17% of Europe's Truck Drivers Retire by 2029 — the Country-by-Country Map of Who Loses Most

Road freight is the circulatory system of the European economy. Trucks move roughly 75% of all goods transported within the EU by volume, and around 85% of perishable, high-value, and medical cargo including food, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines. The entire system depends on one scarce and increasingly endangered resource: the professional truck driver. What the latest data reveals is that Europe is not facing a temporary recruitment challenge. It is facing a structural demographic collapse that has been decades in the making and is now close enough to touch.

In April 2025, the International Road Transport Union published its 2024 Global Driver Shortage Report, drawing on data from 36 countries representing 70% of global GDP. The headline finding was stark: 3.4 million truck drivers are projected to retire across the five years to 2029. Europe's share of that wave amounts to roughly 17% of the current active workforce. To put that in operational terms, by the end of this decade Europe will have lost approximately one in six of its professional drivers to retirement — and the pipeline of younger workers entering the profession is nowhere near deep enough to replace them. The average age of a European truck driver today is 47. The global average has already crept up to 44.5 and continues to rise year on year.

The scale of the current shortfall already gives a sense of how steep the road ahead is. In 2023 the EU, Norway and the United Kingdom combined for 233,000 unfilled truck driver positions. By 2024 that figure had climbed to over 426,000 — nearly doubling in a single year. IRU projects the number will exceed 745,000 by 2028 if no significant intervention occurs. More than half of European transport operators surveyed in 2024 reported that driver shortages are actively preventing them from expanding their businesses. This is not a problem arriving in the future. It is a problem that is already reshaping how freight moves across the continent, which routes are viable, and which operators can actually take on new contracts.

The demographic scissors: understanding the real mechanism

To understand why this crisis is structural rather than cyclical, it helps to think of the driver workforce as two moving blades of a pair of scissors. One blade is the over-55 cohort — a large group moving steadily toward retirement. The other blade is the under-25 cohort — the incoming generation that should, in theory, replace them. In a healthy profession, these blades move in rough proportion to each other. In European trucking right now, one blade is enormous and accelerating, while the other is shrinking. That is the scissors effect, and it explains why the problem will not self-correct.

Across Europe, 31.6% of all truck drivers are currently over 55. That share increased by 1.6 percentage points in the single year between 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, the share of drivers under 25 stands at just 6.5% globally, and it fell by 5.8% from 2023 to 2024 — a decline that happened even as the broader youth labour force in the same countries grew by 1.4%. Young workers are not absent from the labour market. They are absent specifically from truck driving. The profession is failing to attract new entrants at the very moment it most needs them, and the gap between the two blades of the scissors is widening every year.

Spain: the most acute exposure in Europe

Spain presents the most alarming demographic profile on the continent. Half of all Spanish truck drivers — 50% — are currently over the age of 55. That means an entire generation of experienced drivers is within a decade of retirement, and in many cases considerably closer. At the other end of the age spectrum, just 3% of Spanish drivers are under 25. Spain also has one of Europe's highest rates of female unemployment at 14%, yet one of the lowest shares of female truck drivers at only 2%, meaning a large untapped labour pool exists but is not being reached. The structural imbalance between these figures defines the scale of Spain's coming capacity problem.

Italy: the lowest youth intake in Europe

Italy's over-55 share sits at 45%, placing it among the three most exposed countries in Europe. But the more alarming number is at the other end of the age distribution: just 2.2% of Italian truck drivers are under 25, the lowest youth intake rate of any major market on the continent. IRU's survey data, gathered with Truckfly by Michelin across seven European markets, found that British, French and Italian drivers are actually among the most satisfied with their jobs, with young drivers under 25 showing the highest satisfaction levels of any age group. The problem in Italy is therefore not that young drivers who enter the profession leave it — it is that they never enter it to begin with. Entry barriers, not working conditions, are blocking the pipeline.

Germany: the highest-stakes market

Germany carries the largest road-freight volume of any EU economy, which makes its demographic profile not just a national concern but a continental one. Approximately 45% of German truck drivers are currently over 55, placing it alongside Spain and Italy in the critical tier. Only 2.6% are under 25. IRU specifically names Germany alongside Slovakia as a country where the structural gap between younger and older drivers is "particularly acute." The knock-on effects extend beyond German domestic freight: Germany sits at the intersection of the EU's most important east-west and north-south trade corridors, so capacity tightening in Germany reverberates through logistics networks across the whole single market.

Slovakia, Poland and Romania: the corridor countries

Slovakia is explicitly flagged by IRU as one of the countries where the demographic gap is "particularly acute," though granular age-band data has not been published separately. Its significance lies in its geography: Slovak carriers are central to the Central European transit corridor connecting Germany, Austria, Hungary and further east. Poland operates the EU's largest absolute truck driver pool, but the under-25 intake rate stands at just 3% and the over-55 share is estimated in the 30–35% range based on IRU regional data. Romania already has more than 71,000 unfilled driver positions and has historically functioned as a driver-export nation, supplying labour to western EU markets. As Romania's own demographic position deteriorates, that export capacity shrinks, compounding shortfalls in the markets that have relied on it.

