A record shortage of truck drivers is now throttling the world’s trade, and this time it will not fix itself when the economy turns.
Umberto de Pretto, who runs the International Road Transport Union (IRU), delivered a grim tally this year: 2.9 million lorry-driving jobs standing empty across 18 markets, 11 per cent of the workforce and the highest the group had recorded. The number had not fallen even as freight demand cooled. The shortage had “deepened as a critical structural issue”, de Pretto said, and was dragging on transport capacity and supply-chain reliability.
Florence Le Guade, a research specialist at the union, dated the break to 2022 and 2023, when EU freight volumes slid but the driver shortage refused to ease with them. Two-thirds of European hauliers told the survey they had turned down contracts because they could not crew their trucks, and 65 per cent called the shortage their biggest worry, four times the share naming anything else. That left Europe with 502,000 empty cabs, a vacancy rate of 13 per cent, among the steepest in the study.
De Pretto had flagged the deeper trouble earlier, warning in April 2025 of an “ever-widening chasm” between younger drivers and old. Around a fifth of Europe’s drivers, and 24 per cent of Australia’s, are due to retire within five years, with Germany, Italy, Slovakia and Spain looking most exposed. Across the Atlantic the median trucker is now 57, by the count of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), which pegged the domestic shortfall at 82,000 for 2026.
In May 2025 FreightWaves, a freight-news site, dismissed the American version as a myth, pointing out that 35,000 trucking firms had gone under in 2023, a collapse of loads rather than of drivers. Yellow, a haulier with 25,000 drivers, had folded that year for want of freight, not people. The IRU’s own numbers complicate the pay theory, though: it found driver salaries running 30 to 135 per cent above the local cost of living, which suggests wages are not the main deterrent.
Trucking on
In October 2025 MEPs voted to cut the minimum age for a truck licence from 21 to 18, provided the driver holds a certificate of professional competence, and to let 17-year-olds drive accompanied. Raluca Marian, the IRU’s EU director, said the vote had “turned this reform into EU law”. The transport commissioner, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, cast it as a road-safety measure as much as a hiring one. Member states have until November 2028 to write it into national law.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) went the other way. From March 2026 it restricted non-domiciled commercial licences to holders of a narrow set of work visas, a change reaching some 200,000 drivers, roughly five per cent of American licences. J.B. Hunt, a large carrier, reckoned 97 per cent of them would fail the new test and leave within one to three years. An April 2025 order from President Donald Trump had already put drivers who could not read English road signs out of service. The clampdown came just as the ATA declared America back in shortage for the first time in four years.
At a transport forum in Tashkent in November 2025, de Pretto noted that the industry was again working out how to revive the old Silk Road routes. Uzbekistan carried the worst shortage of all 18 markets, at 15 per cent, though not because its drivers were greying: freight was simply outrunning the people to move it. Trans-Caspian traffic on the Middle Corridor had grown nearly fivefold since 2021, from under one million tonnes to around five million, and was forecast to triple again by 2030.
De Pretto’s prescription was blunt: the trade had to make driving “a career that people can enter, build and remain in”, not merely advertise harder. Women account for just four per cent of Europe’s truck drivers, and the report found their ranks had swelled only where governments and firms ran schemes together, as in Finland, the Netherlands and Türkiye. Around 660,000 European drivers are due to retire by 2030, and the licence change will not put a single 18-year-old behind a wheel until member states rewrite their laws, a job they need not finish before November 2028.
Photo: Dreamstime.