How to find hotshot loads

There are four ways hotshot drivers find loads: load boards, a dispatcher, brokers who post freight, and going direct to the companies that hand out the work. The first three are easy to find and take a cut or a fee. The fourth is free to work and pays the best, but nobody hands you the doors — you have to know which companies give hotshot work to outside drivers.

Load boards

The big boards carry hotshot freight alongside everything else. They cost a monthly subscription, the good loads go in minutes, and you are bidding against every driver in the state. Boards are a fine way to fill a gap or find a load back toward home. They are a hard way to build a living, because a board load pays board rates and the next one is never promised.

A dispatcher

A dispatch service finds your loads, books them and does the paperwork for a percentage or a weekly fee — published prices run about 7–8% of the load, or $350 to $375 a week flat. That buys you time and a full calendar. It also means a stranger decides what your truck earns. Read the guide on what a dispatcher costs before you sign anything.

Brokers

Freight brokers post loads they need covered. Working with brokers means carrier packets, factoring decisions and 30-day payment clocks. Some drivers build a whole business on three or four good brokers. The work is real, but the broker keeps the customer — when the broker loses the account, your loads vanish with it.

Going direct

The fourth way is the oldest: the rental yard, the auction house, the dealer, the oilfield service company. Their loads never reach a board, because the yard calls its driver first. There is no subscription and no percentage — the rate is between you and the company, and the relationship is yours. The cost is effort: you have to find the doors, walk in, and keep showing up. A book of those doors, state by state, is exactly what Hotshot Runs sells — because the doors were never in one place before.

What about expediting?

Expediting is the neighbouring business: freight that has to move now, usually booked through expedite carriers running sprinters, straight trucks and some one-ton pickups. A dually can find a place in parts of that world — the freight is time-critical like hotshot freight — but the doors are expedite carriers and their contracts, not load boards, and the rigs they standardise on are enclosed. Drivers cross over both ways; just know the money is counted differently, by the mile on long urgent runs.

Houston and oil country loads

Drivers ask which board is best for Houston oil and gas work. The honest answer is that oilfield freight in Houston moves the way it moves everywhere in the patch: through the service companies, yards and terminals in the book's Texas chapter, with boards as the overflow. A board subscription will show you Houston freight; it will not show you the terminal manager who loads three hotshots a day.