Empty running in Europe: what the statistics actually say

In 2025, 21.8 % of the distance driven by road freight vehicles registered in the EU was driven empty. That is Eurostat’s own figure, not an industry estimate: Road freight transport by journey characteristics, drawn from the road_go_ta_tott collection and extracted in August 2026 (Eurostat, Statistics Explained). A fifth of everything a European truck drives, it drives with nothing on board.

It is worth sitting with that number before doing anything with it, because it is more stable than it looks. The same measurement stood at 21.6 % in 2024, and Eurostat’s earlier reporting put it at around 20 % in 2020 (Eurostat news, A fifth of road freight kilometres by empty vehicles, 2021). Five years, three readings, a two-point range. Whatever is driving empty running across the EU fleet, it is not a recent trend and it is not improving. It is closer to a structural constant of how road freight is currently planned.

The split the headline number hides

The EU-wide figure is an average of two very different situations, and Eurostat reports them separately for exactly that reason. In 2025, national transport ran empty 26.0 % of the time; international transport ran empty 12.9 % of the time — roughly double. In 2024 the same split was 25.8 % against 12.6 %. The gap is not noise; it shows up every year Eurostat has published it.

The likely reasons are structural rather than mysterious. International freight is booked further ahead, covers more distance per journey, and is planned by people whose job is specifically to fill that vehicle for the whole trip — the cost of an empty international leg is large enough to justify the planning effort. National freight is shorter, more repetitive, and more often planned the same day or the day before, which leaves less room to search for a return load before the vehicle has to move. Eurostat’s own figures do not explain the mechanism; they only establish that the gap is real and persistent.

Country figures make the range visible in a way the EU average cannot. In the 2025 data, Cyprus ran 43.1 % of its vehicle-kilometres empty; Austria 33.4 %; Ireland and Greece 33.3 % each. At the other end, Denmark ran 7.6 % empty, Belgium 10.1 %, Lithuania 10.9 %. A fleet in Denmark and a fleet in Cyprus are not failing or succeeding by the same margin — geography, the shape of the domestic economy, and how much of the country’s freight is transit rather than origin-and-destination all move this number before any carrier’s own planning does. Within international transport specifically, France and Austria each ran 29.1 % of their international vehicle-kilometres empty, ahead of Germany (20.9 %), Luxembourg (20.7 %) and Ireland (20.0 %) — a reminder that “international” is not one homogeneous flow either; a country positioned as a through-route for other people’s freight looks different from one that mostly exports and imports its own.

What the published numbers do not show

The angle worth naming honestly is the one the headline statistics do not answer: how much of this empty running belongs to own-account operators — a manufacturer or retailer running its own trucks to move its own goods — as against hire-and-reward carriers, whose entire commercial purpose is moving other people’s freight for a fee. Eurostat’s underlying collection framework does distinguish the two categories, and the shape of the incentive is not hard to guess: a company running trucks as a cost centre in service of its core business has less structural pressure to chase a return load than a carrier whose margin depends on it. But Eurostat’s published commentary on empty running breaks the number out by national and international transport, not by own-account and hire-and-reward — so that comparison is not something this piece can put a figure on. It is a real question about the data, not a gap in this article’s research; the number to answer it does not appear to be publicly reported at this level of detail, and a plausible mechanism is not a statistic.

What one fleet’s number is not

An EU or even a national average is not a diagnosis for a specific fleet. It is a distribution, and any single carrier can legitimately sit well above or below it for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they plan: the freight available in their region, the equipment they run, how much of their work is genuinely one-way by nature (a delivery to an island, a seasonal harvest lane that only runs one direction most weeks). Comparing your own empty share to 21.8 % tells you almost nothing on its own. Comparing your own empty share this quarter to your own empty share last quarter, per lane and per vehicle, tells you whether something changed — and that is the number worth keeping.

The EU figure is useful for exactly one thing: it puts a floor under expectations. If a system, a broker, or a consultant is promising to take a fleet’s empty running to near zero, the EU’s own most efficient large markets — Denmark at 7.6 %, Belgium at 10.1 % — are the ceiling that claim has to clear, and they are still not zero. Some empty running is structurally correct: repositioning to where next week’s freight starts, a genuinely one-way regional flow, a return load that would cost more in fuel and hours than it earns. The honest target is not zero; it is knowing which part of your own number is the structural floor and which part is a leg nobody looked for a load early enough to fill — the operational half of this question, and one this site has covered on its own terms in backhauls and empty kilometres.

Where navichain fits

navichain does not change what Eurostat measures; it changes what a planner can see about their own fleet’s version of the same number. A dispatch board and a planning sheet put every run’s outbound and return legs — including the empty one nobody plans around — in front of a planner days before departure, off one set of numbers the whole office reads from as the day happens, so an empty leg is something to act on rather than a gap noticed after the vehicle has already left. What it will not do is tell you whether your regional average should look like Denmark’s or Cyprus’s — that answer is in your own freight, not in ours. Every feature is on every plan, from 995 kr a month; the details are on the pricing page and the platform page.