“The outperformer carriers buy fewer gallons, at right prices and at right places.”
On September 14, the Energy Information Administration put the national average price of on-highway diesel at $6.285 a gallon, up 31.8 cents in a single week and $2.546 higher than the same week a year earlier. Diesel opened July at $4.578. On the futures side, CME ultra-low-sulfur diesel settled at $5.262 a gallon, the highest settlement in a history that dates back to 1978. Regional spreads are wide enough to change a lane’s economics on their own. The Gulf Coast average was $6.027 that same week. California was $8.039.
The Number Carriers Budgeted For Is Gone
Most 2026 fuel budgets were built on a quiet year. ATRI’s 2026 cost study found that the industry-average cost to operate a truck in 2025 reached a record $2.336 per mile, but fuel was not the driver. Fuel came in at roughly 48 cents per mile, an increase of about a tenth of a cent, in what ATRI described as the most stable year for on-highway diesel prices since the pandemic. Driver compensation, maintenance, insurance, and tolls did the work. Fuel sat still.
That is the baseline sitting inside most carriers’ cost models right now, and it is the one line item that has since moved further and faster than any other. A fleet that budgeted fuel at a flat rate and is now paying a record price per gallon is absorbing the difference somewhere, and for most of them, that somewhere is margin.
Nothing on the Supply Side Points to Relief in a Few Weeks
Three things separate a price spike from a price level, and all three are in place.
Refining capacity is out, not delayed. FreightWaves reports that Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have taken more than 1 million barrels per day of refining capacity offline, and those refineries process heavy crude, making them diesel producers first. Before all this happened, Russia accounted for 12% of the world’s diesel supply. Domestic outages have landed on top of that, including a power failure that shut ExxonMobil’s 264,000 barrel-a-day plant in Joliet, Illinois.
Refining margins are telling operators to make diesel, which means the crude has to be there to run. FreightWaves described diesel-to-crude crack spreads reaching territory “no one in the market can recall ever seeing,” alongside East Coast distillate inventories at historically low levels.
And the people who sell the product are not forecasting relief. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told the market it is “harder to envision a scenario where prices soften quickly,” and that “the risks remain to the upside over the next few months.” I worked in the crude and refining business before I worked in the freight business, and Mr. Wirth is darn right. Even if the Ukraine and Iranian wars stopped today, the destruction of crude and refining in the Middle East and the refining capacity in Russia will take at least months and maybe years to rebuild back to its capacity before the wars, and the part of this that is easiest to misread from a dispatch office is the direction of the pass-through. Wholesale prices fall quickly when supply loosens. Retail prices at the truck stop are coming down slowly because the retailer is recovering the cost of the inventory they already paid for. Carriers feel the increase first and the decrease last.
You Collect on Last Week’s Price
The fuel surcharge exists to move price risk to the shipper, and in a slow market it does that job. In a fast one, it pays late by construction. Most surcharge formulas are indexed to the EIA weekly average, which is collected on Monday and published on Tuesday. When the price is climbing 30 cents or more a week, every gallon bought between those Tuesdays is recovered at a price that no longer exists.
The size of that gap became public on September 15, when J.B. Hunt told investors at a Morgan Stanley conference to expect a sequential fuel headwind of at least $10 million in the third quarter, on top of $25 million in incremental driver-related costs, and guided third-quarter earnings per share down 5% to 10% from the prior quarter. Shares fell 12% the following morning. The company’s account of the fuel line was the lag itself: diesel prices “have increased sequentially in eight of the 11 weeks of the third quarter,” and its fuel surcharges run a week behind. Intermodal and dedicated contract services generate 96% of J.B. Hunt’s operating income, and both segments reprice more slowly than over-the-road trucking, leaving the company exposed when costs move faster than contracts reset. J.B. Hunt said it won’t push through out-of-cycle rate increases to close that gap, betting instead on bid season to catch pricing up.
Nussbaum Transportation put numbers on the cash flow problem in Transport Topics: the carrier’s weekly fuel bill went from $430,000 in February to $590,000 by late March, and it applies fuel surcharges across more than 80% of its shipper relationships. Company President Bill Wettstein described the lag plainly: surcharges built on the prior week’s EIA price made “March was terrible” and “June was a really good month” out of the same freight.
Rates are not filling the gap either. Diesel has climbed since early July, while spot truckload rates have gone the other way, because the two are driven by different factors. As FreightWaves’ Julie Van de Kamp put it, “There’s a clearing price in freight that’s set by supply and demand,” and fuel is not what sets it. Her read on the fuel side was direct: “I don’t get the sense that this is going to resolve itself anytime soon.”
Carriers are already making capacity decisions on this math. DAT iQ principal analyst Dean Croke told Trucking Dive that higher diesel prices are squeezing some carriers enough that they are parking trucks, and that operators are “very concerned and quite restless about where things are going.”
