Cargo Theft and Pallet Loss Statistics

Cargo Theft Statistics: The National Picture

Verisk CargoNet's annual analysis, released January 22, 2026, is the number most of the industry quotes. It recorded 3,594 supply chain crime events across the United States and Canada in 2025, essentially unchanged from 3,607 in 2024. Inside that flat total, incidents involving confirmed cargo theft rose 18 percent, from 2,243 to 2,646, and estimated losses jumped 60 percent to nearly $725 million. The average value per theft climbed 36 percent, from $202,364 to $273,990.

Keith Lewis, CargoNet's vice president of operations, put it plainly: criminal enterprises are becoming more selective and sophisticated, targeting extremely high value shipments rather than relying on opportunistic theft.

Overhaul, a supply chain security firm that publishes its own annual count, recorded 2,576 cargo theft events in the United States in 2025, a 16 percent rise, or 7.16 thefts a day against 6.07 the year before. Its 2026 projection calls for at least another 13 percent, roughly 2,910 incidents. The FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System tells a different-looking story: 5,715 commercial cargo thefts in 2024 valued at more than $155.6 million, per an InvestigateTV analysis. More incidents, far less value, because NIBRS captures what local agencies report, including small thefts that never reach an industry database.

Then there is the big number. At a Senate subcommittee hearing on February 27, 2025, witnesses told lawmakers that cargo theft costs the industry as much as $35 billion a year. The American Trucking Associations has used the same figure, and a Senate Judiciary hearing in July 2025 heard a $15 billion to $35 billion estimate attributed to a Department of Homeland Security report that cites no source of its own. None of these are counts. They are estimates of total economic loss, including fraud and the thefts nobody reports, and they should never sit next to the CargoNet figure as if they measured the same thing.

Where Cargo Theft Happens and What Gets Taken

California is still the center of gravity. CargoNet logged 1,218 incidents there in 2025, but the map inside the state moved: Los Angeles County was down 11 percent while Kern County rose 82 percent and San Joaquin County 44 percent. Outside California the growth was in New Jersey (up 50 percent), Indiana (up 30 percent) and Pennsylvania (up 24 percent). Overhaul's state shares tell the same story from a different angle: California took 38 percent of U.S. incidents, up from 32 percent, Texas 20 percent, Tennessee 11 percent, Illinois and Pennsylvania 7 percent each and Georgia 4 percent.

The 2025 data says risk is dispersing into the lanes that used to be the safe choice.

Commodities: Food Climbs, Consumer Electronics Fall

Food and beverage products saw the largest increase in CargoNet's data, 708 thefts, a 47 percent jump, with meat and seafood hit hardest in the Northeast and tree nuts on the West Coast. Metal theft rose 77 percent on copper demand. Consumer-grade electronics such as televisions and personal computers declined while enterprise computing components and cryptocurrency mining hardware moved up the target list, along with engines and components bound for domestic vehicle assembly plants. Overhaul's shares for 2025: electronics 22 percent of incidents, food and drinks 15 percent, home and garden 11 percent.

Where does it happen? Overhaul attributes 36 percent of thefts to warehouses and distribution centers and 17 percent to truck stops and fuel stations. Globally, the TT Club and BSI Consulting 2025 Cargo Theft Report has trucks as the target in roughly 70 percent of incidents, insiders cooperating in 22 percent, and warehouses accounting for 33 percent of theft locations in Europe and about half in Asia. In the U.S., rail's share of incidents rose from 4 percent in 2024 to 10 percent in 2025.

Strategic Theft and Fictitious Pickups

Here is the number that explains the year. Scott Cornell, who leads transportation at Travelers, told FreightWaves in June 2025 that CargoNet data showed strategic theft up 1,475 percent between the first quarter of 2022 and the fourth quarter of 2024, going from roughly 3 percent of all theft to about 33 percent. Strategic theft means the thief never breaks a lock. They forge carrier credentials, buy or borrow a motor carrier with a clean load history, win the tender, and drive away with freight that was handed to them.

CargoNet's quarterly data shows how far this has gone. In the second quarter of 2026 it logged 677 theft reports, down 26 percent from a year earlier, yet estimated losses more than doubled to $304.6 million from $135.7 million, and the average reported commodity value hit $564,009. Of those 677 reports, 378 were physical thefts of loaded equipment and 158 were fictitious pickups. By our arithmetic that is 23 percent of all reports arriving through the paperwork, not the fence line. Overhaul put deceptive pickups at about 10 percent of 2025 events, up 35 percent year over year, its fastest-growing theft method. Pilferage, taking part of a load, was 43 percent of its incidents.

