Amazon expects to move more than 4 million loads through the holidays this year, with weekly Relay volume hitting 300,000 by December — roughly 11% more freight than last year. That number anchored every conversation at RelayCon 2026, where more than 1,000 carriers gathered in Las Vegas from Sept. 9-11, double last year's attendance.

The growth curve is steep. RelayCon 2024 drew just over 500 carriers to the Horseshoe in Las Vegas. The 2025 edition brought more than 600 transportation professionals. This year Amazon crossed the four-figure mark, and just as notably, it restructured the event around three breakout tracks — build, scale and optimize — after carriers complained that open mixers made it hard to find peers running similar businesses. When a three-truck operator sits next to another three-truck operator instead of a 60-truck fleet, the conversation gets honest fast.

The keynote numbers

Thursday morning opened with remarks from Amazon's John Hartland, director of North America surface transportation, and Maneesh Jyoti, followed by FreightWaves founder Craig Fuller on the freight market's direction.

The volume forecast framed everything else on the agenda. Carriers came for the announcements, and Amazon delivered several.

Relay Assistant, originally a chat tool for negotiating rates and pickup times on certain spot loads, now resolves common over-the-road issues on the spot: trailer availability, site closures, basic trip information, with the ability to reroute and release drivers. By year-end, carriers will be able to ask it to repeat Post A Truck orders instead of relisting manually. More features are coming around load availability, schedule changes and route patterns. When the assistant can't solve something, it hands the carrier to a live operator with the full conversation attached, and Amazon says performance disputes are now resolved 20% faster.

The Scorecard is changing too. Safety, compliance and required actions now sit on a single page instead of being split across hauling performance, and new AI-generated focus areas tell carriers which sub-metric to fix first. For a small fleet without a back office, knowing what to repair before it costs load access is the whole game.

Cost programs expand across fuel, maintenance and equipment

Amazon widened its Deals & Discounts program across the three expenses that hit carriers hardest. Enrollment barriers came off the Comdata fuel card program, where carriers average about 10% savings, with discounts reaching up to 66 cents a gallon at Petro and 40 cents at Love's, plus added regional providers. Maintenance savings target 15%, with Red Classic added as a vendor. On equipment, a three-year Ryder leasing option with a 10% discount joined the existing 40% rental discount and a $10,000 discount on used trucks.

Safety rewards expanded as well: free dash cams for eligible carriers and 2 to 5 cents extra per collision-free mile, capped at $14,000 a year.

There was news on the freight itself. Amazon Supply Chain Services opened the Relay network to shippers of all sizes and industries, meaning the load board is no longer limited to Amazon's own packages. Contract offers now run longer than the previous six-month maximum, and intermodal, reefer, hostler and less-than-truckload options are all growing.

A sharper room

The shift from 2025 to 2026 was qualitative as much as quantitative. Last year, many conversations started with some version of "should I grow?" This year, almost nobody asked that. They asked how, when and what it would cost.

Carriers arrived knowing their cost per mile and what their trucks cost sitting still. Some had mapped out their next equipment purchase and wanted someone to poke holes in it. Several operators on the floor had been in business 25 years — not 25 months — and what kept them in the game wasn't rates. It was time and flexibility, the ability to run a real business on their own terms after decades on the road.

The hallway between 10:15 and 10:45 after the keynote told the story better than the keynote itself. Carriers weren't reacting to the forecast; they were working it. Add a truck before peak or wait? Is the best driver ready for a second unit? Which of the new load types fits the equipment already on the ground? Implementation talk started before anyone found their breakout room.

A packed room for a hard conversation

Right after that break, FreightWaves Editorial Director Adam Wingfield led the first scaler-track session, "Growing from strength, how to know you're ready for what's next." It drew a full room for a session largely about when not to grow.

The premise: opportunity and readiness aren't the same thing. The market can hand a carrier an opening, and that carrier can still be the wrong business to take it. The session walked through the real cost of adding equipment — not just the truck payment, but insurance, maintenance reserves, driver cost, and the weeks a new unit sits before it earns. It also covered ways to grow without another truck: tightening utilization, cleaning up a safety profile, getting more from equipment already on the ground.

Every carrier scored their own readiness and left with one move and a date attached. Not a vision board — a decision.

The pushback was the best part. One carrier worked out, out loud, that adding two trucks before the new year would have wiped out his cash reserve in a single slow month. That's the kind of moment that saves a business, and it happened because he came ready to look at his numbers honestly. The session handed off to Part 2 in the same room, focused on ways to grow on Relay, so carriers who determined they were ready had a clear next step waiting.

What it signals

RelayCon has grown every year, but the bigger shift this time was the quality of the room. In 2025 the message was that small fleets weren't giving up. In 2026 the message is that the ones still standing have gotten serious about structure — measuring success not by how many trucks they own but by whether each truck earns its keep.

The announcements point the same direction. Longer contracts, a broader shipper base, new equipment types and better cost programs all reward carriers who can plan past next week, and the tools only pay off for operators who know their numbers well enough to use them.

For the broader industry, the signal from 25-year veterans is worth heeding: longevity in trucking is built on a business you can sustain, not just the rate on the next load. With peak volume climbing 11% and contract terms stretching beyond six months, the carriers who treated RelayCon as a working session rather than a sales pitch are the ones positioned to still be standing — and growing — a year from now.