Industry Data
81% of the Brokers Who Boomed During COVID Are Gone
Cohort survival analysis of every FMCSA broker authority granted 2014–2022. The 2021 entrants had a 19% survival rate. The 2014 entrants had 77%. The boom killed brokers, not carriers — and the total count obscures the meat grinder underneath.
If you joined the broker side of trucking in 2021, you had a 19% chance of still being in business in 2026.
Not 50%. Not “tough but most survived.” Nineteen percent.
Compare that to brokers who got their authority in 2014 — the boring, pre-pandemic year nobody writes about. Those folks had a 77% survival rate through 2026. The brokers who came in during the boom died off at four times the rate of the brokers who came in before it.
The chart that tells the whole story
FMCSA’s AuthHist records every grant and revocation event with a date. Cross-referencing the first-broker-authority-grant date for every DOT against whether they still have active broker authority today, by cohort year:
| First broker authority year | New brokers that year | % still active in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2,315 | 77% |
| 2015 | 2,502 | 69% |
| 2016 | 2,711 | 67% |
| 2017 | 3,072 | 62% |
| 2018 | 3,881 | 57% |
| 2019 | 4,413 | 51% |
| 2020 | 5,728 | 36% |
| 2021 (peak) | 8,546 | 19% |
| 2022 (Jan–Feb) | 1,288 | 18% |
Two things to notice.
First, the size column: 2021 produced almost four times more new brokers than 2014. The boom is real and visible.
Second, the survival column: it’s monotonic. Every year deeper into the boom died faster than the year before. There’s no inflection where things stabilize — it just keeps degrading until you hit 2021 and 81% of the entrants are gone.
Why the total broker count looks “flat” — but isn’t
Here’s the trick: in February 2022, FMCSA had 24,751 active brokers. Today, it has 25,027. A casual observer concludes the broker market is stable — even healthy.
They are wrong.
Of the 24,751 brokers active in 2022:
- 12,252 still have active broker authority today. That’s 49.5%.
- 12,366 had their broker authority revoked or withdrawn. That’s 50%.
- 133 are gone from the database entirely.
Half the brokers in the industry got purged in four years. The market replaced them with new entrants. The total count happened to land near where it started, because every dying broker generation gets replaced by a smaller-but-still-massive new one. It’s not stability. It’s a meat grinder running at steady state.
Why this happened
The 2021 cohort came in during $3+/mile spot rates. They didn’t need experience, capital, or even a real office — just an MC number and a laptop. They thrived in a market that handed them margins they couldn’t actually earn.
When rates collapsed in 2023, the people who got in late had no buffer, no shipper relationships built before the boom, and no skills besides covering loads at boom prices. Half of them — the operators with even a year of slack and any existing customer base — survived. The other half got eaten.
This is the part that doesn’t get said in trade press: the boom didn’t produce a generation of new brokers; it produced a generation of people who briefly held broker authority. They were never functioning brokerages. They were freight middlemen during the only period when freight middlemen could exist without skill.
Why this isn’t the same story as carriers
Run the same analysis on the carrier side and the surprise reverses. Carriers granted authority in 2021 — the same boom-cohort year — had a 71% survival rate, basically identical to carriers granted in 2014 (74%). Walk every year and the carrier survival rate barely moves. There’s no cliff. There’s no monotonic decline. It’s a flat line.
Trucks survived the boom-bust because they had to. The capital was already spent. Brokers didn’t survive because there was nothing to anchor them — when the rate environment changed, walking away was free.
If you want a single sentence that explains 2020–2024 in trucking, it’s: the boom killed brokers, not carriers. The industry talks about it as one event because the rates moved together. Underneath, two different things happened to two different populations.
What this means going forward
Three implications worth chewing on:
- Broker count stability is misleading. Every year, half the broker market churns over. Don’t read 25K active brokers today as the same 25K from 2022.
- Carrier “survival” stories are the wrong lens. Carriers are durable because their assets force them to be. The interesting carrier metric isn’t survival — it’s fleet-size change, where the actual restructuring shows up.
- The next boom-bust will probably look the same. It will produce a fresh cohort of one-year brokers who get washed out the next time rates compress. The industry chronically over-produces broker entrants during good years, and the data backs that up over and over.
Receipts: All numbers in this piece are pulled from FMCSA data — specifically a 2022-02-26 SAFER Web snapshot reconciled with current FMCSA Carrier table authority status, joined on USDOT. Cohort definitions use AuthHist first-grant dates by docket. Methodology and queries available on request.