JB Hunt Reports Q3 Revenue Up 20%, EPS Up 3%

JB Hunt Transport Servs (NASDAQ: JBHT ) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

Access the full call at Summary JB Hunt Transport Services reported a 20% increase in total revenue, a 2% increase in operating income, and a 3% increase in diluted earnings per share for the third quarter of 2026. The company is focused on disciplined growth and operational excellence, aiming for sustainable growth that creates long-term value for customers, employees, and shareholders. Key cost headwinds included driver-related investments, volatile fuel prices, and higher claims and medical costs, which impacted operating income by over $50 million.

The company repurchased $174 million in stock during the quarter and plans to invest approximately $700 million in CapEx for the year, focusing on replacement needs and growth opportunities. Management emphasized the importance of margin repair and pricing strategies to reflect the value provided, with ongoing efforts to improve productivity and lower structural costs. Intermodal volumes grew 8% year-over-year, with strong demand and a focus on road-to-rail conversion opportunities, particularly in the East. Dedicated business faced growth-related expenses and inflationary pressures, but management remains confident in long-term opportunities and margin expectations.

The company is actively engaging in pricing discussions with customers to address cost pressures and expects to achieve margin improvement through upcoming bid seasons. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good afternoon and welcome to the JB Hunt Transport Servs third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero.

After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance. Please go ahead. Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance Good afternoon. Before I introduce the speakers, I would like to provide some disclosures regarding forward-looking statements.

This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on JB Hunt Transport Servs' current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

For more information regarding risk factors, please refer to JB Hunt Transport Servs' Annual Report on Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now I would like to introduce the speakers on today's call. This afternoon I'm joined by our President and CEO, Shelley Simpson; our CFO, Brad Delco; Spencer Frazier, EVP of Sales and Marketing; our COO and President of Highway Services and Final Mile, Nick Hobbs; Brad Hicks, President of Dedicated Contract Services; and Darren Field, President of Intermodal. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Ms.

Shelley Simpson, for some opening comments. Shelley Simpson — President and Chief Executive Officer Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to start by thanking our employees for their continued focus on serving customers safely and consistently. Their efforts are the foundation of the progress we're making across the business every day.

As I think about where we are today, it's important to remember that our industry operates in cycles. With the long tenure of our management team, we have been through numerous cycles, and what we've learned over time is that success comes from staying disciplined throughout every phase and strategically positioning ourselves for the opportunities that follow. A few years ago, our team focused the organization on operational excellence. We spent significant time improving execution, strengthening service, driving productivity, and creating a more efficient operation.

Those efforts were not always easy, but they were necessary. As growth opportunities returned, we were positioned to capitalize on that demand and take market share because the foundation had already been built. We offer customers unique value across our scroll of services and remain committed to disciplined growth that aligns with the returns we expect to generate. But growth alone is not the objective.

Sustainable growth that creates long-term value for our customers, our people, and our shareholders is the objective. As I look across the organization, we are seeing evidence that our strategy is working. We are making early progress on driver hiring, which gives us confidence in our ability to support current and future growth. Our year-to-date safety performance continues to improve on last year's record, reflecting the discipline and culture we built over many years.

We are seeing the record pipeline in dedicated begin to translate into new truck growth and are continuing to take market share in our more transactional businesses. Customers continue to lean into JB Hunt. Across our organization, we're seeing evidence that customers want deeper relationships and broader engagement within our services. Importantly, we're approaching these opportunities with rigor and discipline.

Every growth opportunity is measured against the return profile we expect to create. We are working daily to ensure we maintain the right balance between growth, customer service, operational excellence, and financial discipline. Looking forward, we will continue to improve productivity and lower structural costs where opportunities exist. But the largest opportunity ahead of us is ensuring our pricing reflects the value we create.

We are making decisions today that we believe will strengthen margins and returns over the long term, enabling us to create even greater value for customers that will ultimately need to be covered through higher rates. The foundation is strong, the opportunities ahead are meaningful, and we remain focused on converting both into improved margins, stronger returns, and long-term shareholder value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brad. Brad Delco, CFO Thanks, Shelly, and good afternoon.

