Freight Brokerage
The industry — Freight transportation arrangement
Base industry report for 4885 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 3,020
- Under 10 employeesA
- 67%
- Establishments · USA
- 22,383
- Employment · USA
- 323,348
- Payroll · USA
- $24.3B
Of 3,020 Canadian establishments with employees, 67% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Execution decidesThe hurdles here are ones a better operator clears. That is not a promise of success — it is the absence of a structural reason you cannot win.
Get to the buyer. The product is reachable and the need is real; the channel is owned by someone else, and a route to it — a partner, a reseller, a trade relationship, a book of clients bought outright — is what has to be built.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 3
The binding constraint — distribution
Asset-light and therefore crowded. The broker's product is a shipper relationship and a carrier list, and both sit with incumbents who have been building them for decades while double-brokering fraud has made shippers less willing to try an unknown name. Working capital is the quiet killer: carriers expect quick pay and shippers pay in 45 days, so growth consumes cash. The visibility and TMS software above this market is screened separately. Update, 2026-09-16 — the capital barrier is genuinely low, and that is not the problem. Federal authority plus $75,000 of financial security is the whole regulatory entry [B], which makes this one of the few markets in this research a person can legally enter with five figures. But active broker authorities stood at about 25,271 in a January 2025 update, down 9.9% year over year [C] — an industry shedding intermediaries — and in 2025 the listed brokers' shares fell on the argument that AI removes the matching work a brokerage sells. The margin here is an information asymmetry, and entering a business whose product is an asymmetry while that asymmetry is being automated is a timing bet rather than a market.
Brokers arrange freight on national lanes and compete with everyone doing the same, so there is no geographic protection at all. The only boundary is the shipper relationship.
Handle — The listed brokers — C. H. Robinson, RXO and Landstar. Thousands of small brokerages disclose nothing, but three listed intermediaries report the profitability of the very same function. The figure that matters is not their revenue, which is mostly purchased transportation passing through, but C.H. Robinson's adjusted gross profits — revenue less what it pays carriers. That is the industry's actual margin pool, and it is a quarter smaller than it was in 2022.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 3 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 3 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| C. H. Robinson WorldwideNASDAQ: CHRWA | $16.2B | — | FY2025 total revenues, Form 10-K filed 13 February 2026 |
| RXONYSE: RXOA | $5.7B | — | FY2025 revenue, Form 10-K filed 9 February 2026; the year produced a $79M operating loss |
| Landstar SystemNASDAQ: LSTRA | $4.7B | — | FY2025 revenue, 52 weeks ended 27 December 2025, Form 10-K filed 24 February 2026 |
| The small-brokerage tailC | not disclosed | — | About 25,271 active broker authorities at a January 2025 trade aggregation, down 9.9% year over year; no revenue is published for this tier and none is estimated. Canada has 3,020 establishments with employees, 1,412 of them with one to four (Statistics Canada, December 2023). |
Evidence
Evidence. Re-sourced at the filing 2026-09-20. The FY2025 Form 10-Ks were opened directly on EDGAR and read: C. H. Robinson (filed 13 February 2026) for total revenues, net income, income from operations, the adjusted-gross-profit-by-mode table back to 2021, the 75,000 customers and 450,000 contract carriers, and the description of the industry as 'highly competitive and fragmented'; RXO (filed 9 February 2026) and Landstar (filed 24 February 2026) for revenue and result [A]. These supersede two figures this record previously carried at tier B — C.H. Robinson's nine-month 2025 net income and Landstar's half-year 2025 net income — which were partial-year numbers from secondary reporting and have been replaced with the audited full years. The bond requirement remains reported rather than read at the regulation [B]; the broker-count is a trade aggregation, not an FMCSA extract [C], and FMCSA retired MC numbers on 1 October 2025, so any count spanning that change needs care. Not sourced: no revenue, margin or failure rate for the small-brokerage tier could be found, no Canadian broker discloses, and the claim that AI is compressing the matching margin is the market's argument and not a measurement. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Main 3PL and freight-broker body; homepage says 2,000 companies, 70% small family-owned businesses.
Formerly Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association; now covers freight brokers, forwarders, customs brokers, dray carriers, warehouses. No member count stated.
Blocked automated access. Search results show an active brokers' subreddit created 2014; a third-party tracker (reddapi) listed about 46k members.
TIA's annual 3PL conference; next 5-7 April 2027, Gaylord Palms, Orlando. No attendance figure stated.
Trucking and logistics news site; runs a Brokerage Compliance Symposium (26 Oct 2026) and the F3 freight festival. Audience figures not stated.
Freight-broker training podcast by two TIA-accredited instructors; latest episode 15 Sep 2026. Counters on the page are unfilled placeholders.
Canadian brokers have no association of their own and mostly sit inside CIFFA or TIA; day-to-day shop talk happens on r/FreightBrokers. Trucknews.com blocked automated access and was not listed.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.