# Buying a Trucking Company

What small carriers sell for, why the federal authority may not survive an asset purchase, and the safety record that prices the insurance.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/guides/buying-a-trucking-company
Last checked: 2026-10-03

## First, the Authority Question

A carrier runs on federal registrations, and they do not behave like assets. The regulator's own answer is that a USDOT number may not be sold or transferred. What survives a sale therefore depends entirely on structure. Buy the shares of the company that holds the number and the number stays, because the company is a separate legal person from its owner. Buy the assets into a new entity and that entity needs its own USDOT number and re-enters eighteen months of new-entrant monitoring, and the authority moves only if the regulator records a transfer. Neither is wrong. The difference is months of runway and a compliance status the seller had already discharged, so settle which one the price assumes before anything else.

## Why Searchers Look at Small Carriers

Freight is bought by businesses on standing terms, not by consumers on impulse, the customer list is knowable, and the assets are financeable in a way a service book never is. The trade is also genuinely fragmented and genuinely old: the median driver is closer to retirement than to a first job, and the owner who dispatches, sells and drives is the norm. What a buyer is really acquiring is a lane book and the people who run it. The thesis that works is boring, which is dedicated freight on contract instead of spot loads bought off a board at whatever the week pays.

## What Trucking Companies Trade For

Sold trucking companies on the marketplace that publishes them ran between 2.29x and 3.56x [SDE](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/sde) across 2021 to 2025, with a 2.96x median, on a $1,137,500 median sale price and $400,000 of median owner earnings. [Revenue multiples](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/gross-revenue-multiple) run 0.39x to 0.86x. Read the table and not the page's own summary sentence, which quotes 2.35x to 3.75x, a band neither of its quartile tables prints. Days on market run to a 203-day median, which is long, and a business at this median carries real equipment and a real driver payroll, not an owner and one truck.

## The Safety Record Prices the Insurance

The federal safety system scores two years of roadside inspections and crashes into seven categories and ranks carriers by percentile inside each. A poor score raises the insurance quote and closes shipper doors, and at the extreme it ends the business: a carrier whose proposed unsatisfactory rating becomes final is prohibited from operating and its authority is revoked. Insurance is the cost line that decides most deals at this size, against a federal floor of $750,000 for general freight. The number to get is the seller's own complete profile, because the public view of a freight carrier's percentiles was closed by statute.

## What to Verify in Diligence

The record to assemble before the offer holds:

## Financeability Notes

The loan program names this trade directly: a lender must verify the borrower's USDOT number in the federal safety system, so a suspended registration is a financing problem before it is an operating one. The fleet is collateral and heavily discounted, counted at half of net book value or eighty percent with an [orderly liquidation appraisal](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/orderly-liquidation-appraisal), which is worth commissioning when trucks are most of the [balance sheet](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/balance-sheet). Vehicles under twenty thousand dollars need no lien at all. Service bays, truck washing or fuel tanks put the trade on the environmental investigation list, so an owned yard adds a step.

## Terms in This Industry

- **Commercial driver's license (CDL)**: The license class a driver needs for a heavy vehicle, graded by weight, passengers, and hazmat cargo. It is the constraint on every fleet of heavy trucks or of buses seating sixteen or more. It is also slower to replace than a payroll line suggests: entry-level training from a federally registered provider now gates the skills test, so a driver is a matter of months instead of a week. In diligence the roster is the capacity statement, and the credential detail matters as much as the count: an endorsement for passengers, a school bus, or hazardous materials is a separate test and a separate pool of people.
- **Backhaul**: A load found for the return leg, so the truck is not driving home empty. Revenue per mile is the number that decides whether a lane is worth running, and the return leg is where it is won or lost. A carrier with a dense enough customer base to fill the way back earns twice on the same fuel and the same driver hours; one without it is paying for half its miles. Ask for loaded miles against total miles by lane instead of for a revenue figure, because a strong revenue number on a poor backhaul ratio is a business that cannot grow without getting worse.
- **Drug and alcohol clearinghouse**: The federal database of driver testing violations that an employer must query. A driver with an unresolved violation in it is prohibited from safety-sensitive work, which means a truck without a driver. An employer has to run a query before hiring and annually after, so the seller's compliance with that is a document a buyer can ask for and a gap a buyer inherits. Ask for the annual query records alongside the driver roster: a fleet that cannot produce them has either not run them or has drivers it should not be running.
- **Electronic logging device**: The recorder that captures driving hours automatically instead of on paper. It is the evidence behind the hours-of-service record, and its data is what a roadside inspection and an audit both read. For a buyer the useful thing is that the history is not editable in the way a paper log was: pull the violation summary out of the system rather than asking how compliance has been, because the answer is already recorded. Persistent violations show up in the safety percentiles that price the insurance.
- **Dedicated freight**: Contracted lanes run for one shipper on a schedule, not loads bought off a board. It is the difference between a business and a bet. Dedicated work prices lower per mile and holds through a soft freight market, while spot loads bought off a load board pay well in a strong one and vanish in a weak one, taking the year with them. A book that is mostly spot has revenue a buyer cannot underwrite, and a lender reads it the same way. Ask for the split by month across three years, because a single strong quarter of spot work will otherwise carry the whole trailing twelve months.
- **Operating authority (MC number)**: The federal permission to haul for hire, held separately from the USDOT number that identifies you. Two registrations, and they behave differently in a sale. The regulator says plainly that a USDOT number may not be sold or transferred, while operating authority can sometimes be recorded as transferred inside a corporate transaction. That difference is the whole structure question: buy the company and both survive with it, buy the assets into a new entity and that entity needs its own USDOT number, with the authority transferred only where the same safety management carries on. Ask which the asking price assumes before reading a single tax return, because the answer is months of runway.
- **BASIC percentile**: The monthly ranking a carrier holds inside one of seven federal safety categories. It is the number an insurer quotes against and the number a shipper screens on, and for a freight carrier it is not public. Federal law removed property carriers' percentiles from public display, so the only complete view is the one the seller pulls from its own logged-in profile. A seller who will not show it is withholding the figure that prices the deal. Passenger carriers are still public, which is worth knowing if the target runs any charter work.
- **New entrant status**: The eighteen-month monitoring window a newly registered carrier operates inside. A carrier that has been running for years has discharged it. A new entity formed to buy the assets has not, so an asset structure quietly imports a compliance burden the target had already finished, along with the safety audit that ends it. It changes what the first eighteen months of ownership cost in attention, not in cash, which is exactly the kind of item that never appears in a broker's package and always appears in the first quarter.