CargoNet's outlook for 2026 says the quiet part: theft by deception groups are expected to focus on misdirecting shipments tendered to legitimate carriers, sidestepping compliance controls that have traditionally centered on the tendering process itself. Carrier vetting screens risk before the load moves. If the fraud activates after tender, there is nothing left to screen, and the only object that knows where the freight actually is sits under the freight.

This is the gap pallet-level GPS tracking was built for. A sensor embedded in the pallet reports its own position over cellular networks, independent of the truck and the carrier. When the pallet leaves the planned route or dwells where no stop was scheduled, Pulse flags it. No scanning, no dock infrastructure, no cooperation needed from the party that may be the problem.

Inventory Shrinkage Statistics

Inventory shrinkage is the retail-side cousin of cargo theft: the difference between what the books say and what the shelves hold. The National Retail Federation's National Retail Security Survey is the benchmark, and the last survey-based total it published was for 2022: shrink of 1.6 percent of sales, up from 1.4 percent, or $112.1 billion. The year before, NRF reported $94.5 billion at 1.44 percent for 2021 and $90.8 billion for 2020. Anyone quoting a 2024 or 2025 national shrink figure is estimating.

What NRF publishes now is the Impact of Theft & Violence study. The 2026 edition, fielded February to April 2026 with 66 retailers representing 143 brands and $1.7 trillion in sales (31.6 percent of U.S. retail), found shoplifting incidents down 12.4 percent in 2025 and retail merchandise theft down 8.1 percent. The organized side went the other way: organized retail crime incidents up 40 percent, repeat offenders up 50 percent, walkout and pushout theft up 37 percent, gift card fraud up 42 percent. And 63 percent of retailers report fewer than half of theft incidents to law enforcement, which tells you how much the official crime statistics undercount.

Why does a pallet company care about shrink? Because the shrink line is where in-transit loss goes to hide. A pallet pilfered at a cross-dock gets received against the purchase order, and the shortfall becomes an inventory adjustment three weeks later with no evidence of where it happened. Pilferage was 43 percent of Overhaul's 2025 incidents. Most of it is never called cargo theft. It is called shrink, and it is written off.

Pallet Loss in Pooled and Exchange Programs

Now the number everyone asks us for and nobody publishes: how many pallets does a pool lose? No pooler discloses a per-trip loss rate. A 2004 Pallet Enterprise review called pallet loss one of the main hindrances to starting a pool. The best public proxy is in Brambles' financial reporting. Brambles, the parent of CHEP, books an irrecoverable pooling equipment provision, or IPEP, for pallets it does not expect to get back. That provision was 3.9 percent of sales in FY21, 4.2 percent in FY22, 4.7 percent in FY23, 2.8 percent in FY24 and 1.4 percent in FY25.

Read that table as a story. Loss provisions rose for three years, then Brambles put money into what it calls asset efficiency: a loss recovery fleet, improved pallet visibility and analytics to recover pallets. Its FY25 results against the FY21 baseline: about 25 million additional pallets recovered and salvaged, uncompensated losses down about 50 percent, and pooling capital expenditure down from 29.9 percent of sales to 12.3 percent. Brambles headlines that as an 8 point improvement against its FY21 baseline and credits about 9 million fewer pallet purchases in FY25 to pallets recovered through its asset efficiency initiatives. That is the economic case for pallet tracking written by the largest pooler in the world, in its own investor deck.

How Many Shippers Use a Pool at All

Fewer than you might think. Modern Materials Handling's Pallet Report, run by Peerless Research Group, found 17 percent of respondents using a pallet pool in 2024, up from 15 percent the year before and 8 percent in 2022, with 14 percent using a pallet rental company and 76 percent not renting or using any retrieval provider. The October 2026 edition put pool users at 19 percent, up from 16 percent in 2025, with 92 percent still using wood and plastic use at 36 percent, up from 28 percent. Most of the market still buys white wood, loses it and buys more.

