latest data that retail sales in November increased 0.6% to $735.9 billion from a sluggish October. Dhawan warned that consumers have been losing firepower, as of late, because of the jobs market over the past couple of years. He also noted that a lot of the spending comes from older consumers who are more focused on services.

“We have not added, on-net, any new jobs in the white collar, entry level or middle management,” Dhawan said. “This is the lifeblood of spending for the young people who graduate, get a job, and also for the middle-aged people with wife and kids who are also worried about their job prospects. So that shows up in the lack of spending.”

The Cass Freight Index found that shipments decreased 7.5% year over year to 0.932 from 1.007 and 7.2% sequentially from 1.004. The index noted that the three winter storms that hit the Midwest earlier in the month of December slowed the highway network and created pent-up demand that still was evident in the spot market in the first half of January.

“Holiday consumer spending data suggest retail inventories destocked in recent months as freight shipments across modes were below spending trends,” the Cass report said. “A rebound from the weather could support January volumes above the normal seasonal trend, which otherwise would have the shipments component of the Cass Freight Index down 5%.”