Let me start with the quarter on a GAAP basis. Total revenue increased 20%, operating income increased 2%, and diluted earnings per share increased 3% versus the prior-year period. Sequentially, operating income fell 5% from the second quarter. At the better end of the guidance we provided each quarter, these results reflect strong demand for our services and disciplined execution.

We absorbed near-term cost pressure while investing behind growth. We are protecting our networks, growing with purpose, and positioning the company to generate stronger returns as our pricing catches up with our strong value proposition. At an investor conference in September, we identified three primary cost headwinds: driver-related investments, volatile fuel prices, and higher claims and medical cost. Driver-related costs include recruiting, onboarding, training, sign-on bonuses, and targeted wage actions.

In total, these cost buckets—driver-related, claims, and fuel—impacted operating income by over $50 million versus the second quarter of this year, and group medical costs alone accounted for more than $16 million of that increase. These costs are real, but the context matters. Driver investments support visible demand and prepare our networks for growth. Fuel surcharge programs recover costs over time, although rapid movements create a timing mismatch and dilute margins.

Risk and medical costs remain an industry-wide challenge, and an elevated number of train derailments drive up cargo claims expense. We will control what we can through safety, productivity, asset utilization, and disciplined execution. Importantly, we have not given back the structural cost improvements from our lowering our cost to serve initiative. These pressures are either more cyclical or unpredictable than structural and reinforce the need to price our services for the value, capacity, and reliability we deliver.

Turning to capital allocation, our priorities remain consistent and return focused. Net CapEx was $146 million in the quarter, primarily supporting replacement needs based on a robust pipeline of dedicated opportunities. We expect CapEx to trend higher in Q4 but still targeting approximately $700 million for the year. We repurchased approximately $174 million in stock, or over 700,000 shares, in the quarter, the majority of which were purchased towards the end of the period.

We will invest where returns are compelling, preserve our investment-grade balance sheet, support a growing dividend, and remain opportunistic with repurchases. We will not deploy capital simply to grow. Every dollar must strengthen the business and create long-term shareholder value. Let me close with three points.

First, disciplined growth is working. Our service, scale, and execution are earning customer trust and creating share gain opportunities. Second, margin repair remains a top priority. We have done the hard work on structural cost and will be equally disciplined in securing prices that reflect the value we create.

Third, we are supporting long-term growth from a position of strength with experienced people, proven technology, and available pre-funded capacity. We have confidence and focus on converting execution into durable earnings growth and stronger shareholder returns. That concludes my comments. I'll now turn it over to Spencer.

Spencer Frazier, EVP of Sales and Marketing Thank you, Brad, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. In a dynamic, rapidly changing market, our people remain focused on what we can control: serving customers, improving execution, and helping shippers create reliability across their supply chains. Our teams have earned customer trust by doing what we say we will do, and that trust is reflected in the depth of our relationships and growth of our business. Over the last several quarters, we spent a significant amount of time discussing the structural changes taking place across the transportation industry.

The pace of this change created tender acceptance, cost, and driver availability challenges for our customers. Capacity remains constrained, operating costs continue to move higher, and supply chains are seeking out providers that can deliver reliable capacity at scale. Most importantly, customers have gained a much clearer understanding of these realities. The conversations we are having today are materially different than those we were having a year ago, six months ago, or even last quarter.

During the quarter, demand across our scroll of services continues to outpace the broader market. Our customer retention remains strong, and we saw continued growth in our commercial pipelines. Customers are proactively engaging with our commercial teams across all business units as they evaluate efficient network designs, transportation procurement strategies, and long-term capacity planning. As part of those discussions, we are seeing customers become increasingly focused on provider quality, resiliency, and operational execution rather than viewing transportation strictly through the lens of procurement.

While working with customers to create differentiated value, we also believe the industry is entering a new phase of the cycle—one that has moved from repricing transactional capacity to repricing contractual capacity. You can see from our results our work started with ICS and repricing our transactional brokerage business in Q2, then JBT quickly repriced our portfolio in Q3, and now we are actively repricing our JBI and DCS business. Customers understand it is getting more expensive to support the capacity, the service, and the professional driving jobs that power America's supply chains. They understand that reliability creates value beyond the rate per mile.

