Truck Dispatch Statistics: Every Study (MIT, ATRI, OIG)

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The single best-sourced number about a freight dispatch desk is this one: in an MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics study of a mid-sized US carrier, one dispatcher managed an average of roughly 28 drivers, and those drivers used only 60% of their legal 11-hour driving window. The dataset behind it was 1,017,346 hours-of-service lines resolving to 621 drivers and 21 dispatchers. Almost every other figure the logistics software industry quotes about dispatch call volume - calls per load, the share of a dispatcher's day spent on the phone, the after-hours enquiry split - has no published study behind it at all. This page gives every dispatch, detention and driver statistic we could trace to a named source with a disclosed sample, and says plainly where the data does not exist.

Dispatch call volume is the number of voice contacts a freight operation handles per driver, per load or per day - carrier and driver check-ins, dock appointment changes, ETA updates, proof-of-delivery chases and inbound load enquiries. It is the metric the logistics software industry quotes most often and measures least. The figures below are ordered from the best-evidenced to the least, and each carries its sample size, its year and its confidence level.

How many drivers does one dispatcher manage?

Roughly 28, in the only research-grade study that discloses its sample. The figure comes from Goldilocks and the Three Dispatchers: Quantifying the Impact of Dispatcher Management on Truck Driver Performance, a May 2021 MIT Supply Chain Management capstone by Danielle E. Procter and Paulo Sergio F. de Sousa Junior, advised by Dr. David Correll at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Its exact wording is: "the average team size is roughly 28 drivers." (source: MIT DSpace, PDF)

What the study actually measured

The authors took six months of ELD and TMS data from a mid-sized US carrier and ran it through regression and clustering models to see which dispatcher-controlled variables moved driver performance. Their summary: dispatchers "have at least three managerial levers that can be used to improve fleet performance, including the weekday a driver works, the equality of distribution of freight plans, and the size of the team a dispatcher manages."

Why 28 is the number that matters for phone traffic

Every driver on a dispatcher's board is a potential inbound call, and every load on that board is a potential outbound one. Twenty-eight is therefore the honest denominator for any conversation about dispatch call load - and it is the number to use instead of the invented per-load call figures examined in the next section. It is also the number that sets the ceiling on attention: a dispatcher with 28 drivers cannot give each of them a dedicated line.

The 60% window, and the 25-29 dip

• Drivers used 60% of the 11-hour window. The study's wording: "The drivers in the final dataset had a range of 65%, from a minimum utilization of 15% to a maximum of 80%. The mean performance was 60%, or 6.6 hours." source
• Utilisation was worst at team sizes of 25-29. "utilization is mostly flat across all team sizes with a noticeable dip in performance in team sizes of 25-29. Here, the utilization is only 47% (5.17 hours), 22% below the average performance of 60%." Those teams also averaged 268 miles per day on duty against 356 for other team sizes. This is what one carrier's data showed. It is not a proven causal law, and the study does not claim it is. source
• Twelve minutes. The same MIT study reports that Correll's earlier work "estimates that just an additional 12 minutes of driving per day could have counteracted the existing driver shortage at the time." This is a secondary citation - the underlying 2019 paper is quoted by the capstone, not read here - so treat it as the MIT authors' characterisation rather than as a primary figure.

How many dispatch or check calls does one load generate?

Nobody has published a defensible number. This is the most-quoted statistic in dispatch software marketing and the least evidenced. We looked for a research-grade figure for check calls per load, for dispatch calls per driver per day, and for the share of a dispatcher's working day spent on the phone. There is no study, no disclosed sample and no published method behind any of the figures currently in circulation.

What we found instead, and what it is worth:

There is one further gap worth naming, because it is the one that would settle the question. The US Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration commissioned a detention study with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, designed to collect twelve months of ELD, TMS and telematics data from up to 80 carriers and around 2,500 drivers. A final report was scheduled for July 2025. As of 5 September 2026 no published final report was found. Until it lands, the DOT Office of Inspector General audit below remains the deepest primary dataset on what actually happens to a truck at a dock - and the OIG itself explicitly asked FMCSA to go and collect exactly this data.

Why can a truck driver not answer the phone while driving?

Because US federal law forbids it, and the ban applies to the carrier as well as to the driver. 49 CFR 392.82 states: "No driver shall use a hand-held mobile telephone while driving a CMV," and "No motor carrier shall allow or require its drivers to use a hand-held mobile telephone while driving a CMV." The regulation defines driving to include being "temporarily stationary because of traffic, a traffic control device, or other momentary delays." (source: 49 CFR 392.82, govinfo.gov, 2023 CFR edition)

This is the mechanism sentence of the whole page, and it replaces the after-hours volume statistic that does not exist. A dispatcher's call to a moving driver is not merely inconvenient. It is legally unanswerable until the driver stops - and stopping is governed by the hours-of-service clock, not by the office clock. The callback therefore lands whenever the driver next parks, which is a function of the driving window, the mandatory break and the availability of parking. None of those three things are aligned with a nine-to-five dispatch office.

