How many freight brokers are there?

The short answer

On May 14, 2026, FMCSA’s licensing file showed 24,773 dockets with active property broker authority. Of those, 23,495 had a U.S. business address, 1,270 a Canadian one and 8 an address somewhere else. That date matters. It is the last complete national count in FMCSA’s open data: FMCSA stopped updating this file and moved to its new Motus system, and the public files give no complete count for any later date.

If you run a brokerage, read the number this way: there are about one fifth fewer licensed competitors than at the end of 2022, when the count reached 30,699. But the market is still larger than at any year-end before 2021, so the shake-out has not undone the boom.

The churn matters as much as the headline. Of the 8,569 brokers first granted authority in 2022, only 33.7% still held it on the second anniversary of that grant. For brokers first granted authority from 2000 to 2004, the same measure was 71.6%.

Retrieved November 1, 2026. Carrier, AuthHist and Revocation files: data as of May 14, 2026, when FMCSA stopped updating them. Motus files as updated October 31, 2026. Company Census as updated October 31, 2026.

Freight brokers by state

Texas (3,029), California (2,653), Florida (1,985) and Illinois (1,582) lead the count. Those four states hold 39.4% of all brokers with a U.S. address.

Nearly every state is below its 2022 level: 48 of the 52 places in the table. Among states with at least 300 brokers at the peak, Georgia fell hardest at 41.4%, then North Carolina (33.4%) and South Carolina (33.3%). New York fell least, at 9.0%.

Broker authority is national, so a state count shows where brokerages are based, not where their freight moves. A broker in Georgia can cover a lane in Washington. Use this table to size local competition for customers and staff, not to judge capacity on a lane.

State is the business address on file. Active brokers is the Carrier file on May 14, 2026. Change compares AuthHist counts on both dates, so each broker is measured the same way. Includes the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Canadian brokers with U.S. authority

The same file lists 1,270 dockets with a Canadian business address and active U.S. property broker authority, 5.1% of the total. Ontario has 696, Quebec has 237, British Columbia has 132 and Alberta has 100. These are companies holding U.S. authority. The file says nothing about brokers that work only inside Canada.

New broker authorities and revocations by year

From 2015 to 2019, FMCSA issued an average of 3,313 first-time property broker authorities a year. In 2021 and 2022 it issued 17,051, about 2.6 times that pace.

Then the direction turned. Revocations beat new authorities in 2023 (9,688 revoked against 6,181 new), 2024 (8,131 revoked against 3,830 new) and 2025 (5,243 revoked against 3,763 new). New authorities in 2025 were the lowest for any full year since 2017. From the end of 2022 to May 14, 2026, the active count fell by 6,001, or 19.5%. Anyone planning a brokerage should treat these last three years as the better guide, not the boom.

New authorities counts each docket once, in the year of its first grant. The 2026 row stops at May 14, 2026. The two-year figure needs a full cohort two years old, so 2023 is the latest year shown. The CSV goes back to 2000 and adds reinstatements.

How long do new freight brokers last?

Two years gives every new broker the same length of time, so one year’s brokers can be compared with another’s. For brokers first granted authority from 2000 to 2004, 71.6% still held it on their second anniversary. For 2014 to 2017 the figure was 51.3%. For 2021 to 2023 it was 37.2%, and 2022 was the lowest at 33.7%.

Losing authority is not the same as failing. A company may have merged, moved to another docket or chosen to stop. FMCSA’s revocation file shows 89.3% of 110,130 broker revocations as involuntary, but it does not record the reason.

Motus has started to record one. Of the 347 involuntary suspensions of property brokers it listed on October 31, 2026, 274 cite an insurance cancellation with no qualifying coverage on file, 44 a cancelled BOC-3 process agent filing and 27 both, and 2 give no detail. For a broker, the financial filing is the bond or trust fund, so paperwork lapses show up here as well as failed businesses.

