Quick summary
- Average truck age rose to 3.6 years in 2025; fleets held onto equipment rather than pay tariff-inflated new-truck prices.
- That deferral is showing up in a different line item: repair and maintenance costs jumped 8.6% to a record $0.215 per mile, and miles between breakdowns fell.
- A 2027 NOx pre-buy wave is already pulling new-truck orders forward, narrowing the window to keep deferring without paying more for it later.
What Does ATRI’s Operational Costs Report Mean For Fleets?
When I owned a fleet, I was constantly considering whether to keep running the equipment we had or pay today’s ugly price for new equipment. ATRI’s Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update shows that in 2025, most of the industry chose to wait.
Believe me, I know that when the freight market gives you no cover to eat the cost, it’s really hard to invest in new equipment. But ATRI’s numbers show that waiting to upgrade equipment is costing fleets in 2026, and what’s coming next will make it even more expensive to keep waiting.
Average Truck Age Rose For The First Time Since 2022
The average truck age climbed to 3.6 years in 2025, which is the first increase since 2022, as fleets held off on new-truck purchases at today’s prices. On the surface, that’s reasonable capital discipline: nobody wants to take on a truck payment this expensive if they can avoid it. Unfortunately, holding onto older equipment doesn’t make that cost disappear; it just moves it to another part of the P&L.
The Deferred Truck Payment Landed in the Shop
Repair and maintenance (R&M) costs jumped 8.6% in 2025 to a record $0.215 per mile, and that increases even more as trucks age. The dollars fleets didn’t spend on new trucks are turning up on repair invoices instead. Miles between breakdowns fell from 38,249 to 36,891, even as trucks ran more miles per year: average annual mileage hit 85,991, up from 82,677. Older equipment, driven harder, breaks more often.
A separate quarterly analysis from ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council and Decisiv found labor costs easing slightly, down 0.4% YOY in the fourth quarter, while parts costs climbed 3.7% over the same stretch. The steepest increases were concentrated in specific components: rear axles rose 20.6%, and wheels, hubs, and bearings rose 15.5%, both squeezed by tariffs on imported parts and the metals used to manufacture them domestically.
Fleets Are Already Shifting More Repairs In-House
Nearly two-thirds of R&M, 64.4%, was done in-house in 2025, up more than four points from the year before, and it’s not hard to see why. In-house labor costs less than what outside shops charge, and outside parts markups keep climbing on top of that. If your shop has room to absorb more of this work, this is the year to use it: that cost gap between doing it yourself and paying someone else won’t stay this wide forever.
The Window For Waiting To Purchase Trucks Is Closing
Class 8 orders picked up again in the second quarter of 2026, a good chunk of it pre-buy activity ahead of the 2027 NOx regulations. Nobody knows yet how many of those orders turn into real deliveries versus being deferred or canceled, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who’s been through the buying cycle before: demand pulls forward, and prices follow. ATA estimates tariffs could add up to $35,000 to the price of a new truck. Stack a NOx pre-buy rush on top of that, and the gap between buying now and buying later keeps growing.
The Bet Every Fleet Is Making by Waiting
Every fleet deferring replacement is making the bet that climbing repair costs will stay cheaper than a new truck, even after pre-buy demand pushes prices higher.
I made this same bet with my own trucks years ago, and here’s what I’d tell you now: holding onto older equipment is a good call when the freight market gives you no cover to spend, but that only lasts so long. Eventually, those deferred new-equipment payments are used for R&M.
The trucks you’re running right now still have to get you through, however long you decide to wait. Cutting engine hours you don’t need slows the wear that’s driving those R&M numbers up, and keeping a truck from no-starting keeps it out of the shop instead of adding to that invoice total.
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