There Is No Truck Driver Shortage. There Is Low Pay. Make OTR Trucking Tax-Free.

This is an opinion.

For years, trucking industry groups have warned that the nation faces a serious shortage of qualified drivers. The American Trucking Associations now projects a potential shortage of more than 100,000 drivers within five years. Whether someone agrees with that estimate or believes the industry has a retention problem instead of a pure shortage, the basic question remains the same:

Why are so many qualified Americans unwilling to enter or remain in long-haul trucking?

The answer is not complicated. The job often does not pay enough to justify what it demands.

Over-the-road trucking means weeks away from home, missed holidays, long stretches of unpaid waiting, limited safe parking, high responsibility, and a life built around somebody else’s freight schedule. Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median annual wage for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers was $58,640 in 2025. Some drivers earn substantially more, but many do not.

That gap matters.

For many interstate commercial drivers, the federal overtime requirement does not apply because of the Motor Carrier Act exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is not a blanket exemption for every person who drives a truck. Its application depends on the employee’s duties, the employer, and the vehicle involved. But for many drivers operating large commercial vehicles in interstate commerce, it means there is no federal requirement that they receive time-and-a-half after 40 hours.

That is a major reason trucking pay must be judged by more than an annual salary or a cents-per-mile advertisement. A driver can appear to make a respectable yearly number while working hours that would trigger overtime pay in much of the rest of the economy.

The industry should stop pretending the answer is simply to locate more bodies to put behind the wheel.

A larger labor pool may help companies fill seats in the short term, but it does not solve the underlying problem if the work itself remains financially unattractive. American workers will continue to leave a career that asks for too much and gives too little back.

My proposal is straightforward: Congress should create a federal income-tax exclusion for qualifying OTR driver wages.

The phrase “tax-free trucking” needs to be precise. Congress can change federal tax law. It cannot simply erase state income taxes by declaration. Each state would have to decide whether to adopt a matching exemption under its own tax laws. Congress should encourage states to participate, but it should not pretend it can commandeer them.

Congress must also decide whether the benefit applies only to federal income tax or to payroll taxes as well. Those are separate questions. Social Security and Medicare taxes are payroll taxes, not federal income tax.

Here is what the math looks like under a narrow, defensible version of the proposal.

A single W-2 driver earning $70,000 in 2026, taking the standard deduction and claiming no credits, would owe roughly $6,570 in federal income tax under current federal brackets. Eliminating only that federal income-tax liability would increase that driver’s annual take-home pay by about $6,570, or roughly $126 a week, before any state tax savings.

The driver would still pay the employee share of Social Security and Medicare taxes, currently 7.65 percent, unless Congress separately chose to exempt qualifying OTR wages from those taxes too. That distinction matters. It is the difference between an honest policy proposal and a slogan that does not survive basic math.

Even the narrower federal income-tax exclusion would be meaningful. It could let a driver keep thousands more every year without requiring a carrier to immediately raise gross wages by the same amount.

But critics are right about one thing: tax relief cannot become a back-door subsidy for carriers that refuse to fix abusive pay practices.

A carrier should not be allowed to hold down wages, pad deductions, delay pay, misclassify workers, or rely on unpaid detention and then claim it is helping drivers because the government gave those drivers a tax benefit.

That is why any OTR tax exclusion should come with strict eligibility rules.

Congress should limit the benefit to drivers employed by carriers that meet a real compensation standard, provide itemized and understandable pay statements, disclose all deductions, and comply with wage-and-hour, safety, and worker-classification laws. The benefit should be denied to carriers that use the exemption as cover for abusive lease arrangements or unlawful deductions.

The policy should also be written to protect drivers, not merely increase a company’s recruiting pitch. If a carrier’s business model depends on treating drivers as disposable, it should not receive an indirect advantage from a taxpayer-funded incentive.

The purpose is not to subsidize low-paying carriers;

For purposes of this proposal, a qualifying OTR carrier must pay company drivers a base rate of no less than 65 cents per practical mile, adjusted ( + or – ) annually for inflation never dropping below $0.60c for all practical miles. “Practical miles” means the miles the driver is actually dispatched to run, including loaded and empty miles, not an artificially shortened mileage calculation.

The cents-per-mile floor cannot include sign-on bonuses, safety bonuses, fuel bonuses, detention pay, layover pay, breakdown pay, or reimbursement money. Those payments must be separate. A carrier that pays below the qualifying per-mile rate, or leaves drivers unpaid for carrier-caused waiting time, should not receive the benefit of a tax-incentive program designed to improve driver compensation.

The purpose is to make long-haul driving financially competitive again.

A federal income-tax exclusion, paired with state participation and enforceable labor standards, would not solve every problem in trucking. It would not create more safe parking. It would not eliminate detention. It would not replace the need for transparent pay, stronger enforcement, or honest recruiting.

But it would be a direct, immediate way to make OTR work more appealing to experienced drivers and to younger Americans deciding whether trucking is worth the sacrifice.

The industry says it needs drivers. Then policymakers should stop treating the people who move America’s freight as an afterthought.

There is no shortage of people capable of driving a truck.

There is a shortage of jobs that pay enough, protect workers enough, and respect the people willing to live the OTR lifestyle.

Make qualifying OTR income tax-free at the federal level. Invite states to match it. Tie the benefit to real wage and transparency requirements.

Then let the industry prove that it wants to solve its driver problem instead of merely talking about it.

Opinion by Tim O’friel, Chief Editor, TWOSU News