Flatbed slipped 1.2% in July but held up better than the rest of freight

Prices received by long-distance specialised carriers fell 1.2% in July to 168.2 on the Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index. It is a real decline, but it was the shallowest of any major long-haul freight segment for the month: dry van truckload fell 1.3%, general long-haul freight 2.3%, and less-than-truckload 4.6%. Trucking as a whole was down 1.9%.

So the flatbed-and-specialised segment gave back less than the rest of the board, and it is still up 9.4% over the past year, the strongest twelve-month gain of any over-the-road segment except LTL. For an owner-operator running open-deck, that annual figure is more useful than a single soft month: the year-long trend is holding while dry van and LTL do the heavy losing.

What to do with it: if you can move between deck and van work, July's data says the deck side is losing ground more slowly. It is not a boom, every freight index in the set fell in July, but specialised is the segment giving back the least, and the widest monthly drops are in LTL and general long-haul.

Two cautions. First, this is an index, not a rate: it tracks change from a December 2003 base rather than dollars per mile, and it blends contract and spot business, so it turns later and more gently than the spot market you actually book. Second, and specific to this series: it is the nearest public proxy for flatbed, but it is broader than flatbed alone. NAICS 484230 covers every kind of specialised long-distance hauling except household goods, so a step-deck, a tanker and a car hauler all land in the same number. No free source isolates flatbed by itself.

The July figure is also preliminary and can be revised.