Private fleets still care about efficiency, but their top priorities are changing, and assured capacity, supply chain control, uptime and service reliability are taking on greater importance.
“Companies are building resiliency in kind of these crazy and unpredictable economic times that we live in, in a number of ways, and strengthening the private fleet is certainly one of those,” said Tom Moore, executive vice president of the National Private Truck Council (NPTC). “Companies are using private fleets to achieve better control over the supply chain and take a greater share of freight.”
Moore shared his comments during a press conference releasing NPTC’s 2026 Benchmarking Survey. He spoke along with Tim Eckhardt, senior director of safety for Dot Transportation, Kevin Mattimore, senior vice president of sales for Penske Truck Leasing, Marley Bebout, director of outbound transportation and customer satisfaction for AutoZone, and Gary Petty, NPTC president and CEO.
Eckhardt said greater control helps fleets improve outcomes. “The more we can control our supply chain, the more we can control our service level, the more we can control our cost, and just the overall efficiency. That’s where the benefit is to us,” he added.
Control Moves Up the List
Improving customer service remains the top reason companies operate a private fleet, cited by 85% of respondents, which is down slightly from 89% last year. However, enhancing control over the supply chain was the second most cited reason, listed by 73% of respondents, up 14 percentage points from in the previous survey.
The more traditional efficiency-focused reasons slipped. Controlling transportation costs dropped eight percentage points to 66%, and providing a hedge against for-hire costs and capacity also dropped eight points to 65%.
Private fleets showed that they are actively focused on gaining more control of their overall supply chain. They handled 72% of outbound freight, up from 70% in the last survey and the second-highest share in the history of the survey. For most of the survey’s history, private fleets handled about 67% of outbound moves.
During the height of the pandemic, private fleets couldn't get service from outside carriers, and if they could, “they paid dearly for it,” Moore said. "As a result, many of our fleets increased their private fleet share of that, growing their fleet, their driver pool to serve as a hedge against that outside carrier capacity."
On the inbound side, private fleets handled 42% of freight movements, the second-highest level in the survey’s history. Vendors, many of whom run their own fleets, handled another 22%. The report also found that 76% of respondents use their private fleet as leverage against for-hire carriers, a record high.
The Supply Chain Comes First
In some cases, fleets are accepting less-than-optimal fleet efficiency to protect the broader supply chain. “Sometimes I think that our members actually look at the supply chain first and then optimize their private fleet second because sometimes you might have to run half of a trailer load just to satisfy the supply chain that suboptimizes the private fleet,” Moore said.
The need to support the overall supply chain also affects how fleets approach backhauls. While 71% of respondents hold for-hire authority, only 21% actively solicit or haul backhauls, and 93% said they give company freight priority over outside freight. According to the report, which is sponsored by Penske, many fleet managers would rather get trucks home to load their own product than chase backhauls that may not fit their operations.
The report also found that rather than keeping only the easiest freight and outsourcing the rest, private fleets are increasingly choosing to serve harder-to-reach customers themselves.
Uptime and Predictability Matter More
Keeping trucks on the road is also part of fleets’ broader focus on resilience. The share of fleets with PM currency rates of 95% or higher reached an all-time high of 77%.
Many fleets are turning to leasing for predictability. This year, 42% of fleets said they lease most of their heavy-duty power units, up from 28% over the previous two years, and 80% of those leases are full-service. Another 24% use a combination of ownership and leasing.
Kevin Mattimore, senior vice president of sales at Penske Truck Leasing, said the survey results reflect what Penske is hearing from customers. “Private fleets continue to emphasize control, as we talked about earlier, along with safety, fleet technology, uptime and flexible growth,” he said. “That’s where a full-service lease comes in perfectly.”
Mattimore said some fleets are converting from ownership to leasing, typically to increase reliability and cost visibility and reduce disruptions. “They’re trying to keep that freight flowing through the network with the least amount of disruption,” he explained. “We're going to give a customer a predictable budget from that five- to seven- and sometimes eight-year life cycle that we're presenting."
Moore noted that an important part of fleets’ strategy is to become more diverse in terms of the equipment we're operating. “The other strategy here is to kind of wrap the right kind of equipment around those loads, and I think we're becoming more diverse in times in terms of the equipment we're operating,” he said.
Demand for day cabs has continued to increase, Mattimore said. This is the first year the report tracked the buying habits of Class 8 equipment and found that 69% of units purchased are day cabs, while the remaining 31% are sleepers.
Plans To Expand
The report found that private fleets continue to function as a flexible strategic asset and a valuable link in the supply chain, giving companies control over logistics costs and service.
“In addition, in an era where supply chain shortages manifested themselves internally, the private fleet provides flexibility to better control the supply chain and satisfy customer demand— safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively,” the survey stated.
As a result, private fleets are expected to continue increasing, and 71% of respondents expect to add equipment or handle more of their company’s freight within the next five years, while only 9% expect to shrink.