When is a truck driver actually reachable?

Only inside the gaps the hours-of-service rules leave. The two rulebooks that govern this are public and specific.

United States: 49 CFR 395.3

The US cycle is 10 hours off, a 14-hour window, 11 hours of driving. The regulation reads: "A driver may not drive without first taking 10 consecutive hours off duty"; "A driver may not drive after a period of 14 consecutive hours after coming on-duty following 10 consecutive hours off-duty"; "A driver may drive a total of 11 hours during the period specified"; and "Driving is not permitted if more than 8 hours of driving time have passed without at least a consecutive 30-minute interruption in driving status." On-duty time is capped at 60 hours in 7 days or 70 in 8. (source: 49 CFR 395.3, govinfo.gov)

European Union: Regulation (EC) No 561/2006

The EU cycle is tighter on daily driving and explicit about breaks. Article 6(1): "The daily driving time shall not exceed nine hours. However, the daily driving time may be extended to at most 10 hours not more than twice during the week." Article 6(2) caps weekly driving at 56 hours and Article 6(3) caps two consecutive weeks at 90. Article 7: "After a driving period of four and a half hours a driver shall take an uninterrupted break of not less than 45 minutes, unless he takes a rest period." (source: EUR-Lex, consolidated text)

Put the two together with 392.82 and the picture is unambiguous. The reachable moments are the 45-minute EU break, the US 30-minute break, the loading and unloading stops, and the daily rest. A dispatcher trying to place a call inside those windows across 28 drivers, in a European fleet running across several time zones, is scheduling against a constraint set that no amount of staffing fixes cleanly.

One more thing eats into the reachable window. ATRI collected 148 driver diaries covering 14-day periods between June and September 2016, and found that "On average, drivers surveyed noted that 56 minutes were spent looking for parking during work hours." The same reporting put that at a reduction of 9,300 revenue-earning miles a year per driver. (source: Transport Topics reporting ATRI, December 2016) Small sample, ten years old, so treat it as colour on when a driver becomes reachable rather than as a headline figure. Confidence: Medium (trade body diary study, small sample, 2016).

How often are truck drivers detained at a shipper or receiver?

Drivers reported being detained on 39.3% of deliveries in 2023. The American Transportation Research Institute surveyed 587 drivers at the 2024 Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky. Its findings, as reported by Transport Topics: "In 2023, drivers reported being detained during 39.3% of deliveries"; "each truck driver was detained between 117 and 209 hours per year"; and "total time lost to truck driver detention exceeded 135 million hours in 2023." (source: Transport Topics, September 2024) · (ATRI release)

The sample is self-selected: drivers who attended a trade show and chose to fill in a survey. Say so when you cite it. Confidence: High (trade body research, disclosed sample) - self-selected trade-show sample.

What else the 2024 ATRI detention research found

• $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity from driver detention in 2023, across the industry.
• 94.5% of fleets charge detention fees, and they are paid on fewer than 50% of those invoices. The billing exists; the collection does not.
• Detained trucks were driven 14.6% faster on average than trucks that were not detained - the safety cost of a dock delay, made visible.
• Detention frequency was higher among women drivers (49.1%), in refrigerated freight (56.2%) and at spot-market fleets (42.5%).

Detention got worse between 2014 and 2018

ATRI's earlier survey series, Driver Detention Impacts on Safety and Productivity (September 2019), collected 674 driver responses and 220 carrier responses between March 2014 and January 2015, then 1,011 driver responses between August and November 2018. Its finding: "Between 2014 and 2018, driver respondents experienced an increase in the percent of delays greater than two hours, with a 27.4 percent increase in delays of six or more hours." Drivers reporting that 71-100% of their pickups and deliveries were delayed rose 39.6%. (source: ATRI, PDF) Same caveat: self-selected trade-show sample, disclosed.

How long does the average truck wait at a dock?

113 minutes, on the deepest dataset anyone has published - but that dataset is from 2013. The US Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, in report ST2018019 (31 January 2018), analysed 2,984,340 truck-stop observations from a commercial vendor panel covering arrivals between 1 January and 30 June 2013, reduced to 1,052,727 observations after applying FMCSA's 30-minute-to-10-hour loading window. Its finding: "The average dwell time in the dataset we used was 113 minutes in 2013" and "Most stops were less than or equal to an hour (46 percent), and approximately 21 percent exceeded 2 hours." (source: US DOT OIG, PDF)

Always date this one. The audit was published in 2018; the underlying dwell observations are from the first half of 2013. The OIG noted that its 21% figure matched what the brokerage C.H. Robinson had reported independently in 2015, which is a useful independent corroboration for a decade-old number.

