The FMCSA publishes its Company Census File for free. It has about 4.5 million rows. Most of them are not what you would call a trucking company, so I filtered it before counting anything.
Filter: active status, authorized for hire, 3 or more power units, US address. I also dropped rows where the legal name is an email address, and fleets of 50+ trucks that report zero mileage. Without that last rule, Houston's "largest carrier" claimed 4,872 trucks and drove none of them.
That leaves 42,510 carriers in TX, OH and GA. A few things stood out.
Houston is big, Laredo is bigger per truck than you'd guess
| City | Carriers (3+ trucks) | Trucks |
|---|---|---|
| Houston, TX | 2,550 | 42,583 |
| Laredo, TX | 1,139 | 21,208 |
| Columbus, OH | 1,066 | 13,410 |
| Dallas, TX | 969 | 18,462 |
| San Antonio, TX | 858 | 12,058 |
Laredo has fewer carriers than Houston but averages about 19 trucks each, against about 17 in Houston. That fits a border crossing where a lot of the work is short cross-border runs for mid-size fleets.
Not every "largest carrier" is a trucking company
The biggest fleet in Houston is an armored-car operator. In San Antonio it is a grocery chain's own fleet. The census counts anyone who holds for-hire authority, so private fleets show up too. If you build a lead list from this file, check the name before you call.
The method, in short
- Pull the census from the FMCSA open data portal by state.
- Filter on status, classification and power units.
- Drop rows with an email as the name, and large fleets with zero reported mileage.
- Group by city. Keep cities with at least 5 carriers.
I put the per-city tables online, one page per city, sorted by fleet size with phone and DOT number: https://trucking-directory.agentbets.workers.dev/tx/laredo/?utm_source=devto
The data is public record and I only show business phone numbers that carriers filed themselves. If a row looks wrong, tell me the DOT number in the comments.
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