## What the Data Says

- Trucking companies sold on BizBuySell from 2021 through 2025 changed hands between 2.29x and 3.56x SDE, with a 2.96x median and a 3.00x average. The same BizBuySell series shows a $1,137,500 median sale price, $1,954,881 of median revenue and $400,000 of median owner earnings, with revenue multiples of 0.39x to 0.86x. The same page's summary sentence quotes 2.35x to 3.75x, which neither its sold nor its asking quartiles print; the sold table is the one to read. (BizBuySell trucking benchmarks (sold listings, 2021-2025): https://www.bizbuysell.com/learning-center/valuation-benchmarks/trucking-company/)
- The federal regulator states that USDOT numbers are not transferable, and that where a corporation is sold the number goes with the corporation because it is a separate legal person from its owner. Where a new entity is formed, it says a transfer of operating authority may be recorded or new authority may be required, and it records a transfer only if operations continue under the same safety management oversight and controls. (FMCSA, registration and operating authority guidance: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/faq/can-i-sell-my-usdot-or-mc-ie-operating-authority)
- Federal projections put employment of heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers up 4% from 2025 to 2035 with about 214,500 openings a year against 2,221,200 jobs, at a $58,640 median wage in May 2025. Almost all of those openings replace people leaving the occupation, which is the shape of the constraint a buyer inherits. (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers (2025-35 projections, May 2025 wages): https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm)

## Who Else Is Buying in This Industry

- Kenan Advantage Group (North Canton, Ohio): North America's largest tank truck and dry bulk carrier, which grows by buying regional liquid and dry bulk haulers and folding their terminals into its own network. Newest here: Fisher Transport · 2025 · Nova Scotia liquid bulk hauler moving raw milk, the firm's Canadian arm buying locally. 7 more confirmed on its profile. (https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/kenan-advantage-group)
- Heniff Transportation Systems (Oak Brook, Illinois): A bulk chemical and food-grade tank truck operator that buys regional tank carriers and tank-wash operations into what it calls its family of companies, naming each seller on its own newsroom. Newest here: TechnoPort · 2024 · Netherlands ISO tank services provider, the firm's move outside North America. 2 more confirmed on its profile. (https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/heniff-transportation)
- Alterna Equity Partners (Fort Lauderdale, Florida): A South Florida lower-middle-market private equity firm whose transportation platform hauls waste, aggregates and construction debris long-haul, built by buying family-owned carriers and adding to them. Newest here: Attaway Hauling and Choice Bulk Carriers · 2023 · Gordon, Georgia long-haul waste transport and regional bulk carrier, about 200 trucks combined. 1 more confirmed on its profile. (https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/alterna-equity-partners)

## What It Costs to Replace the Owner

The multiples are quoted on SDE, which adds the owner's pay back into earnings, so they hold only if you do the owner's job. For this trade the replacement is usually the manager who runs a fleet or a facility, paid a median of $107,230 a year nationally; at a 3x multiple that wage takes about $321,690 off what the business is worth to you. Transportation, storage, and distribution managers, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (2025), national, all industries, before payroll taxes and benefits (https://searchspheresource.com/data/manager-wages).

## The Numbers That Run This Business

- Contract freight share against spot loads off a board
- Safety percentiles, from the seller's own logged-in profile
- Insurance loss runs and the renewal quote in hand
- Driver tenure, pay, and two years of turnover
- Fleet age against the replacement schedule

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt