Mexico's freight and warehousing base, state by state

Finding a factory is half of sourcing from Mexico. The other half is moving the goods: a carrier to the border, a warehouse to hold stock, a forwarder to coordinate it. This report maps that base from INEGI's May 2026 business directory: every establishment whose main activity is freight trucking, freight forwarding, rail or ocean freight, parcel delivery, or warehousing.

Trucking dominates

General freight trucking is the largest group, with 7,108 establishments, 3,837 of them with 11 or more employees. Parcel and courier delivery is second by count (5,381), but most of those are branches of a few national networks, and only 1,049 have 11 or more employees. Freight forwarders and intermediaries, the companies that arrange shipments on other carriers' trucks, number 2,671, and more than half are mid-size or larger.

Specialized carriers are a smaller but important slice for manufacturers: 2,122 flatbed and specialized freight establishments, 697 hazardous materials carriers, and 675 refrigerated carriers.

Concentrated in the northeast, Mexico City, and Jalisco

Nuevo León has the most freight establishments with 11 or more employees (981), followed by the State of Mexico (806), Mexico City (656), Jalisco (627), and Tamaulipas (540). The top five states hold 43.9% of mid-size and larger freight companies.

The six states on the U.S. border hold 36.1% of them. That reflects where freight goes: most U.S.–Mexico trade crosses by truck at a handful of northern crossings, and the carriers that specialize in that traffic, including the short-haul "transfer" carriers that move trailers across the bridges, are based nearby.

The top cities

Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo lead, at two of the busiest commercial crossings on the border, followed by Guadalajara, the port of Manzanillo, and Apodaca, the logistics and industrial municipality next to Monterrey's airport.

Inland, freight follows manufacturing: León, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí, all in the Bajío corridor, each have more than 125 mid-size and larger freight companies.

Warehousing: smaller, spread out, and growing in fulfillment

DENUE lists 1,243 warehousing establishments, excluding consumer self-storage. General warehousing is the largest kind, followed by farm product storage, refrigerated storage, and specialized storage. The 132 almacenes generales de depósito (AGD) are a regulated kind of warehouse that can issue deposit certificates and, with customs authorization, hold imported goods in bond.

Jalisco, Nuevo León, the State of Mexico, and Mexico City have the most warehousing establishments, which mirrors Mexico's largest consumer markets and its main manufacturing hubs.

One caution: the directory classifies each establishment by its main activity, and many large distribution centers and fulfillment operations are run by companies classified elsewhere, as freight forwarders, carriers, retailers, or manufacturers. Warehousing capacity is larger than these counts suggest, and fulfillment centers in particular don't have their own category. For what each kind of warehouse does, see Warehouses and fulfillment centers in Mexico.

What this means for buyers

• Cross-border freight has deep capacity at the main crossings. Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo alone have more than 450 mid-size and larger freight companies between them.
• For inland plants, look locally first. The Bajío and Monterrey have hundreds of carriers each, many already moving freight to the border every day.
• Count the forwarders. If you don't want to coordinate a Mexican carrier, a transfer carrier, and a U.S. carrier yourself, a freight forwarder will. Mexico has more than 1,300 mid-size and larger ones. How cross-border trucking works explains the legs.

About the data

Counts are establishments from INEGI's national business directory (DENUE), May 2026 release, by main activity: freight trucking (SCIAN 4841 and the freight codes of 4842, excluding moving and local construction hauling), freight forwarding and intermediaries (488519), rail (482110), ocean and coastal shipping (483111–483112), port cargo handling (488320), parcel and courier (492110), and warehousing (4931), excluding consumer self-storage. Passenger transport, tourism, and pipelines aren't included. Customs brokers are covered in Where are Mexico's customs brokers?.