Two markets under one class

A sleeper is a tractor with a bunk behind the seats, built for long haul. A day cab has no bunk and comes home at night: regional freight, less-than-truckload, ports, construction. Both are class 8, both pull the same trailers, and a price book files them one line apart. For two years they have moved in opposite directions.

The divergence shows up in J.D. Power's monthly guidelines, the closest thing the used-truck market has to a published index. In autumn 2024 day cabs were losing 3.6 percent a month while three-to-five-year-old sleepers lost 2.3 percent at retail. By early 2025 the gap had become a split: sleepers were up 14.4 percent year over year in January while day cabs were down 4.8 percent, and in February day cabs fell 14.4 percent in a single month.

Why they parted

Two supply stories, running at once. Sleepers are scarce because the factories built few of them in 2021, when parts shortages throttled production, so the four-to-six-year-old sleeper that fleets want in 2025 barely exists. Day cabs are glutted because the regional and less-than-truckload carriers that run them were shrinking, and because one of the largest of them, Yellow, failed in 2023 and put roughly 12,000 tractors and 35,000 trailers through auction over the following two years. Most of those tractors were single-axle day cabs.

Sandhills, which owns the TruckPaper marketplace, counts inventory as well as prices. In October 2024 it recorded something it had never seen: more day cabs for sale than sleepers. Day-cab inventory was up 27 percent on the year while sleeper inventory was down 31.8 percent. The deepest day-cab price falls followed three months later.

The count of trucks for sale in each segment is an early warning. It moved a full quarter before the prices did.

Where it stands now

The gap has narrowed but not closed. Sandhills' September 2026 report, covering August, had sleeper inventory down 42.3 percent on the year, the largest fall of any category, with sleeper auction values up 5.7 percent on the month and 5.9 percent on the year. Day cabs recorded the largest monthly inventory drop, 7.2 percent, and their asking prices rose 3.1 percent on the month but were still 3.7 percent below a year earlier. Scarcity is finally reaching the day-cab lot, a year after it reached the sleeper lot. Two years in, the two segments are still telling different stories, and the second is a lagged copy of the first.