Truck Driver Shortage in Europe: Where Are the Opportunities?

Right now, more than half of Europe’s trucking companies cannot take on new contracts because they cannot find enough drivers to run them. If you already hold a CE license and drive for a living, that gap works in your favour. It puts you in a real bargaining position, and carriers are spending money to prove it.

This article is written for drivers who already work for a trucking company in Europe and are wondering whether it is worth looking elsewhere. It covers what the shortage actually changes for you, what to compare before you switch, and how relay trucking, the model we run at Baton Transport, changes the shape of a working week.

How big is the driver shortage gap, really?

How many truck drivers is Europe actually short right now? The short version: Europe counted around 233,000 unfilled truck driving jobs in 2023. That gap has climbed every year since, reaching roughly 502,000 in 2026, a 13% shortage rate, per the IRU’s latest survey.

Here, the question is simpler: what does that number mean for someone already sitting behind the wheel? A big part of the shortage of truck drivers is structural: the average driver age in Europe is around 47, only 4% of new drivers are under 25, and about 660,500 drivers are expected to retire by 2030. The pipeline is also narrow, with women making up about 4% of drivers, and the pressure is already visible in specific markets like Germany, which had about 70,000 unfilled truck driver positions in 2023.

What the shortage changes if you already drive for someone else

Scarcity is doing something specific to the market, and it shows up in how carriers behave, not just in the size of the gap. In the IRU’s most recent survey of European operators, more than half said they cannot expand their business because they cannot find drivers, nearly half reported reduced productivity, and 39% said the shortage was cutting into revenue directly while also hurting overall transportation efficiency and day-to-day operations. That shortfall is not abstract: with more drivers missing, capacity tightens, transit times slow, and logistics costs rise for businesses across supply chains, creating a ripple effect.

Companies do not absorb numbers like that quietly. The same survey found over 70% of European carriers are now running retention programs, more than half are offering performance rewards or straight pay increases, 44% are investing in newer vehicles, and 35% are covering licensing and qualification costs that used to come out of a driver’s own pocket. Average gross truck driver pay across Europe now runs about 55% above the national minimum wage, and in the Netherlands it reaches 133% above minimum.

None of that happens because carriers feel generous. It happens because a qualified driver who leaves is expensive to replace, and every serious operator knows it. That is the part worth sitting with if your current company has not moved on pay, your truck, or your schedule in the last year despite all of this: the market has given them every reason to compete for you, and if they have not, someone else will.

Signs it might be worth comparing offers

A few patterns tend to show up before a driver starts looking around. Pay that changes month to month without a clear explanation, or that is not fully documented against your actual employment country, is one. A truck that keeps breaking down, or that never gets replaced no matter how many kilometres go on the clock, is another. So is a schedule you cannot plan around: dispatch that changes at the last minute, routes that shift week to week, irregular working hours, or a home time that keeps slipping further out.

None of these on their own means you need to quit tomorrow. But taken together, they are a reasonable reason to find out what else is on offer, especially in a market where over half of logistics companies are actively trying to win drivers away from competitors.

Before you take any offer at face value, ask to see the numbers in writing rather than hearing them over the phone, and ask if you can speak to a driver already working the route you would be running. A carrier that is confident in what it offers will not have a problem with either request.

What working conditions to actually compare before you switch

A few things are worth checking with any carrier before you sign anything.

Pay transparency matters more than the headline number. Ask whether your salary is fully legal and documented in your country of employment, rather than agreed verbally, and ask what happens to your income when freight volumes dip, because high levels of inflation and weaker demand in parts of the market are among the factors that can limit wage growth across the industry even during a shortage.

In road freight transport, contract rates can stay firmer even when spot pricing softens, with spot rates falling by 14.8 points year-over-year.

Route and contract structure tells you what your actual working life will look like. A fixed route with a predictable schedule is a very different job from open dispatch, where you find out where you are going a day or two ahead.

Home time is the number that affects everything else: your family, your sleep, your health. Ask directly how many nights a month you can expect to be home, and get a specific number rather than a general impression.

Truck age and condition affect your daily comfort and your safety. A company investing in its fleet, as 44% of European carriers now say they are doing specifically to attract drivers, is telling you something about how it plans to compete over the next few years.

Relay trucking: what actually changes day to day

At Baton Transport, we run a relay model across our network in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Sweden. The idea is straightforward. Instead of one driver taking a load from origin to destination, the truck keeps moving along a fixed route while drivers hand over at set exchange points and head home. Each driver runs a defined leg of the journey, not the whole thing. That kind of setup depends on stronger management of handovers and scheduling, and it reflects wider technology investment in freight transport as companies look for solutions to driver shortages.

The effect on a route’s total time is significant. Our internal benchmark is a 1,300 km linehaul: in a traditional solo setup, that run takes around 30 hours, largely because one driver has to stop for mandatory rest along the way. Run the same distance as a relay, with a handover partway through, and it moves in about 19 hours, because the truck barely stops while the people driving it do.

For the driver, the difference shows up in the parts of the job that do not appear on a payslip. A fixed route means you generally know where you are going next week, not only tomorrow. A defined exchange point means your working day has an actual end, rather than however many hours it takes to reach a destination that keeps moving further away. And because each leg is shorter, drivers on a relay model sleep in their own beds far more often than drivers running long-haul solo, where nights in the cab are simply part of the job.

Relay trucking will not suit every driver. Some prefer the autonomy of running a full route start to finish. But for a driver switching companies specifically because they are tired of unpredictable weeks and too many nights away, it offers a genuinely different structure, one that a new employer running the same long-haul model cannot really match.

Is now the right time to switch?

There is no single answer that fits every driver, but the market conditions are not in dispute. Europe is short roughly half a million drivers, carriers know a driver who leaves is hard to replace, and the industry’s own survey data shows most companies responding with better pay or improved working conditions, and often both. The workforce problem also does not resolve quickly, because cross-border recruitment and hiring are slowed by different license rules, national employment requirements, limited access to foreign drivers, and long visa processing times. If your current employer has not moved on any of that while the rest of the market has, that gap is worth paying attention to.

If you hold a CE license and want to see what a relay-based route, a documented salary, and a real answer on home time actually look like, we would like to hear from you.

Interested in driving for Baton Transport? Submit your details here.

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