Trailer Demand to Sag Further on Tariff Uncertainty
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Trailer market demand continues to be weak and will remain so for around the next 12 months, with 2025 uncertainty around tariffs choking back already meager appetite, according to dealers, manufacturers and analysts.
Dealers responding to a quarterly survey from attributed the weakness to uncertainty swirling around Trump administration tariff policies — particularly for dry van trailers — with some warning that ordering new stock in the current environment seemed foolhardy.
North American trailer dealer inventories at the end of the second quarter of 2025 were slightly more than half the level of 12 months earlier, according to respondents to the FTR second-quarter 2025 survey.
Overall, dealer inventories fell 47% compared with the year-ago figure, the data shows. By segment, dry van inventories were down 55% year on year, refrigerated van stocks fell 32% and flatbed inventories decreased 46%, according to the results of the survey, which is carried out in partnership with the .
Trailer dealers say sales fell 7.52% year over year in Q2, with refrigerated sales down more than 8%, the largest decline among the three main trailer categories.
FTR Transportation Intelligence
The Trump administration announced 25% steel and aluminum tariffs in February, and doubled them in June. Levies also have been imposed on semiconductors, copper and fabricated components. Individual country-by-country tariffs were also imposed.
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“Demand has been under pressure due to uncertainty [on] tariffs, specifically, orders remain at a subdued low level,” FTR Senior Analyst for Commercial Vehicles Dan Moyer said during a recent event held by the research and analysis group.
“Demand remains volatile, with the two largest segments — dry van and refrigerated van — being down year over year for the order season,” Moyer told attendees of the 2025 FTR Transportation Conference in Indianapolis, adding: “Vocational segments, including flatbed, have actually remained comparatively pretty solid. Holding up well, but still, are under pressure.”
In addition, production has continued to be above demand, he said, adding that build levels will continue to decline.
“We expect production levels to drop into the beginning of the first half of next year further, and then start to recover the second half of next year, with building momentum into the following year,” said Moyer.
Build Levels Decline
North American trailer production totaled 230,000 units in 2024.
Looking forward, FTR expects production to total 187,000 trailers in 2025, a figure that will rise to 204,000 units in 2026, 253,000 units in 2027 and 295,000 trailers in 2028.
If we just said, ‘This is what tariffs are going to be,’ the market would pretty quickly — not absorb that — but just deal with it and just be able to move on,” Alan Briley told the conference.(FTR)
Drilling down, FTR expects manufacturers to build 49,000 trailers in the third quarter of 2025, 39,000 units in the final three months of the year, 43,000 trailers in the first quarter of 2026, 50,000 units in Q2 2026, 55,000 trailers in Q3 2026 and 56,000 units in the final three months of next year.
So far in 2025, production is down 23% year over year while backlogs were down 10% year over year. The backlog-to-build ratio is currently 5.1 months, Moyer told conference attendees. Typically, the ratio is between five and seven months.
Part of this is also because carriers are currently holding more trailers than they need, one of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moyer explained. Plus, with tariffs carriers do not know what trailers are going to cost to buy. And manufacturers do not know how much the trailers will cost to build.
”We really don’t know what its going to cost at the point where we order some things, and that obviously makes it challenging in an environment where we’re trying to pass those [cost increases] on to our customers,” Alan Briley, Fontaine Trailer Co. president, told the FTR conference.
“We’ve seen challenges with some of our component manufacturers that have a significant part, or any part, of their manufacturing offshore,” the executive at the Haleyville, Ala., manufacturer added.
“I believe the economy will sort itself out, work through these challenges. If there can be some semblance of stability, regardless of what anybody thinks about tariffs. If we just said, ‘This is what tariffs are going to be,’ the market would pretty quickly — not absorb that — but just deal with it and just be able to move on,” Briley told the conference.
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“And I think that lack of clarity — I know we’ve been saying it for two years now, ‘Uncertainty, uncertainty.’ But that’s really what has got a lot of our customers and consumers of our product just sitting on their hands to see what happens,” he added.
The publicly listed truckload carrier tractor-trailer ratio is currently 4.0, a level maintained since the end of 2023 and around a third higher than the pre-pandemic average, Moyer noted in his Sept. 8 presentation.
U.S. trailer net orders totaled 7,261 units in August, down 4% month-over-month, but up 3% year over year, according to FTR data. The 10-year August average is 17,568. A higher-than-normal percentage of orders in 2025 came after the presidential election, with customers keeping their powder dry earlier in the year.