• Owned White Wood No loss rate because there is no recovery expectation; the pallet is consumed in 3 to 5 trips and the cost shows up as replacement purchases (see Why Plastic).
• Pooled Hardwood Loss is real but priced into rental fees, lost-pallet charges and transfer fees; Brambles' IPEP of 1.4 to 4.7 percent of sales is the only public yardstick.
• Exchange Programs Pallet-for-pallet swaps at the dock, where quality drifts down with every exchange and nobody tracks who holds the broken ones.
• Closed-Loop Lease Every pallet is tracked and expected back, so loss becomes a measured number per lane. This is the model APS runs, described in Sustainability.

In 2024 the Pallet Report also asked whether companies had a current business need that IoT-enabled pallets could satisfy. Ninety-three percent said no. The largest pooler in the world just cut its pallet purchases by finding its pallets, and 93 percent of the market has not connected the two.

Recovery Rates, Insurance and the Claim Clock

Recovery data is thin because recovery is rare. The clearest published series comes from Canada's Équité Association, the insurance industry's anti-crime body, which put the national cargo recovery rate at 9 percent in 2025, down from 13 percent in 2024, with trailer recovery falling from 64 percent to 44 percent. Trailer thefts nearly doubled, from about 570 to about 970. Équité also noted that cargo loss reports did not rise at the same pace as trailer thefts, which it attributes to reputational concerns and deductible thresholds.

In the United States, the American Trucking Associations has said that only one in 10 freight fraud and cargo theft cases results in an arrest, as Talk Business & Politics reported in April 2025. Lower recovery figures circulate from security vendors, but we could not verify them against a primary source.

What the Claim Clock Actually Says

Federal rules set the pace of a cargo claim, and the pace is slow. Under 49 CFR 370.9, a carrier that receives a loss or damage claim must pay it, decline it or make a firm compromise settlement offer in writing within 120 days of receipt. If it cannot, it must tell you why at 120 days and again at the end of every succeeding 60-day period while the claim stays open. Under 49 U.S.C. 14706(e), the Carmack Amendment, a carrier cannot give you less than 9 months to file a claim or less than 2 years to sue after a written denial. Four months is the fast path, and claims with no proof of where the loss occurred are the ones that get the delay letter instead.

Claims drag because of evidence, not regulation. Three parties point at each other, as we wrote in Pallets, Paperwork, and Proof, and the Incoterm that decides who pays is useless without a timestamp for when the loss happened. A pallet that logged its own location, movement and load state settles the question before the 120 days begin.

What the Numbers Mean and Where the Pallet Layer Fits

Put the statistics side by side and the shape of the problem is clear. Incident counts are flat. Dollar losses are up 60 percent. The share of theft done with paperwork instead of bolt cutters went from 3 percent to 33 percent in two years and kept climbing. Recovery sits in the single digits. Pallet pools provision one to five percent of sales for equipment they will never see again, and the shippers who buy their own pallets do not provision at all.

Every one of those numbers is a visibility problem before it is a security problem. Carrier vetting, dock-door RFID scans and carrier telematics all share a weakness: they belong to someone other than the owner of the freight, and they go dark exactly where the losses happen. The hours between two dock scans are where the facility thefts, the truck-stop thefts and every fictitious pickup take place.

• Independence Beats Permission Location data that comes from the cargo itself cannot be spoofed by a carrier's system or switched off by the person doing the pickup. APS pallets carry an embedded cellular GPS module, built into the pallet rather than bolted on, so there is nothing to install and nothing for the carrier to agree to.
• Exceptions Beat Feeds Nobody can watch 100,000 pallets. Pulse stays quiet while a pallet sits where it should and wakes up when it moves off plan, dwells too long or changes load state mid-trip, then routes the alert to the person who can act. The silence is data too.
• Records Beat Arguments A timestamped, geolocated chain of custody at every handoff is the evidence a 120-day claim window is waiting for. See Savings to estimate what unproven losses cost your network today.
• Found Pallets Beat Bought Pallets A closed loop where every pallet reports its position turns pallet loss from a provision into a number you can manage by lane.

Cargo theft has become a data-layer crime, and the response has to live in the data layer too. The pallet is the one asset present at the plant, the dock, the truck, the cross-dock and the store, and it has been silent through all of it. The statistics above are what silence costs. Tell us what you move and where, and an APS expert will come back with a program scoped to your network. Click Let's Talk.