The Half-Load Paradox

Here is a paradox that would have sounded absurd to a freight dispatcher five years ago: in 2026, the load that fills only half a trailer is often the better-paying freight. The shipment that fills the whole thing, the full truckload that trucking was built to move, has spent the longest stretch in modern memory earning thin margins or none at all. Meanwhile the smaller shipments, the pallets and part-loads that ride in shared trailers and less-than-truckload networks, have quietly held their prices and their profits.

On the surface that looks like good news for anyone moving smaller freight. Look closer and it is a warning light. The economics of trucking have not been rewritten. A full trailer is still the most efficient way to move goods down a highway, on fuel, on labour, on emissions, on damage. When the market starts paying more to move freight in smaller pieces, that is not a sign that the smaller pieces became more productive. It is a sign that something in the market is bent out of shape. This is the half-load paradox, and it is worth understanding before you let it reshape how you ship.

What a "Half Load" Actually Is

Freight moves in a spectrum of sizes, and the language matters here. A full truckload, or FTL, is exactly what it sounds like: one shipper's freight fills a trailer, the truck runs point to point from origin to destination, and the goods are touched twice, once when they are loaded and once when they are unloaded. It is the model Keylink is built around, and if you are new to it, we walked through the basics in our guide to first-time FTL shipping.

Everything smaller than a full trailer is what this article is loosely calling a "half load." That covers two main worlds. Less-than-truckload, or LTL, is the classic version: a shipment of a few pallets rides in a trailer alongside freight from other shippers, moving through a hub-and-spoke network of terminals where it is sorted, transferred, and reloaded on its way to the customer. Partial truckload and newer shared or pooled truckload services sit between LTL and FTL: bigger than a few pallets, but still not enough to justify booking a whole trailer, so the space gets shared. What unites all of them is simple. None of them fills the truck, and all of them, right now, are commanding a stubborn premium the full load cannot.

The Inversion: Half Loads Are Winning

Start with prices, because the gap is the whole story. Measured against a 2018 baseline, the rate to move a pound of LTL freight was up almost 68 percent by the fourth quarter of 2025. Over the same window, the rate to move a mile of full truckload freight was up just 7.6 percent. Two segments of the same industry, hauling for the same economy, on the same fuel, received wildly different raises. One roughly kept pace with a hard decade; the other barely moved.

That price gap flows straight through to profit. Operating ratio is the plainest way carriers keep score: it is operating costs as a percentage of revenue, so lower is better and anything under 100 means the trucks are earning their keep. Old Dominion, the best-run public LTL carrier, was posting operating ratios in the mid-70s through 2025, which is roughly a 25 percent operating margin, the kind of number most of trucking can only envy. On the truckload side, Knight-Swift, one of the largest carriers in North America, was running its truckload segment at an adjusted operating ratio in the mid-90s, leaving only low-single-digit margins, and rival Werner reported an outright operating loss in the same stretch. Same industry, twenty points of operating ratio apart.

The gap in margins is even starker than the gap in rates. The single most damning number comes from the American Transportation Research Institute. In its 2024 operational cost data, the truckload sector as a whole posted an operating margin of negative 2.3 percent, its first loss-making year since 2019, while LTL stood out as the one sector holding a healthy positive margin. Read that again: on average, moving full truckloads lost money that year, and moving smaller loads did not. A market that pays you to break freight into pieces and penalizes you for consolidating it has its incentives pointed exactly backwards.

One honest caveat belongs here. Part of the recent rise in LTL revenue per shipment is fuel surcharge, not base rate, since diesel climbed through the first half of 2026, and fuel surcharges pass that cost straight into the invoice (we explained how that mechanism works in our piece on fuel surcharges). Strip the fuel out and the base LTL price is holding firm rather than spiking. But holding firm is itself the point: the structural scoreboard, operating ratios and margins, still shows the smaller loads comfortably ahead.

Why It Shouldn't Be: The Physics of a Full Trailer

None of this reflects the underlying physics of moving freight, which have not changed and do not favour the half load. A truck burns roughly the same diesel and pays the same driver whether its trailer is packed to the roof or running a third full. The efficiency of freight is therefore measured per unit of goods moved, per pallet or per ton-mile, and on that basis one full trailer beats two half-full ones every time. It is why the US Environmental Protection Agency's SmartWay program, the benchmark for freight efficiency, rewards carriers that pack trailers densely and move more tonnage on less fuel. Density is efficiency. Fragmentation is waste.

