Fuel's share of the freight rate is climbing while linehaul eases, which makes the structure of a 2027 bid the clearest place for shippers to control what diesel costs them.
Fuel made up about 24% of the dry van spot rate in August, up from 21% in June, according to the latest U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index produced with DAT Freight & Analytics, even as spot linehaul pricing softened over the same three months. The average fuel surcharge rose from 62 to 70 cents per mile during that stretch, which means the part of the freight bill that tracks the pump has been growing while the part that tracks the freight market has been easing. I wrote last month about what record diesel means for shipper capacity, and the same numbers carry a narrower lesson for the 2027 bids many shippers are building now, which is that bid structure decides who carries fuel risk.
A bid that compares carriers on all-in rates asks them to fold a volatile fuel cost into a contract price that has to hold for a year, and carriers answer that uncertainty the only way they can, by pricing it in. The shipper then pays for that cushion whether diesel climbs or falls, with no clean way to tell whether one carrier's lower number reflects a more efficient operation or simply a more optimistic guess about where fuel will be next summer. Separating linehaul from fuel in the bid, and applying one surcharge schedule to every carrier, turns the comparison back into what it should be, a measure of what each carrier charges to move the freight.
An all-in rate asks carriers to fold a volatile fuel cost into a price that has to hold for a year, and carriers answer that uncertainty by pricing it in.
The rate data adds a second reason for care, since U.S. Bank and DAT found dry van contract rates rising to $2.39 per mile in August while spot rates fell to $2.17, leaving contract freight about 22 cents above the spot market. That gap will tempt some procurement teams to push 2027 contract offers toward spot levels, at a moment when the freight market has started to turn and the spot discount may not survive the contract year. DAT's Patrick Pretorius warned in the same report that higher fuel costs push thinner-margin carriers out of an already shrinking driver pool, leaving shippers in a market that is “tightening from two directions at once.”
Once fuel sits on its own line, the surcharge schedule becomes one of the most consequential documents in the bid, and three of its settings deserve close attention: the base price, the fuel economy assumption, and the index it follows. A base price set years ago, when diesel sat far below today's level, moves more of the cost into the surcharge and makes linehaul rates look cheaper than the service really is. A miles-per-gallon figure higher than what loaded trucks actually achieve does a different kind of damage, underpaying carriers on every mile in a way that tends to surface later as rejected tenders rather than as a line on the invoice.
The choice of index matters as much as the formula, because the Energy Information Administration publishes regional diesel averages alongside its national figure, and those regions sit far apart this fall. For the week of September 28, the EIA put California at $8.181 per gallon, the West Coast at $7.357 and the Midwest at $6.526, against $6.137 on the East Coast and $5.955 on the Gulf Coast. A schedule pegged to the national average of $6.382 overpays on lanes that fuel in the Gulf states and underpays on lanes that fuel in the West, so a shipper with a national network ends up overcompensating some carriers while shortchanging others under the same contract. Tying each lane's surcharge to the regional index where the truck actually fuels, or at least where the load originates, keeps the payment close to the cost and removes a reason for carriers to avoid the lanes where diesel runs highest.
A schedule pegged to the national average overpays on lanes that fuel in the Gulf states and underpays on lanes that fuel in the West.
Pretorius advised shippers to shift their focus from squeezing rate per mile toward consolidation and network planning, and that advice carries more weight as fuel's share of the rate climbs, because every unnecessary mile now costs more than it did in June. Consolidating partial shipments into full truckloads, building multi-stop routes where order patterns allow, pairing outbound lanes with inbound freight so trucks avoid empty return miles, and sourcing from facilities closer to demand all reduce the gallons a network burns. A carrier will usually price a lane with a reliable backhaul more aggressively than one that sends the truck home empty, and at today's fuel prices that difference shows up clearly in the linehaul number.
Diesel will move again before these contracts expire, in one direction or the other, and a bid that keeps fuel separate, indexed to the right region and reset on a schedule both sides understand will adjust on its own without forcing a renegotiation. The shippers who build their 2027 bids that way will spend the contract year comparing carriers on service and linehaul, which is where that comparison belonged all along, instead of trying to work out after the fact how much fuel risk they paid for.
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