Freight hauling conditions improved slightly for shippers in January but were ultimately offset by higher fuel costs, according to an industry measure from transportation analytics firm FTR.
Looking further out, the market outlook for shippers technically is negative after March through the forecast horizon, but the forecast is mostly very close to neutral over that period, the Bloomington, Indiana-based firm said.
FTR’s Shippers Conditions Index improved in January to +0.6 from December’s reading of -1.8. The change came because freight dynamics – measured by utilization, rates, and volume – were slightly favorable for shippers in January, but higher fuel costs offset almost all those benefits.
“Broadly speaking, the freight market is still fairly comfortable for shippers despite softening over the past few months. However, conditions vary depending on freight profiles,” Avery Vise, FTR’s vice president of trucking, said in a release. “For example, in the spot market for truck freight, 2025 has been rather sluggish for dry van and refrigerated equipment but has been increasingly hot for flatbed. In rail, carload volumes have been only marginally stronger than comparable 2024 weeks, but intermodal is still running strong year over year. Tariffs and anticipation of tariffs likely are big components of these distortions, and it will be advantageous for the whole supply chain to have clarity and certainty soon.”
The firm’s SCI tracks the changes representing four major conditions in the U.S. full-load freight market: freight demand, freight rates, fleet capacity, and fuel price. Combined into a single index number, a positive score represents good, optimistic conditions, while a negative score represents the opposite.
