The Trucking Business in Southern Africa: Starting, Running and Getting Paid

Starting a trucking business takes a few weeks. Running one takes the rest of your working life. Almost everything written on the subject covers the first part.

This page is about the second. What decides whether your truck gets work, what the market actually pays and when, what size the other operators are, and the one asset nobody can sell you.

What actually decides whether you get a load

This is the question every operator has and almost nobody answers concretely, because answering it requires running a matching engine. We run one, so here it is.

Two things decide the order loads reach you in.

1. Your vehicle type. Tipper work goes in front of tippers first.
2. Your corridor. The lanes your truck actually runs.

They order the board. They do not close it. Nothing about your truck stops you seeing a load, or applying for one off your usual lanes — not your payload capacity, not your trailer dimensions, not whether you carry GIT cover, not your axle count, not tarpaulins, not GPS.

Those things are all still recorded, and they are all still shown to the shipper deciding between applicants. They just do not stop a load reaching you first. The distinction matters more than it sounds: a filter you fail is a load you never knew existed, while a fact displayed beside your name is something you can explain.

So the practical advice is the opposite of what you would guess. Give as much detail about your truck as you possibly can — it cannot narrow what you are shown, and it is what a shipper reads when choosing. And keep your corridors accurate, because that is a filter, and an empty or wrong corridor list is the single most common reason an operator sees nothing.

Corridors belong to the truck, not to you — each vehicle carries its own lanes, up to five. A three-truck fleet running different routes needs three different corridor sets, and setting them on one truck does nothing for the other two.

Who you are competing with

Operators tell us how many trucks they run when they sign up. This is what they say:

Fleet size	Share of operators
1 truck	38%
2–5 trucks	39%
6–20 trucks	14%
20+ trucks	8%
None yet	1%

More than three in four run five trucks or fewer. Just over one in five runs six or more.

If you are starting with one truck, that is not a disadvantage you need to hide — it is the largest single group on the board. The operators you are bidding against are mostly the same size as you, and the ones who are not are competing for different work.

These are declared figures, not counted ones. We record what an operator tells us; we do not audit it.

When you actually get paid

Cash flow kills more transport businesses than rates do. The standard advice is to plan for 30 to 60 day terms and finance the gap.

That is not what this board looks like. Here is how shippers on Kweli Load Exchange actually set their terms:

Payment terms offered	Share of loads
At or before loading	51%
On delivery / COD	31%
Split 50/50	8%
Deferred credit (14 or 30 days)	8%
Not stated	1%
Other	Under 1%

Eight percent. Four out of five loads here pay at loading or on delivery, and fewer than one in twelve asks you to wait.

Read that carefully before you plan around it. These are the terms shippers set when they post — what is being offered, not a record of what was paid. A term in a posting is a promise, and the whole reason a track record matters is that promises and outcomes are different things.

What it does tell you is what to ask for. If half the board pays on loading, a 30-day term is a negotiating position, not an industry standard you have to accept. That is worth knowing before you agree to one.

The asset nobody can sell you

You can buy a truck. You can buy insurance, a permit, a tracking unit, a bookkeeper. You cannot buy the thing that actually gets you the next load, which is somebody’s memory of the last one.

Here is the problem that creates for a smaller operator. Your reputation exists — the shippers you have worked for know exactly how good you are. But it does not travel. It sits in the heads of three or four people and in a WhatsApp group nobody else can read. To the fifth shipper, you are a stranger with a truck, and so is everyone else, so they pick on price or on who they already know.

A large fleet solves this by being known. A single-truck operator with a spotless ten-year record has no way to prove it, and that is not a quality gap — it is a memory gap.

So the business advice that matters most is unglamorous: do the work in places where it is recorded. Collections made when you said, deliveries made when you said, documents provided without being chased. Those become a record a future shipper can read before they decide — which is the difference between competing on price and competing on performance.

Before you buy the truck

The single most expensive decision in this business is which truck, and it is three separate decisions that get made as one:

• The body — what it carries. This decides which loads you can even see.
• The rig — rigid, articulated, superlink, interlink. This decides your legal length and mass.
• The axles — what you may legally weigh, and it binds sooner than most people expect.

Get the body wrong and you own a truck that cannot take the work in your area. Our trucks guide covers all three, plus how to read a spec sheet and what horsepower actually buys you.

The compliance floor

None of the above matters if you cannot legally haul. The non-negotiables, each covered in full:

• Operating licence — required for any commercial road freight operation
• Driving licence codes — Code 14, Code 10, EC and what each permits
• Roadworthy certificates — how often, and why
• Truck insurance — what is required and what it costs
• Cross-border permits — if you plan to run outside South Africa

Questions people ask

What decides whether a load is shown to my truck?
Your vehicle type and your corridors decide which loads we show you first — they do not lock you out of the rest. Capacity, dimensions, insurance and equipment are all recorded and shown to the shipper, and nothing about your truck stops a load reaching you. Keep your corridors accurate: a truck with no corridors on it has nothing to rank against, which is the most common reason an operator sees nothing matched.

How many trucks does a typical operator have?
Of the operators who told us, 38% run one truck and 39% run two to five — so more than three in four run five or fewer. Just under 8% run more than twenty. These are self-declared figures.

What payment terms are normal in South African trucking?
On our load exchange, 51% of loads offered payment at or before loading and 31% on delivery. Only 8% offered deferred credit terms of 14 or 30 days. These are terms set by shippers when posting, so they describe what is offered rather than what was paid.

Can I run a trucking business with one truck?
It is the most common way to run one. Single-truck operators are the largest group on our board at 38%, and the two-to-five group is the same size again. Your competition is mostly the same size as you.

Do I need corridors set on every truck?
Yes. Corridors belong to the vehicle, not to the operator — each truck carries its own lanes, up to five. Setting them on one truck does nothing for the others in your fleet.

Where these numbers come from

• Fleet sizes — self-declared by operators at signup, read 17 August 2026. Declared, not audited.
• Payment terms — every real load posted to Kweli Load Exchange, grouped by the term the shipper set. Test and demonstration loads excluded.
• What decides matching — our own matching rules, which rank on vehicle type and corridor and gate on nothing.

These describe our board, not the whole market. A free community exchange attracts a particular mix of work. Use them to know what to ask for, not as an industry benchmark.

Guides

Starting out

• How to start a trucking company — the full setup
• Starting with one truck — the most common route in
• Owner-operator trucking — running it yourself
• Owner-operator income — what truck owners actually make

Finding work and getting paid

• How to get trucking contracts
• How to calculate freight rates
• Cost per kilometre — the number the whole business runs on
• Rates and running costs — the hub

Next

• Trucks and what they carry — before you buy
• Border posts — if you plan to run cross-border
• Abnormal, bulk and special loads — the work that pays differently