France and the Netherlands: different problems, same direction

France illustrates how structural barriers beyond demographics can amplify the crisis. A truck licence in France costs approximately €5,300 — more than three times the average minimum monthly salary. For a young person weighing career options, that upfront cost is prohibitive regardless of how much experienced drivers earn. The Netherlands takes the opposite approach on pay: Dutch truck drivers earn on average 133% above the national minimum wage, the highest premium in Europe, yet the country still reports recruitment difficulties that prevent fleet expansion. The Dutch example is instructive because it demonstrates what IRU's data shows at the aggregate level — there is no statistical correlation between driver pay and shortage severity. The crisis is not about money. It is about access, perception, and the structural barriers that block younger workers from entering the profession.

The policy response: a step forward, but too late for 2029

The EU has responded to the crisis, and the response is meaningful — it simply arrives too late to prevent the 2029 shortfall. On 22 October 2025, the European Parliament passed Directive 2025/2205, which standardises the minimum age for a Category C truck licence at 18 for applicants holding a Certificate of Professional Competence. It also introduces a supervised driving framework from age 17, allowing licence-eligible young people to drive trucks accompanied by an experienced driver. This directly addresses one of the most significant structural barriers IRU had identified — the age threshold that was previously 21 in five EU member states and effectively closed the school-to-wheel pathway for young people.

The timeline, however, is where the problem lies. Member states have until November 2028 to transpose the Directive into national law and until November 2029 to apply it operationally. Any meaningful pipeline of newly qualified 18-year-old drivers will not appear in workforce data before 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, and at scale not until the early 2030s. The retirement cliff arrives in 2029. The policy solution, as currently structured, lands at almost exactly the same moment as the problem it is trying to solve. The shortfall in the intervening years is structural and, on current policy alone, unavoidable.

On the international recruitment front, the IRU's SDM4EU programme is running Phase 2 operational pilots in 2026, matching countries with surplus driver capacity to EU nations facing acute shortages. In February 2026 the European Commission published the STEER2EU study — the most comprehensive assessment to date of how non-EU qualified drivers can be integrated into EU road-freight operations — documenting the patchwork of qualification recognition standards across member states that currently deters both drivers and employers from pursuing the international route. These are important steps, but they address a symptom rather than the underlying cause, and their timeline for meaningful workforce impact extends well into the late 2020s.

What operators are doing in the meantime

Faced with a shortfall that neither demographic trends nor policy timelines will bridge in the near term, transport companies are adapting on their own. IRU's survey of 5,100 firms in 2024 found that more than 70% in certain countries are already implementing active retention and attraction measures. The most widespread response is salary uplifts and performance rewards, reported by over half of European operators. Investing in newer and better-equipped vehicles — a factor that meaningfully affects driver satisfaction and retention — is being pursued by 44% of operators. Covering the cost of CPC qualifications and licence fees for new entrants is being done by 35%, and structured upskilling programmes by 25%. These are all reasonable responses, but they address the pipeline problem only at the margins.

Technology adoption is accelerating as a parallel strategy. Among the firms surveyed, 54% name automation and digital productivity tools as a mitigation priority, with delivery route optimisation and driver mobile tools ranking highest. Some operators have extended international recruitment to Central Asian markets including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, establishing regional entities specifically to pipeline non-EU qualified drivers while the EU's recognition framework is still being built. As the CXTMS freight analysis from March 2026 observed, driver availability is increasingly the binding constraint on capacity for shippers routing freight through Germany, France, Poland or the Benelux corridor — ahead of equipment, infrastructure or regulation. The operators who are best positioned heading into 2029 are those who are treating this as a supply chain risk to be actively managed, not a workforce problem to be handled reactively.

What this means heading into the late 2020s

The 2029 retirement cliff is not a scenario to prepare for. It is a trajectory already underway, visible in workforce data that is updated annually and trending consistently in the same direction. For transport directors planning fleet capacity and network commitments through 2027 and 2028, the implication is direct: the demographic signal is already embedded in your current driver headcount, whether or not it has been mapped explicitly. If your fleet reflects the European average, roughly one-third of your drivers are within a decade of retirement. If your under-25 intake rate is below 5%, you are not replacing attrition — you are deferring it and compounding the eventual shortfall.

The countries that anchor the problem — Spain, Italy, Germany and Slovakia at the critical tier, Poland, Romania and France close behind — are also the countries that anchor European freight. This is not a peripheral issue affecting minor markets. It is a structural shift occurring at the centre of continental logistics. The operators and shippers who respond now, by auditing their workforce demographics, investing in qualification pipelines for younger candidates, and rethinking how they recruit, will be materially better positioned than those who wait for the shortfall to become an operational crisis before acting. The data has been clear for several years. The window for structured preparation, rather than emergency response, is measured now in months and years rather than decades.

The driver shortage crisis is ultimately a hiring problem — one that plays out across thousands of individual recruitment decisions made every month by transport operators across Europe. Every week that a position goes unfilled represents lost capacity, delayed freight, and revenue that cannot be recovered. CE.D was built in response to exactly this pressure. By combining AI-powered candidate screening with a Europe-wide driver network, CE.D helps transport companies move faster through the hiring process — reducing the time from application to qualified placement, and making it practical for operators to compete for a shrinking pool of available drivers without the manual overhead that traditional recruitment demands. In a market where the demographic tide is working against every operator simultaneously, the companies that hire more efficiently gain a structural advantage. That is the problem CE.D is working to solve.