Why Europe’s trucks drive 20 to 25 percent of their kilometres empty
A truck that drives empty still burns diesel, pays tolls and pays its driver. It just doesn’t earn anything. It also pollutes and adds to traffic for nothing, and so does an empty barge, train or plane, whether it runs on fuel or on electricity.
Across Europe, trucks drive 20 to 25 percent of their kilometres empty. Eurostat puts the EU average at 21.8 percent in 2025, and at 26 percent on domestic trips, about one in four, which is the number you usually hear. The overall share has hardly moved in years.
Most people read that as a demand problem: there isn’t enough freight to go around. Building GeoBirds, I’ve come to read it as a visibility problem.
How empty it gets
Some countries do much worse than the average. In Cyprus, 43.1 percent of truck kilometres were driven empty in 2025, which Eurostat links to goods arriving through the ports and to construction traffic.
Barges have the same problem. On EU rivers and canals, empty containers made up 29.8 percent of container transport in 2024. In the air it’s worse: more than half of airlines’ cargo capacity went unused in 2024, according to IATA, which put the cargo load factor at 45.9 percent. And flying is one of the most polluting ways to move goods: per tonne kilometre, planes and trucks emit far more than trains and ships, according to the EEA.
A thick rulebook
Crossing borders comes with rules, most of them from the EU’s Mobility Package. Drivers on cabotage and cross trade jobs count as posted workers, which means a declaration for every posting and the host country’s pay rules. A truck may do three domestic jobs in another country within seven days of delivering an international load, and then has to stay out of that country’s domestic market for four days. Drivers must be able to get home every three or four weeks and can’t spend their regular weekly rest in the cab. Trucks on international work had to switch to the newest smart tachograph by August 2025, and since July 2026 vans over 2.5 tonnes on international work fall under the same driving time and tachograph rules.
Each of these rules has a reason behind it, and each has to fit into the plan before the truck leaves. The Mobility Package rules narrow the loads a cross border truck can take on the way back.
The one rule that didn’t survive made trucks on international work return to their home country every eight weeks. The Commission’s own studies said it would add journeys and up to 2.9 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023, and in October 2024 the EU Court of Justice annulled it, because the lawmakers hadn’t shown they had enough information to judge whether it was proportionate. The rest of the package stands.
Margins of 1 to 3 percent
Road haulage runs on thin margins. A European Commission impact assessment from 2023 describes hauliers as price takers in highly competitive work, with a profit margin of 1 to 3 percent. Larger operators do a little better: McKinsey puts the average at 2 to 4 percent EBIT.
A long distance truck in France costs about €172,000 a year to run and covers about 108,000 kilometres, according to the French road freight cost body CNR. By my rough count, one percent of those kilometres is about 1,080 kilometres, worth roughly €1,700 at full cost. At a 1 percent margin, one percent more paid kilometres is worth a truck’s entire profit for the year. At 3 percent, it’s still about a third of it.
A visibility problem
Trucks run empty because carriers can’t see the demand, not because there isn’t any. EU trucks moved 1,886 billion tonne kilometres in 2025. A carrier sees its own customers, its own lanes and whatever turns up on a freight exchange that day. It doesn’t see the factory two towns over that ships the same route every week with someone else.
How GeoBirds builds that view
At GeoBirds we took a top down approach. We don’t ask shippers or carriers to hand over their data. We source it from data providers and use it to map where goods are produced, stored and moved across Europe. Then we give each carrier a magnifying glass, set to its own lanes and the assets it runs, to find demand for its empty kilometres.
What it finds is structural demand: shippers whose flows match its lanes and capacity, week after week. A one off load fills one empty return trip. To build a profitable business, a carrier needs demand for its capacity that keeps coming back, and that’s what sets us apart from freight marketplaces. They are good at filling tomorrow’s empty truck. We help carriers find the customers that fill their trucks every week.