EU Road Freight Grew in 2025, But Cross-Border Work Is Quietly Shrinking

New Eurostat figures show EU road freight rose 0.9% in 2025, but the growth was entirely domestic. Cross-trade and cabotage, the segments many international hauliers depend on, both fell.

The Headline Number Hides a Split Market

Eurostat published its full 2025 road freight dataset in late September, and the top-line figure looks reassuring: EU-registered goods vehicles performed 1,886 billion tonne-kilometres of work over the year, up 0.9% on 2024. The total weight carried grew even faster, reaching 13.3 billion tonnes, an increase of 1.8% compared with 2024.

But averages flatten out what's actually happening on the ground. As trans.info put it plainly, the growth was driven entirely by domestic haulage, while the cross-border segments that many carriers depend on for their livelihood continued to shrink. If your fleet earns most of its revenue from international runs, cross-trade or cabotage, the market you're operating in looks quite different from the one the headline number describes.

Domestic Up, Cross-Trade and Cabotage Down

The breakdown by type of operation is the real story here. Most freight was transported nationally, accounting for 62.2% of the total, while international transport made up 24.4%, cross-trade 10.7% and cabotage the remaining 2.7%. National transport increased by 2.2% compared with 2024, international transport rose only slightly at 0.3%, while cross-trade and cabotage declined by 3.7% and 3.0% respectively.

There's a second signal buried in the numbers. Tonnage carried grew faster than tonne-kilometres, meaning the average load travelled a slightly shorter distance than in 2024, a sign that growth came from shorter, domestic-style journeys rather than long-haul international runs. For fleets that built their business model around long international lanes, that's a structural shift worth planning around, not a one-year blip.

Poland Still Dominant, Germany Still the Hub

Poland recorded the highest volume of road freight transport, with 381.0 billion tonne-kilometres, or 20.2% of the EU total. Germany followed with 277.4 billion tonne-kilometres (14.7%), narrowly ahead of Spain on 272.6 billion (14.5%), with France and Italy rounding out the top five. Together, these five countries accounted for 67.1% of the total EU road freight tonne-kilometres.

Germany's role as the central hub of the network held up too. When looking at country-to-country flows within the EU, the largest volume of goods was transported between Germany and the Netherlands, at 86.9 million tonnes, and Germany was the origin or destination of almost half of the top 20 country-to-country flows within the EU. If your network runs through or near Germany, you're operating on the busiest corridor in the bloc, which cuts both ways: more freight to bid on, but more competition chasing it.

What's Moving More, and What's Moving Less

By weight, metal ores and other mining and quarrying products were the largest category, accounting for 3.04 billion tonnes, or 22.9% of the EU total, but these are typically short, heavy, local hauls. By tonne-kilometres, a better measure of what actually keeps a truck on the road for hours, food products, beverages and tobacco led at 311.1 billion tkm, followed by grouped goods at 237.1 billion tkm and agricultural products at 206.3 billion tkm.

Some categories moved sharply in either direction. Notable increases between 2024 and 2025 were recorded for unidentifiable goods (up 18.8%), coal and lignite, crude petroleum and natural gas (up 11.7%) and coke and refined petroleum products (up 8.2%). On the other side, the highest decreases were in furniture (down 11.8%), chemicals, rubber and plastic products (down 4.1%) and vehicles moved for repair (down 3.3%). If a meaningful share of your book is in furniture or chemicals, this data is worth checking against your own volumes before you assume it's just your customers, not the wider market.

The Market Is Growing and Getting More Expensive at the Same Time

This volume shift is landing on top of a cost environment that's already tight. Separate market analysis for 2026 points to fuel prices up 26% since end-2025 and driver vacancies standing at 12.1%, with tolls and compliance costs both rising, making cost pass-through, not efficiency, the key lever for margin this year.

That same analysis found contract rates rose in Q1 2026 even as spot rates softened, as carriers recover structural costs through longer-term agreements rather than the spot market. Put together with the Eurostat data, the picture is a market where domestic and contracted freight is holding up reasonably well, while the more exposed cross-border and spot segments are under pressure from two directions at once: shrinking volume and rising costs.

What This Means for Your Fleet

None of this means cross-border work is disappearing. International transport still rose slightly and still makes up almost a quarter of all EU road freight activity. But if cabotage and cross-trade are a meaningful slice of your revenue, it's worth stress-testing your lane mix now rather than after a rate renegotiation forces the issue. Knowing which lanes still cover their real cost, including tolls, fuel, driver hours and empty running, is no longer optional detail, it's the difference between a route that pays and one that quietly loses money.

This is exactly where per-kilometre cost visibility earns its keep. FleetlySolutions was built so fleet managers can model a lane's true economics, tolls, EU 561 driver-hours limits, fuel through the DKV integration, before committing a truck to it, rather than finding out after the invoice. As the market reshuffles between domestic and cross-border freight, that kind of granular, route-by-route pricing data matters more than it did a year ago, and it doesn't require a single piece of telematics hardware to get it.