The waste is not hypothetical. Even at the level of full loads, 16.7 percent of truckload miles in 2024 were run completely empty, according to ATRI, roughly one mile in six with nothing in the trailer. Now layer on the cost of running a truck at all. ATRI pegs the total marginal cost of trucking at $2.26 per mile, and the non-fuel portion, the driver, the equipment, the insurance, at $1.78 per mile, the highest it has ever recorded. That $1.78 barely moves whether the trailer is full or half empty. So every time freight that could have filled one truck is instead spread across two, the industry pays that fixed cost twice to move the same goods. More trucks, more drivers, more miles, more emissions, for no additional cargo.

Then there is handling. A full truckload is touched twice. An LTL shipment, by the nature of a hub-and-spoke network, is typically handled four to six times, sometimes more, as it is sorted and transferred through terminals. Every touch is labour, and every touch is a chance for damage; industry LTL damage rates run north of one percent of shipments, with the average freight claim measured in the thousands of dollars. Consolidating freight into fuller loads is, in fact, one of the cleanest levers the whole sector has for cutting cost and emissions at once, which is why decarbonization researchers list "reducing empty trips and consolidating loads" among the first moves for greener road freight. The efficient answer and the profitable answer have simply come unglued from each other.

The Real Cause: A Glut and an Oligopoly

If the half load is not winning on merit, why is it winning? Two distortions, pushing from opposite ends of the market in the same direction.

The first is a glut on the truckload side. Full truckload is a fragmented business of tens of thousands of carriers, easy to enter, and it drew in a wave of new trucks during the pandemic freight boom. When demand normalized, all that capacity stayed on the road, and the result was the longest freight recession in modern history, running from roughly April 2022 through a bottom that only formed in 2026. Rates fell to levels last seen in 2019 and simply sat there; DAT's chief of analytics described truckload contract pricing as having "pushed pause" for a stretch that, in twenty years of data, had "never happened." Spot rates have finally turned up in 2026, rising off the floor, but they remain below their old peak and the recovery is being driven by weak carriers leaving, not by booming demand. We traced the early signs of that turn in our look at the freight-rate recovery and the grind that preceded it in our Q3 2025 market update. A glut of trucks chasing too few loads is what has been holding full-load prices down. It has nothing to do with the full load being less useful.

The second distortion is an oligopoly on the LTL side. Running an LTL network requires hundreds of terminals and enormous capital, so the segment was already concentrated in a handful of national carriers. Then, in the summer of 2023, Yellow, the third-largest LTL carrier in the country, collapsed, taking roughly $5 billion in annual revenue and about 30,000 jobs off the board overnight. The survivors absorbed the freight and, at auction, bought up Yellow's terminals, making an already concentrated market more concentrated still. Analysts were blunt that this would be "supportive of continued LTL pricing power," and it has been, with contract renewals running well ahead of inflation. Fewer players controlling scarce network capacity is a recipe for pricing power. That is what the half-load premium largely is: an oligopoly rent collected on smaller freight, sitting on top of an oversupplied, price-taking truckload market.

What It Means for Canadian Shippers

The practical trap here is over-rotating. It is tempting to look at the numbers and conclude that breaking your freight into smaller LTL shipments is the clever move. Sometimes it genuinely is. But a price signal built on a capacity cycle and a temporary market structure is a shaky thing to redesign your supply chain around, especially since the truckload glut is already draining and will, eventually, swing the other way. A few principles worth holding on to:

How Keylink Reads the Half-Load Premium

Keylink is a BC-based, asset-based full truckload carrier built around Canada-US freight, so we live on the side of this market that the last four years punished. We are not neutral observers of the half-load premium; we have felt the truckload squeeze directly, in our own trucks, on our own lanes. That is exactly why we are wary of treating the current pricing as the new normal. The premium on smaller freight is real, and we will not pretend otherwise to a customer. But it rests on a capacity glut that is already clearing and a market structure that regulators and competitors are both watching, and neither of those is permanent.

What does not change is the underlying truth that a full, well-planned trailer is the most efficient way to move goods, and that efficiency is what protects a shipper's cost over the long run rather than the quarter. Our job is to price honestly through the cycle, to help customers consolidate into full loads when that genuinely serves them, and to be straight about when a partial or LTL move is the better call instead. A distorted market rewards the wrong behaviour for a while. A good carrier helps you avoid building your supply chain on the distortion. If your freight lives on Canada-US lanes, the months ahead are a good time to make sure the people moving it can tell you the difference between a real efficiency and a temporary one.

Sources and Further Reading