Between late August and September 21, at least 16 trucking, delivery, and transportation companies entered bankruptcy proceedings across the United States, according to federal court filings and carrier records reviewed by FreightWaves. They ranged from single-truck owner-operators to fleets running dozens of tractors. Some filed Chapter 11, hoping to reorganize. Several smaller carriers filed Chapter 7, which usually means liquidation, the end of the road. This is a case study in what happens when the cost of moving goods rises faster than the price anyone will pay to move them.
Start with two of the Chapter 11 filings, because they show this is not only a story about tiny operators. Xoco Transport, based in Hidalgo, Texas, filed for Chapter 11 on September 16. Court filings indicate the carrier runs more than 40 tractors, 65 drivers, and 70 trailers. A day earlier, Globemaster Inc., a long-haul carrier out of Bolingbrook, Illinois, filed for Chapter 11 in the Northern District of Illinois. The company operates 51 power units and logged roughly 3.3 million annual miles, and it reported assets of $500,000 to $1 million against liabilities of $1 million to $10 million. These are not fly-by-night outfits. They are mid-sized businesses with payrolls, and the math stopped working for them anyway.
The Chapter 11 list also includes Jett Transport & Materials, CLJ Transporting (an Amazon Delivery Service Partner), Mill Creek Logistics-Illinois, RP Hay Hauling, Truckload LLC, and Pacer Transport. The Chapter 7 filings read like a map of the country’s small-carrier heartland: A&B Transportation of Lake Elsinore, California; T Yorkman Trucking of Midland, Texas; Blue Star Transports of Garland, Texas; and Jackdollars Transport of McKinney, Texas, a one-truck carrier being wiped out entirely. In California, Eulogia Logistics of Hacienda Heights and Rothchild Transportation of South Gate filed Chapter 7, as did Illinois’ C. Pride Transport (TheStreet, digitaltradinglab.com).
So what broke them? Diesel is the headline, but it is not the whole story. The national on-highway diesel average set a new record near $6.53 a gallon in the latest weekly Energy Information Administration data (The Road Warrior Brief, citing EIA), and earlier in September it hit $6.29, a staggering 68.1% increase from $3.74 just one year ago (Road Warrior Entrepreneurs). “You’ve got diesel prices almost at double what they were a year ago,” Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, told Transport Topics. He drew a line that matters enormously: large contract carriers are somewhat insulated from diesel prices, but small spot-market carriers are, in his words, enduring an “existential crisis” because of limited cash flow and an inability to add fuel surcharges.
Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told Transport Topics the country is in “a troubling crude oil supply situation, the worst it’s been since several months ago.” That supply pressure is one reason this feels different from a normal downturn. It is not only that fuel is expensive. It is that everything else is expensive too. The industry-average cost to operate a truck reached $2.336 per mile in 2025, the highest per-mile cost ever recorded by the American Transportation Research Institute, with tolls up 13.2%, repair costs up 8.6%, driver benefits up 6.6%, and tire costs up 6.4%. When your margin per mile was thin in the good times, there is no room left when every line item rises at once.
Here is the part of the case study that deserves the most attention, because it is the part most people miss. The recent filings do not prove that diesel prices caused each individual bankruptcy. Some of these companies may have been struggling for years. What the filings do prove is how little financial room smaller carriers have left as operating costs rise. A big contract carrier can negotiate fuel surcharges into its rates and smooth costs across thousands of trucks. An owner-operator with one truck in McKinney, Texas, takes the spot-market rate that is offered and pays the pump price that is posted, and when those two numbers cross in the wrong direction, the business does not have a cushion. It has a choice.
Carriers have already executed their largest freight capacity reduction since the 2022 freight recession, cutting truck counts by 2.4%, with more parked trucks sitting unseated. In the short run, less capacity should eventually push rates back up, which is how the cycle is supposed to heal. In the meantime, the healing comes at a cost that lands on all of us: fewer trucks and drivers can mean packages arriving later and thinner store inventories, and the cost of moving what remains gets passed along. Diesel at record prices is not just a trucking story. It is a grocery story, a construction story, and a small-town hardware store story, because nearly everything you buy rode a truck to get to you.
My take, labeled as such: watch the small carriers, not the big ones. When the one-truck operators start liquidating, it means the price of moving goods has outrun what the market will pay, and that gap eventually shows up in your wallet. The companies that survive this will be the ones that hedged fuel, kept debt low, and had cash for the bad months. That is a lesson for a trucking company, but it is also a lesson for a household. Cash is not cowardice in a 5% world. It is the difference between reorganizing and liquidating.
