Cass Says the Longest Freight Downturn on Record Just Ended, and Truckload Rates Are Already Up 11%

The Cass Freight Index's shipments component rose 2.1% year over year in August, the first annual gain since January 2023 and the end of what Tim Denoyer, vice president and senior analyst at ACT Research, called the longest downturn on record for the index. Shipments also climbed 5.6% sequentially from July — 5.0% on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to Cass Information Systems' August Transportation Index Report.

Rates got there well ahead of volume. The report's Truckload Linehaul Index rose to 153.9, up 0.7% from July and 11.3% year over year — its 20th consecutive month of annual increases even while shipment counts were still shrinking. The expenditures index, which combines rate and volume, jumped 18.7% year over year to 3.722, its sharpest annual increase of the year.

Cass's index is built from more than $37 billion a year in freight bills the company processes on behalf of large shippers, giving it a genuinely bottom-up view of what companies are actually paying rather than a spot-market snapshot. That distinction matters here: a spot index can move on a handful of lanes tightening, but a 42-month streak of annual shipment declines reversing across a book that size points to something closer to an actual inflection than a seasonal blip.

Denoyer was careful not to oversell it. He attributed the strength to resilient economic growth even against a soft labor market, alongside early signs of inventory restocking among shippers who had been running lean. He flagged Class 8 tractor sales as a corroborating data point: fleet size expanded in August for the first time after 18 straight months of contraction, suggesting carriers are starting to add capacity back rather than simply raising prices into a fixed fleet. At the same time, he cautioned that risks from oil prices, inflation and interest rates could still slow the recovery, and that "modest freight growth" — not a sharp rebound — is the more likely path from here.

What this means for forwarders and brokers

A 42-month downturn ending is a headline. What a broker or forwarder actually needs to plan around are three narrower signals inside the same report.

Rate momentum predates volume momentum, again. Linehaul rates have now risen year over year for 20 straight months, well before shipment counts turned positive. That sequencing — carriers pricing in tightening before the freight actually shows up — has historically meant contract renewal season gets harder for shippers before the broader market data confirms why. Anyone with a truckload contract up for renewal in the next two quarters should expect carriers to point to this report, not just to spot boards, in rate discussions.

Capacity is starting to come back, which cuts both ways. Class 8 tractor sales turning positive after 18 months of fleet contraction is the first real evidence that carriers are willing to add trucks rather than just raise rates on the ones they have. That should eventually cool rate growth — but "eventually" in trucking capacity cycles has historically meant two to four quarters, not weeks. Shippers negotiating now are negotiating into the tight window before that capacity actually lands.

The expenditures jump is the number to watch on freight budgets. An 18.7% year-over-year rise in total freight spend, driven by both rate and volume moving up together, is a bigger line-item shift than the rate index alone suggests. Shippers building Q4 and 2027 freight budgets off trailing 12-month averages should sanity-check those assumptions against August's expenditures figure specifically, since it is now running well ahead of the shipment count alone.