Two hours at a dock is where a large share of dispatch phone traffic is generated: the receiver has not called the driver to the door, the appointment has slipped, the next pickup needs moving, and the shipper wants an ETA that has just become wrong. It is also, by 392.82, one of the few moments the driver can legally pick up.

What is the truck driver turnover rate at US truckload carriers?

92.7% at large truckload carriers, averaged over 107 quarters. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries (2024) reports: "the average annualized turnover rate from the third quarter of 1996 through first quarter of 2023 was 92.7 percent for large TL carriers (i.e., those earning $30 million or more in annual revenue) and 77.6 percent for small TL carriers earning less than $30 million in annual revenue." The series is ATA's quarterly Trucking Activity Report. (source: NASEM, 2024, Chapter 4)

The study also records the post-recession peak: "After the recession (starting in the third quarter of 2012), annualized turnover rates among TL carriers rose sharply to 106 percent and 94 percent for large and small carriers, respectively." The last freely published quarterly reading is older still: Transport Topics reported in October 2018 that "The annualized rate of driver turnover at large truckload fleets in the second quarter jumped 4 percentage points year-over-year to 98%," against 72% at small truckload fleets and 14% at less-than-truckload carriers. (source: Transport Topics, 2018) Confidence: Medium (trade press reporting a trade-body survey, sample not disclosed). Use it only alongside the NASEM figure.

There is no citable turnover percentage for 2024, 2025 or 2026. ATA's quarterly turnover releases now redirect to a member login rather than a public page, so no fetchable source carries one. If you see a recent turnover percentage quoted without a link that resolves, it is not sourced.

How many truck driver positions are unfilled in Europe and the US?

Around 502,000 in Europe, on IRU's 2025 survey. The IRU (World Road Transport Organisation) reports "around 2.9 million truck driver positions, equivalent to 11% of the workforce, remain unfilled across 18 markets," of which "around 502,000 unfilled truck driver positions" are in Europe, and that "around 660,500 drivers are expected to retire by 2030." (source: IRU driver shortage topic page) The number of operators surveyed is not published - the full report is sold at EUR 390 - so confidence here is Medium-High (trade body primary, sample size not disclosed).

Where a disclosed sample is required, use IRU's previous global reading instead: "3.6 million positions remain unfilled in 36 countries studied representing 70% of global GDP," drawn from "5,100 trucking firms surveyed in 2024," with the global average driver age now "crept up to 44.5" and 3.4 million drivers in those countries due to retire by 2029. (source: IRU, April 2025)

The US shortage figure, and why economists argue about it

ATA's Economics Department, in its Driver Shortage Update 2021, estimated "that in 2021 the truck driver shortage will hit a historic high of just over 80,000 drivers," projected that "At current trends, the shortage could surpass 160,000 in 2030," and that "over the next decade, the industry will have to recruit nearly 1,000,000 new drivers into the industry." (source: ATA, PDF)

The method matters more than the number. ATA states it directly: "This figure is the difference between the number of drivers currently in the market and the optimal number of drivers based on freight demand," with the 2030 forecast "based on driver demographic trends, including gender and age, as well as expected freight growth." That is a modelled gap against an optimum, not a count of vacancies, and the framing has been publicly contested by NASEM and by BLS economists. By 2024, ATA's own chief economist Bob Costello put the shortage at 60,000 or fewer and attributed the improvement to weak freight demand rather than better recruitment: "It's gotten better for all the wrong reasons." (source: Trucking Dive, October 2024)

For Lithuania specifically, the most-cited figure is dated and needs handling with care. In June 2022 the Lithuanian national road hauliers' association LINAVA warned that the country would soon approach a shortfall of 30,000 truck drivers, with Statistics Lithuania recording 4,500 vacant transport-sector positions in Q1 2022; LINAVA's general secretary Zenonas Buivydas noted that around a third of the sector's truck drivers at the time were Ukrainian. (source: LRT, June 2022) That is four years old, it is an association claim rather than a survey, and it was shaped by the 2022 shock. Confidence: Low-Medium (association claim relayed by national broadcaster; 2022, pre-dating the freight downturn). Date it explicitly if you use it.

What does an hour of truck operating time cost?

