Laid off from Knight-Swift Transportation.

What Knight-Swift Transportation layoffs have meant for employees

If you work at a Knight-Swift brand in IT, human resources or another support department, you're in the group that office rounds drew from at U.S. Xpress before the sale and at Knight-Swift after it. Knight-Swift's 2025 annual report counted 9,300 people in corporate and terminal leadership and support roles, about a quarter of its full-time staff, beside 26,200 company drivers. The 2023 cut also showed a way to stay, since some people in the affected departments were offered roles back in the core business work they'd done before, a source told FreightWaves. If one of those roles is offered to you, its pay, schedule and location are yours to weigh against leaving.

Knight-Swift's own accounts since then describe a steady trim of non-driver jobs in truckload. On its January 2026 earnings call, it said non-driver headcount there was down for a second year running, and it put that overhead alongside equipment and real estate among fixed-cost cuts it called structural, ones that won't come back. Its CEO said on the call that the company believed most of its fixed-cost reductions are permanent, and the company described exiting and selling about 13 locations and rolling out AI tools in 2026 to find opportunities in general and administrative costs. If you're waiting for a truckload support job to reopen when freight picks up, the company has told investors it doesn't see those costs returning. In LTL, the CEO said, Knight-Swift had grown its facility count faster than its shipments over the past 2 years and expected a more deliberate pace of expansion, and its October 2026 slides said it was reinvesting in over-the-road trucking as rates recovered.

Cuts came before and after the U.S. Xpress sale. The carrier trimmed its corporate staff more than once in the year before Knight-Swift bought it in July 2023, when about 1,400 people worked at its Ooltewah corporate office, according to Transport Topics. Knight-Swift's own support cut came soon after the sale, at a point when FreightWaves tied part of its weaker outlook to losses at its new U.S. Xpress unit, and its CEO and CFO took voluntary 20% cuts to their base salaries for the rest of that year, the same FreightWaves report said. By January 2026, Knight-Swift's CEO said in its fourth-quarter 2025 results release that the cost structure at U.S. Xpress had been largely brought in line, and the October slides still reported U.S. Xpress as its own business, one still improving its profitability.

More recently, Knight-Swift has started folding its brands together. Its LTL carriers took on the AAA Cooper name at the start of 2026, according to Trucking Dive, and it decided to fold Abilene Motor Express, a truckload carrier Knight bought in 2018, into Swift, a move its January call counted among the places it expected more efficiency in its costs. Abilene's president said its drivers would transition to Swift. If a fold moves you to a sister brand, you can set its pay, home time and home terminal beside what you had.

No notice from any of the office rounds turns up in our WARN tracker, so those cuts left no state filing there to look up. If you receive a termination email or letter, you can keep a copy outside company systems. For people at U.S. Xpress's Ooltewah office, a claim can start with Tennessee unemployment benefits, while someone who worked elsewhere can begin from every state's benefit rules.

A sourced history of Knight-Swift Transportation layoffs

• January 2026, Abilene Motor Express to fold into Swift

  Knight-Swift booked $52.9 million in impairment charges, mainly goodwill, intangible assets and property, from its decision to combine its Abilene truckload brand into Swift, its fourth-quarter 2025 release said, and Abilene was to keep its own name through January 27, a date Trucking Dive reported that month.

• December 2023, U.S. Xpress closing notice for Marion, Indiana

  A permanent closure at 5575 Dollar General Way in Marion would affect 62, U.S. Xpress told Indiana in an amended WARN notice that listed layoff dates of December 22, 2023 and January 19, 2024.

• 2023, Knight-Swift support-department layoffs

  Knight-Swift laid off human resources, IT and other support staff, among them business analysts, scrum masters, quality analysts and project managers, after a second-quarter earnings miss and a lowered full-year outlook, sources told FreightWaves.

• May 2023, U.S. Xpress corporate cuts ahead of the merger

  U.S. Xpress cut roles in a few business areas in response to challenging market conditions, a spokeswoman said May 12, in what Transport Topics counted as its third corporate staff cut in a year.

• May and August 2022, U.S. Xpress office layoffs

  U.S. Xpress laid off about 70 of its 1,400 office employees in May and about 66 of 1,330 in August, and told FreightWaves the August cut came from a multiphased restructuring to improve its financial results.

• October 2019, Swift Logistics warehouse closing in Pennsylvania

  Swift Logistics told Pennsylvania's Department of Labor & Industry it would close its Springettsbury Township warehouse on December 31 and lay off 56 employees, a notice Transport Topics reported in October.

What to do if you're laid off from Knight-Swift Transportation

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Knight-Swift Transportation's biggest hubs: Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Indiana. Somewhere else? Every state is here.
• Apply for financial and hardship assistance. Unemployment supplements income, but food benefits, health coverage and utility help are often available as well. Here's some of what Knight-Swift Transportation's hub states run: Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Indiana, and every other state is here.
• Mind the health insurance window. Losing coverage opens a 60-day special enrollment period, and an ACA plan usually beats unsubsidized COBRA. Compare your options before the employer coverage lapses, and read how the COBRA clocks run if you are weighing it seriously.
• Get your real runway number. Severance plus savings divided by reality. The calculator takes five minutes.
• Know which clocks are already running. Severance review windows, COBRA election, visa grace periods, and 401(k) rollovers all run on federal deadlines that started at termination. All five deadlines are here.