Trucking margins fell 333 bps in 2025 even as sales grew: Abrigo

Truck transportation companies with under $50 million in sales saw gross margins fall 332.7 basis points in 2025, even as their sales-growth rate improved by 3.0 percentage points. That divergence sits at the center of new analysis by Abrigo, a risk management and lending software provider to U.S. financial institutions, which examined how 2025 tariff actions squeezed small private companies across 17 industries with tariff exposure.

The study compared a 2024 pre-tariff baseline against 2025 results, drawing on private-company financial statements inside Abrigo Connect, a banking intelligence platform holding nearly 2 million financial statements across 1,400 industries classified under the North American Industry Classification System, with more than 80 financial data points per company. The sample covered U.S. businesses with sales below $50 million — privately held borrowers who rarely show up in public-company research or survey-based tariff studies.

The headline pattern is stark. In several industries, median sales-growth rates improved while median gross profit margins declined. In plain terms: revenue came in, but input costs ate it.

How Abrigo separated tariff pressure from fuel pressure

To isolate tariff effects from broader energy and freight costs, Abrigo split the 17 industries into three cohorts. The first grouped import-reliant, lower-energy-intensity sectors such as computer and electronic product manufacturing and merchant wholesalers of durable goods. The second covered 10 industries carrying both tariff-sensitive inputs and meaningful energy or transportation costs — fabricated metals, food manufacturing, construction, and restaurants among them. The third cohort captured tariff exposure plus heavy fuel, freight, or industrial-energy requirements: primary metal manufacturing, heavy and civil engineering construction, truck transportation, and warehousing and storage.

That third cohort posted the sharpest numbers in the entire study. The four industries with the greatest combined tariff-and-energy exposure recorded a median 3.1-percentage-point improvement in sales-growth rates alongside a 166.3-basis-point decline in gross margins.

Primary metal manufacturing fared worst on margin, contracting 583.1 basis points even as its sales-growth rate improved 6.7 percentage points. Truck transportation followed the same shape — growth up, margins down — which tells you demand held while pricing power didn't.

What does this change for small carriers and their lenders?

Rob Newberry, an Abrigo Senior Consultant, framed the mechanics: "Small businesses typically have less margin to absorb the impact that tariffs may have on their input costs. That can create larger year-over-year swings in financial performance, and some may require additional funding until businesses can pass those increases on to customers."

So the practical question is pass-through. The data suggests small operators in fuel- and freight-intensive sectors haven't managed it yet. Sales trends stayed resilient in 2025, but tariff-exposed industries with significant fuel, freight, and industrial-energy requirements took the clearest hit to profitability — cost pressures appear to have absorbed gains that would otherwise have supported the bottom line.

For lenders, the signal is a wider distribution of outcomes. Year-over-year swings grow, and working-capital needs rise in the gap between paying higher input costs and recovering them from customers. For small trucking firms and warehouse operators, the study implies margin recovery depends on either passing costs through — hard in soft freight markets — or absorbing them longer than their balance sheets comfortably allow.

Abrigo's dataset, by virtue of covering private borrowers rather than listed companies, offers a read on the segment that carries most of the U.S. freight sector's capacity. If tariff policy and fuel costs hold their current trajectory, expect lenders to keep tightening scrutiny of margin trends in these cohorts, and expect the pass-through question to define small-carrier profitability into 2026.