$90.89 per hour, or $2.260 per mile, in 2024. ATRI's An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2025 Update surveyed for-hire motor carriers covering 178,091 combination truck-tractors between February and May 2025. Its headline: "The industry's average cost of operating a truck in 2024 was $2.260 per mile, a 0.4 percent decline compared with the previous year," against $2.27 per mile and $91.27 per hour in 2023. Driver wages were "79.8 cents per mile in 2024, a 2.4% increase from 2023's 77.9 cents per mile." Excluding fuel, marginal costs "rose 3.6 percent to $1.779 per mile - the highest costs ever recorded by ATRI for non-fuel operating costs." (source: ATRI abstract via TRID)

This is the cleanest cost-of-the-alternative anchor available for a dispatch conversation, and it is worth stating plainly: an hour in which a truck is not moving still costs roughly $90. Set that beside the OIG's 113-minute average dwell and ATRI's 117-209 detained hours per driver per year, and the cost of a dock delay stops being abstract.

Costs kept rising after that. ATRI's July 2026 release announcing the 2026 Update states: "The industry-average cost to operate a truck in 2025 was $2.336 per mile, 3.4 percent higher than the previous year" and "Excluding fuel, costs rose by 4.2 percent to $1.854 per mile." (source: ATRI release, July 2026) The 2026 update's sample size is not published, so this figure sits in prose rather than in the study table below. Confidence: Medium-High (primary release, sample not disclosed).

What does a dispatcher cost, and what does an hour of transport labour cost?

US dispatchers earned a mean $50,830 a year, or $24.44 an hour, in the May 2023 BLS estimates; in truck transportation specifically, 38,150 dispatchers earned a mean $54,010, against a national occupational employment of 206,090 and a median of $46,860. (source: BLS OEWS 43-5032, May 2023) Two things to state honestly whenever this figure is used. First, May 2023 is the newest per-occupation OEWS page that resolves - the 2024 and 2025 equivalents redirect to the OEWS home page - so it should be dated, not presented as current. Second, this is a wage, not a fully loaded cost: it is before employer taxes and benefits, and it should not be silently multiplied into a loaded figure.

For context on the other side of the phone: US heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers numbered 2,044,400 in the same May 2023 estimates, at a mean $26.92 an hour and $55,990 a year, median $54,320. (source: BLS OEWS 53-3032, May 2023)

The European figure is better, because it is already a full employer cost

Eurostat publishes hourly labour cost levels by NACE activity, and its D1_D4_MD5 structure is compensation of employees plus taxes minus subsidies - in other words, what the employer actually pays, not a gross wage. For NACE H (transportation and storage) in 2025: EUR 16.2 per hour in Lithuania against EUR 30.6 across the EU, up from EUR 13.6 in Lithuania in 2023 and EUR 14.8 in 2024. Across the whole economy the same source gives Lithuania EUR 20.9 against an EU average of EUR 34.9 in 2025. (source: Eurostat, dataset lc_lci_lev)

A note on sourcing that matters for anyone reproducing these figures: Statistics Lithuania's own portal returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching, so every Lithuanian figure on this page comes from Eurostat - which is the same nationally reported data, published by the EU statistical office. Cite Eurostat, not Statistics Lithuania.

Why is a Lithuanian dispatcher's call a multilingual call?

Because the Lithuanian haulier's driver is, statistically, further from the office and further from the customer's language than almost any other in Europe. Eurostat's road freight statistics make this precise:

• 93.0% of Lithuanian road freight was international in 2024 (93.4% in 2023) - the highest share of any EU country, ahead of Luxembourg and Slovenia. source
• 922.4 km per tonne on an international load, against 91.2 km on a domestic one. Cross-trade transport averaged 779.9 km and cabotage 386.9 km. source
• 44.7% of Lithuanian tonne-kilometres are run over distances above 1,000 km - a share matched only by Portugal (45.5%). source
• Cross-trade is 70.9% of Lithuania's international transport, and Lithuania alone accounts for 20.7% of all EU cross-trade - freight moved between two other countries, with neither end in Lithuania. source

Read those four lines together and the operational conclusion writes itself. The typical Lithuanian load has neither its pickup nor its delivery in Lithuania, runs close to a thousand kilometres, and involves a shipper, a receiver and often a driver who do not share the dispatcher's first language. That is why the check-in happens by phone and in a second or third language, and it is the reason a Lithuanian dispatch desk is a multilingual reception problem before it is a call-volume problem. We looked at the wider version of this in multilingual business communication statistics.

