From the desk of Reid Stack:
Through September, we tracked more than 320 North American transportation and logistics transactions, roughly 14% ahead of last year’s pace, and the pace held in every quarter of the year. It held through a quarter in which diesel set records and public truckload and LTL valuations gave back roughly a fifth of their June highs. Two sets of investors read the same quarter and reached different conclusions.
Public investors were pricing the next two quarters, and the third quarter gave them reason to be cautious. On comparable rate increases, some carriers converted most of the gain to margin while others surrendered it to fuel, driver retention, and insurance reserves. Only the fuel portion should unwind on its own once diesel stabilizes. Private buyers are pricing the contract book. Net of fuel, spot rates have eased since midsummer while one-way contract rates kept rising. The reset now runs through the bid table, where carriers are signaling double-digit asks for the 2027 cycle and outside forecasts start in the mid-single digits. Public forward valuations still assume that reset. Private buyers are acting on it.
But where they’re deploying capital is just as revealing as how much they’re investing. The fastest-growing part of the freight economy this year sits one step removed from freight: truck dealerships, leasing, and maintenance networks, which earn on fleet age rather than load price and stand directly in front of the 2027 replacement cycle. Technology ran well ahead of last year, concentrated in transportation management, telematics, and safety software, the tools that make a smaller fleet and stricter liability standard workable. However, it slowed to last year’s pace in the third quarter. Carrier deals dipped in the spring and recovered in the third quarter, almost entirely to operators rather than financial buyers. Forwarding and customs moved the other way, with the steepest decline among the major business models, as trade policy remains unsettled.
Most of the activity is private, undisclosed, and below the size that drives large-deal tallies, which show fewer, bigger deals. Where terms were disclosed, earnouts, rollovers, and retained stakes recurred. In July, I noted that the largest private checks were chasing contracted revenue, dedicated capacity among it. The third quarter refined that preference: dedicated trailed one-way contract freight on margin for the first time in years, because it reprices at renewal and drivers are repricing now. For brokers, the summer spot spike was the preview: the 2027 carrier ask is purchased cost unless shipper contracts reprice in step. Sponsors are buying brokerage anyway, and more often than a year ago, betting shipper contracts will catch up. Small-carrier bankruptcies, steady since late summer, transfer freight to scaled survivors, not businesses to buyers.
For owners, the public tape is not the benchmark this winter; the contract book is. Contracts repriced this fall are a run-rate adjustment, payable in cash; the open 2027 bids belong in the earnout, where a seller should negotiate hardest. The exhibits are the award letters, the escalator clauses, and a cost bridge that starts with driver or carrier pay. The question has moved from how far rates rose to how much of the next contract cycle the business can keep.
Owners who want a confidential read on how a buyer would value both the contracts already repriced and the bids still open can reach out to us directly.