That's the foundation for our pricing conversations. Simply put, we remain focused on delivering operational excellence and being compensated for the value we create for customers. We are confident in our ability to help customers achieve better outcomes and confident that those outcomes will continue to be reflected in the returns generated across our business. With that, I'll turn the call over to Nick.

Nick Hobbs — Chief Operating Officer Thanks, Spencer, and good afternoon. I'll provide some updates on our Final Mile and highway businesses, but I'll start with an operations update. A key piece of our work to be operationally excellent involves our commitment to safety, building on the past three record years. I'm proud that our safety performance year to date, as measured by DOT preventable accidents per million miles, continues to best last year.

Our team has done a great job of onboarding a significant number of new drivers in the past several months while investing in training to ensure future success. At JB Hunt Transport Servs, which has safety at the core, on the driver front, our driver needs to support current and future growth of our business remain elevated. We have opened the same proven playbook we have used in past cycles and implemented various strategies to attract and retain drivers. We are seeing good results from these actions as driver hiring success improved throughout the quarter.

We continue to believe the industry will need to further invest in and professional drivers who operate safely and comply with industry regulations. Shifting to the business in Final Mile. Our demand in our fulfillment business remains strong and we are expanding with customers. In this vertical, in our core end markets of furniture, exercise equipment and appliances, demand remains stable.

Our sales pipeline across Final Mile remains encouraging, and we continue to have conversations with both new and existing customers around new opportunities as we work to offset as much as of our previously disclosed $90 million revenue headwind. Going forward, we're expecting a modest peak season in Final Mile and our focus remains on repairing our margins through disciplined growth so that the returns match the value we create for our customers. In JBT, we have spent the past couple of years focused on operational excellence, really earning the trust of our customers through our service.

This trust has afforded us the opportunity to have discussions with customers to address rates that were no longer able to source capacity in the market. We took an appropriate amount of risk in these discussions and while we did see some volume churn from customers, we remained disciplined on rate and quickly addressed our profitability woes in the second quarter. These new rates were implemented throughout the third quarter and we have actually seen some of the volume that churned come back to us in the form of many bids.

Going forward, we remain focused on providing high levels of service while maintaining our open dialogue with customers to ensure our rates remain aligned with the current market conditions and the value we create for our customers. I'll close with ICS. The positive momentum we have in this business continues to build. We have been successful in adjusting our prices to the value we create and to reflect the current market conditions while remaining disciplined.

In the quarter, gross margin expanded almost 200 basis points sequentially, supported by our focus on returning the business to our margin targets. The truckload market remains dynamic, but we are confident in our strategy and our team and our ability to quickly adapt to changes in the market. We continue to see opportunities to further grow market share driven by the strength of our service, our platform and our customer relationships. Going forward, our focus has not changed.

We expect to leverage our cost through the use of technology and to continue to scale volume through the platform to drive disciplined, profitable growth in the segment. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Brad. Brad Hicks — EVP & President of Dedicated Contract Services Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everybody. I'll provide an update on our Dedicated business, starting with the quarter at a high level.

Our third quarter results were below our expectations as overall solid demand was more than offset by growth-related expenses and additional inflationary cost pressures. While the results this quarter do not reflect the underlying strength of the business, my confidence in the long-term opportunity and our margin expectations for our Dedicated business have not changed. More on this in a minute. During the quarter we sold approximately 425 trucks of new deals, bringing our year-to-date new sales number to 970 trucks compared to our full-year target for gross sales of 1,000 to 1,200 new trucks.

Even with this strong sales performance, our pipeline remains at record levels as customers continue to engage with us about an outsourced fleet solution amid current market dynamics. In September, our pricing activity was up almost 50% compared to last year and the amount of business going through an engineered design request is near record levels. This activity continues to be supported by our disciplined pricing approach to targeted returns on our invested capital. In the quarter, we also saw customers look to grow existing fleets with us.