Truckload Rates Up 13%, Diesel Up 39% Since December

Two federal series, same months. The rate carriers were paid rose 13 percent; the fuel they bought rose 39 percent. February to April is where it broke — diesel ran roughly five times faster than the rate index.

Between December and June, the rate a truckload carrier gets paid rose 13 percent. The diesel that carrier bought rose 39 percent. Both numbers come from federal series that anyone can pull, and put side by side they explain a year that felt wrong even when the loads were there.

What the two series actually measure

The rate side is the federal producer price index kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for general freight trucking, long-distance truckload. It tracks prices received by carriers — what actually got invoiced, not what a load board quoted on a Tuesday. It is an index, so what matters is the percentage move, and it comes out monthly, in the middle of the following month.

The fuel side is the Energy Information Administration's monthly average of the national retail on-highway diesel price. Same months, same country, dollars per gallon.

December to June, in one line each

• Truckload rate index: 181.1 in December 2025 → 204.6 in June 2026. Up 13.0 percent.
• Retail diesel: $3.615 in December 2025 → $5.024 in June 2026. Up 39.0 percent.

A 13 percent raise sounds like a good year until you set it next to a 39 percent cost increase on the single largest line item after the truck payment.

The two months that did the damage

The gap did not open evenly. It opened almost entirely in February through April.

• Diesel went from $3.722 to $5.501 — up 47.8 percent in two months.
• The truckload index went from 183.3 to 201.0 — up 9.6 percent.

Fuel moved roughly five times faster than the rate over the same eight weeks. Whatever a contract says about recovering fuel, the recovery arrived on a schedule and the fuel did not.

Less-than-truckload told a different story

The LTL index behaved nothing like truckload. It jumped 12.0 percent in a single month, March to April, from 277.7 to 311.0 — and then stopped, drifting down about 1 percent to 308.0 by June.

One step, taken at once, and then flat. Truckload climbed in stages across five months and was still climbing in June. If you run both, they are not one market and they did not reprice the same way.

The part that is briefly working in your favour

Here is the half nobody mentions. After May the fuel side reversed. Diesel fell from $5.600 in May to $4.955 in July, down 11.5 percent — while the truckload index kept edging up, 203.9 in May to 204.6 in June.

That is the lag running the other way. Rates that were slow to follow fuel upward are equally slow to follow it back down, and for a couple of months an operator keeps the difference. That is where the margin has been hiding this summer.

And it is closing

The weekly diesel series has already turned. The week ending August 3 printed $5.348 a gallon, which is 7.9 percent above the July monthly average. The July rate index is not published yet, so nobody can say what the rate side did against it.

What the pattern says is that fuel arrives first. If August holds where the first week put it, the cushion from May and June is spent before the paperwork catches up — the same sequence that ran in February, only starting from a much higher base.

The one number on this page you set yourself

You do not price freight and you do not price crude. You do decide how many hours the engine runs while the truck is not moving.

That is the whole reason idle time is worth arguing about in a year like this one. Every gallon burned parked is bought at the same price as every gallon burned loaded, and it is the one large fuel cost that answers to a decision rather than to a market. Go Green APU exists for exactly that line, and the rest of our cost and maintenance coverage for operators is at thetrucksavers.com.

One caution on how to read all of this. These are national series. Your lanes, your fuel network and your contracts will not match the average, and none of these figures is a spot rate — the rate index is what carriers were paid, across the whole country, after the fact. Use it to see the direction and the size of the gap, not to price your next load.

Original source

Rate figures from the federal producer price index series for long-distance freight trucking: BLS series PCU484121484121, truckload, with less-than-truckload from series PCU484122484122. Diesel figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration monthly and weekly retail on-highway diesel series, EMD_EPD2D_PTE_NUS_DPG. All values retrieved August 7, 2026.