The size of the Lithuanian sector, and the size of the average firm

Eurostat's structural business statistics for NACE H494 (freight transport by road and removal services) in Lithuania, 2023 reference year: 7,459 enterprises, 121,777 persons employed, an average of 16 people per firm, and EUR 11.68 billion of net turnover. For the wider NACE H49 (land transport including pipelines): 20,610 enterprises, 147,281 persons employed, 7 per enterprise, EUR 12.62 billion. (source: Eurostat, dataset sbs_ovw_act)

Sixteen people per firm is the number that decides how a Lithuanian haulier can staff a phone line. Lithuanian hauliers moved 66.2 billion tonne-kilometres of road freight in 2025, of which 64.9 billion was hire-and-reward work, out of an EU27 total of 1,886.0 billion. (source: Eurostat, dataset road_go_ta_tott) Across the EU as a whole, road freight transport performance reached 1,868.7 billion tonne-kilometres in 2024, up 0.6% on 2023 - Eurostat's wording: "total road freight transport performance increased by 0.6% compared with 2023 (from 1 857.0 billion tonne-kilometres (tkm)) to 1 868.7 billion tkm)." source

How big is the US trucking industry, and which figures are current?

Two figures in wide circulation are out of date or misattributed, and correcting them is worth more than repeating them.

The American Trucking Associations' current economics page states that "the nation's trucking freight bill was estimated at $906 billion in gross freight revenues (primary shipments only)" and that "the nation's domestic truck tonnage shipped was estimated at 11.27 billion tons of freight transported (primary shipments only)" in 2024, with "8.4 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs that relate to trucking activity in 2024, excluding the self-employed" and "3.58 million truck drivers employed in 2024." (source: ATA, Economics and Industry Data) Confidence: High (trade body, own data). ATA does not disclose its method on that page, and the "primary shipments only" qualifier belongs with the revenue figure whenever it is quoted.

One vendor figure gives a sense of enquiry volume in the North American spot market, with the label it deserves: DAT reports "more than 291 million loads & trucks posted annually" on its load board. (source: DAT product page, as displayed 5 September 2026) That is the vendor's own platform metric with no method disclosed, and it is emphatically not a measure of phone calls. Confidence: Medium (vendor data).

Which dispatch and detention studies disclose a sample?

Every figure on this page that has a named source and a disclosed sample, in one table. Rows without a disclosed sample - the IRU 2025 European reading, the ATRI 2026 cost update, the 2018 quarterly turnover reading and the DAT platform figure - are deliberately kept in prose above rather than promoted into this table.

What can a dispatch desk actually change in 2026?

The evidence above constrains what is honest to claim. Nobody knows how many calls a load generates, so nobody can honestly promise to remove a specific number of them. What the evidence does establish is the shape of the problem, and it is a shape that staffing alone does not fix.

The constraint is timing, not effort

One dispatcher covers roughly 28 drivers (MIT, 2021). Those drivers cannot legally answer a hand-held phone while driving (49 CFR 392.82). Their available windows are set by hours-of-service law, in the US and in the EU alike, and are further eaten by an average 56 minutes a day spent looking for parking (ATRI, 2016). Meanwhile the average dock stop ran 113 minutes in the OIG's 2013 dataset, and drivers reported detention on 39.3% of 2023 deliveries. The moments when contact is possible are scattered across the day and across time zones, and they do not coincide with the office being open. That is a scheduling problem before it is a headcount problem.

What the alternative costs, stated as a cost

A truck that is not moving still costs roughly $90.89 an hour to run (ATRI, 2024 data, 178,091 tractors). A US dispatcher's wage was a mean $54,010 a year in truck transportation (BLS OEWS, May 2023), before employer taxes and benefits. An hour of Lithuanian transport-sector labour cost EUR 16.2 in 2025, fully loaded, against EUR 30.6 across the EU (Eurostat). Those are the numbers on the existing way of working. They are not a saving, and this page does not turn them into one.

Where an always-on voice layer fits

An AI voice agent answers every inbound call immediately, at any hour, in over 100 languages, and writes the result into the TMS. It does not make a driver reachable while driving - nothing does, and 392.82 is the reason. What it changes is the other side: when the driver does stop, at 23:40 in a lay-by two countries away, someone picks up. When a carrier calls about a posted load on a Sunday, the enquiry is captured rather than lost to voicemail. When a receiver moves a dock appointment, the change is taken and logged rather than queued behind a dispatcher who is on another line. The AI voice agent for transport and logistics page sets out how that sits alongside a TMS, and the Lithuanian version is at DI sprendimai transporto verslui.

The division of labour that survives contact with this evidence is unremarkable: routine, repeatable, out-of-hours contact goes to an always-available layer, and rate negotiation, service failures, safety events and claims stay with the dispatcher - who now has the 28-driver board and not the switchboard.

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