Two practical points follow. If you are starting out, plan to keep your bond and process agent filing in place through the first two years, because in recent years most new authorities lapsed inside that window. If you buy or sell capacity through brokers, remember that 49.3% of active brokers got their first authority in 2020 or later, and check authority on the FMCSA record when you start working with one.

What the $75,000 bond did in 2013

The sharpest drop in this data lines up with a rule change, not a freight recession. FMCSA’s new $75,000 financial security minimum applied from October 1, 2013, with a 60-day phase-in and 30 days’ notice before revocation. In December 2013, 8,148 property broker authorities were revoked in a single month, equal to 37.8% of everyone active at the end of 2012.

The year-end count fell from 21,531 to 13,743 and did not pass its 2012 level again until 2020. The bond, now in 49 CFR 387.307, is still $75,000, and it is the reason a new broker needs a surety or trust arrangement before authority is issued.

What counts as a broker, and what active means

A broker on this page is a row in FMCSA’s Carrier file with BROKER_STAT = A and PROPERTY_CHK = Y. FMCSA’s data dictionary defines A as “Holds Active Authority”. Active here means the authority was in force on May 14, 2026. It does not mean the company was moving freight that day.

Each row is one docket, and the 24,773 dockets belong to 24,765 USDOT numbers.

• Left out: 285 active dockets flagged household goods only and 23 with neither flag, which is why the file’s 25,081 active brokers of all kinds becomes 24,773. Freight agents working under another company’s authority, and 3PLs with no broker authority, do not appear at all.
• Still counted: 598 dockets (2.4%) with BROKER_REV_PEND = Y, meaning in revocation but still active on that date, 110 where BOND_FILE did not show a bond on file, and 616 flagged for household goods as well as property.
• Brokers that also haul: 2,733 dockets (11.0%) also hold active common or contract carrier authority on the same docket.

For past dates we rebuild the count from AuthHist. A docket is active on a date if a GRANTED or REINSTATED row started by then and its final action had not been served. Tested on May 14, 2026, this method finds 24,698 dockets, and 24,656 of the Carrier file’s 24,773 (99.5%) appear in both.

Two FMCSA files that give the wrong count

Motus shows only part of the market

The Motus Carrier file listed 5,061 active property brokers on October 31, 2026, using OP_AUTH_TYPE = Broker of Property (Except Household Goods) and OP_AUTH_STATUS = Active. That looks like a 79.6% collapse. It is not one. 21,463 of the 24,773 brokers active on May 14, 2026 have no broker row in Motus at all. Because of that gap, we do not roll the May count forward: a missing docket may have changed in a way this file cannot show.

Motus does record new grants. It shows 130 in June, 169 in July, 323 in August, 264 in September, 394 in October, for 1,280 from June through October 31, 2026. Those come from a different system with a different docket rule, so they are not added to the table above.

The Census broker flag is not authority

The Company Census file marks operations in CARSHIP, where B means broker. On October 31, 2026, 124,796 records with STATUS_CODE = A carried that letter, about 5 times the 25,081 active brokers of all kinds in the May Carrier file. Only 23,215 of them (18.6%) match a USDOT number with active broker authority in the May file. Another 71,410 held broker authority that had gone inactive, and 30,171 have no broker authority record there (2,756 of those appear in Motus).

The dates differ by months, which cannot explain a gap that size. The cause is the definition: Census status means the entity is in business and subject to the regulations, not that it holds broker authority. Any broker count built on CARSHIP alone will overstate the market.

Download the data

Brokers by state and province (CSV) and authority by year from 2000 (CSV). Both hold counts only, with no company names, docket numbers or contact details. You may reuse them under CC BY 4.0 with credit to TruckPayPro and FMCSA.

Some limits apply. The data has no loads, revenue or staff numbers, so it cannot size a brokerage or measure freight brokered. State is the address on file now, so a broker that moved counts in its new state on both dates. Source records are as FMCSA holds them: we set aside 425 grant or reinstatement rows with no date, 31 final actions with no date and 5 dated in the year 2517.

FMCSA states that its datasets are snapshots provided for information, and it has not reviewed these counts. TruckPayPro compiled them from its public files.