New data released today by HopSkipDrive shows that bus driver shortages remain a chronic issue for school districts, with real, measurable consequences that have not gone away despite years of attempted fixes.

According to HopSkipDrive’s 2026 State of School Transportation Report, an annual survey of district administrators and parents of K-12 students, 71% of districts have experienced at least one tangible operational consequence of driver shortages in the past year. And that number comes after years of efforts to hire more drivers, route redesigns, and other fixes aimed at solving the shortage.

Many districts have already spent years consolidating routes, extending walk boundaries, or scaling back services, and are now measuring these constrained operations against a smaller baseline than they used a few years ago. Here’s an easy way to see it: Consider a district that eliminated three routes to cope with a shortage. It isn’t unconstrained today. It has absorbed the shortage by cutting service and now treats that reduced level of service as the norm.

That coping strategy has a cost of its own.

A closer look shows where that fallout lands. Roughly half of districts surveyed, 46%, report longer ride times for students; 39% report missed or late pickups; and 26% report staff burnout or turnover in the transportation department. Nearly a quarter of districts, 23%, say they can no longer offer transportation for extracurricular activities or field trips, a cut that falls hardest on the students who rely on school-provided transportation to participate.

The same downstream pressure shows up in the budget. More than half (54%) of districts have been asked to reduce transportation spending in the past two years, increasing pressure to do more with less. This is the single most common strategic mandate districts are facing according to the survey results. At the same time, districts lack visibility into their total transportation costs. More than half (61%) of districts report they don’t know what their annual per-student transportation cost is for students who use district-provided transportation. A budget mandate without that visibility tends to land on whatever is easiest to find, like routes and service, rather than the actual source of waste.

“A district can report fewer shortages and still be worse off than it was five years ago, because it’s absorbed the problem by cutting service rather than solving it,” said Joanna McFarland, CEO and Co-Founder of HopSkipDrive. “Districts are being asked to cut transportation costs without the visibility to know where the real savings are, and that’s the same blind spot keeping transportation out of conversations about enrollment and attendance, where it actually has the most leverage.”

HopSkipDrive’s full State of School Transportation Report digs into what’s driving these numbers, along with related findings on transportation’s ties to parent choices, attendance, enrollment, and cost. It also includes data from parents about their approach to school transportation issues.

The full report can be found here.

About HopSkipDrive

HopSkipDrive is the leader in safe, fast, and simple supplemental student transportation. The company is modernizing the $30 billion school transportation industry through two core solutions: a care-centered transportation marketplace and an industry-leading transportation intelligence platform, RouteWise AI™. HopSkipDrive’s marketplace supplements school buses and existing transportation options by connecting kids to highly-vetted caregivers on wheels, such as grandparents, babysitters, and nurses in local communities. RouteWise AI helps schools and districts address critical challenges, including budget cuts, bus driver shortages, and reaching climate goals. HopSkipDrive has supported over 14,500 schools across two dozen states, with over 2,000 school districts, government agencies, and nonprofit partners. Millions of rides across 130 million miles have been completed through HopSkipDrive since the company was founded in 2014 by three working mothers.

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