Outperformers Utilize Route & Fuel Optimization Tools With Compliance
Route and fuel optimization provides regional and long-haul trucking operations with a critical competitive advantage by drastically lowering operating costs, ensuring regulatory compliance, and stabilizing supply chains. Because fuel and driver labor account for the vast majority of per-mile operational expenses, even minor efficiency gains across thousands of miles yield massive financial.
- A route optimization tool with tracking capabilities is a digital solution that uses artificial intelligence algorithms and real-time GPS telematics to automatically calculate the most efficient path for vehicles or mobile workers. Route optimization software dynamically maps out complex, multi-stop paths for an entire fleet. It accounts for variables like vehicle capacity, delivery windows, driver availability, and real-time traffic. Also, it minimizes unnecessary mileage, directly reducing wear and tear on high-cost components such as tires, brakes, and engines, extending the fleet’s lifecycle and improving returns.
- Instead of simply filling up when empty, a dynamic fuel optimization software analyzes real-time diesel prices along a path. It directs drivers to stop at the exact stations that offer the best contract rates or lowest prices, balancing the cost of the stop against the savings per gallon.
Combining dynamic routing with fuel price optimization, tracking, and driver compliance can cut fuel usage by 15% to 25%. A truck needs fewer gallons to complete the trip and to purchase fuel at the lowest net fuel price: retail or contracted fuel price minus state fuel taxes. Large companies have long deployed these tools and paid premium prices for them — tools to keep their operations running and costs in check, no matter the business environment. Most carriers, including midsize ones, do not use routing and fuel-optimization tools that include compliance. That is the actual difference between the fleets holding margin in this market and the fleets giving it back, and it is a dynamic route and fuel optimization tools and driver compliance gap before it is a large-versus-small company fuel price purchasing power gap.
Get the Route Right Before Optimizing the Fuel
Plan the route first, then plan the fuel against it. Fuel optimization is a calculation performed on a route, so an unoptimized route produces an optimized answer to the wrong question. A plan that sends a driver to the cheapest network stop on a lane that should not have been run that way just buys discounted gallons for avoidable miles.
Cost is not a monetary issue, because this is a decision about which plan runs first, not a purchase.
Build the Trip Fuel Plan on Net Price, Not the Price on the Sign
When making a truck’s fueling decisions about which stop to fuel along the optimized route, you must evaluate the “net fuel price” by subtracting state fuel taxes from the pump or contracted price, rather than relying solely on the retail pump or contracted price. This is because the International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA)redistributes your fuel taxes based entirely on where you drive your miles, not where you buy your fuel. The fuel optimizer will specify how many gallons you should buy at each planned fuel stop along the route.
Measure Driver Compliance, Because the Plan Is Only Worth What Gets Followed
When dispatching the truck, communicate the route and fuel plan to the driver in the cab, then report on out-of-plan purchases at least every month by driver and by lane. A fuel plan that reaches dispatch but not the seat produces a spreadsheet, not a saving, and the most common failure is not a driver ignoring instructions. It is a driver who had not received them in a usable form at the time the decision was made.
Cost is a monthly report somebody actually reads, delivered through the in-cab device the driver already carries.
Reconcile the Gallons, Not Just the Dollars
Match what the fuel card was charged for against what the truck’s fuel management system says went into the tank. Fuel theft and card misuse do not look like theft on an invoice. They look like a slightly high gallon count on a stop that otherwise makes sense, and no price-per-gallon report will ever find them because the price was correct. Only the volume is wrong.
Cost is one data feed from the fuel card or via direct bill from the truckstop provider, matched against data the truck is already producing.
Where We Fit
EKA Route AI & EconFuel AI is live today and runs all four of those steps inside the same record the load already lives on. It selects the stops for a specific route using real-time pricing and negotiated discounts, plans against tank level, burn rate, state fuel taxes, and hours-of-service constraints, sends the stop-by-stop instruction to the driver in the cab, reports out-of-plan purchases back to the fleet, and reconciles fuel card transactions against fuel management system data to expose volume irregularities. EKA’s published figure for the result is a 3% to 8% reduction in fuel spend within a few months.
This offering will not be limited to carriers already running EKA Omni-TMS. In Q4 2026. The EKA Route AI & EconFuel AI will be delivered to carriers that do not use the EKA TMS via API Integration or the EKA website at www.go-EKA.ai.
Three Seats, One Set of Records
Carriers and private fleets carry the price directly and recover it late. The work is planning, driver compliance, and gallon-level reconciliation, running against the same order record as dispatch so nobody is reconciling two systems at month-end.
Brokers and 3PLs do not buy the diesel, but they price against it, and a carrier parking trucks over fuel economics is a capacity problem before it is a cost problem. Watching carrier behavior in one place, rather than across inboxes, is how that shows up early enough to act on it.
Shippers in distribution and manufacturing are being quoted a surcharge built on an index that trails the market. Understanding the mechanism is what separates renegotiating the formula from renegotiating the rate, and the two have very different outcomes.