Howdy Folks,
Here is where I am.
In the second quarter, your LTL bill was up nearly as much as it was in 2022, and most of the reason was fuel, not freight. The increase is riding on the fuel surcharge, the part of the rate most shippers never get to negotiate, and the carriers' own filings show it growing faster than their fuel bills.
You have two rate cards with every carrier. One is the base rate and discount you spent six weeks fighting over in an RFP. The other is a table on a webpage that moves every week whether you like it or not. This year, the second one did the work.
1. A 2022 rate hike without 2022's freight
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a producer price index for long-distance LTL trucking. It includes fuel surcharges, so it is about as close as a public number gets to what shippers actually paid.
In the second quarter of 2022, that index ran 22.1% above a year earlier. In the second quarter of 2026, it ran 19.6% above a year earlier. That is my arithmetic on the BLS's own monthly values, averaged by quarter. May and June are still preliminary, and by August, the latest month, the index was running 14.3% above a year earlier.
So this year's increase is most of the way to 2022's. Now look at what sat underneath each one.
| Year over year | Q2 2022 | Q2 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| LTL price index, BLS (includes fuel) | +22.1% | +19.6% |
| U.S. diesel, EIA monthly averages by quarter | +70.7% | +51.2% |
| Old Dominion tons per day | +2.8% | −4.1% |
| Saia tonnage per workday | +2.8% | +8.4% |
| XPO pounds per day | −5.5% | +1.0% |
| Old Dominion revenue per cwt, ex-fuel | +9.3% | +5.5% |
| Saia revenue per cwt, ex-fuel | +14.9% | −2.2% |
| XPO revenue per cwt, ex-fuel | +10.6% | +4.4% |
2022 came off the back of a real freight boom. Old Dominion ran 16.3% more tons a day through its network in 2021 and another 12.0% more in the first quarter of 2022. Carriers had more freight than room and priced like it: ex-fuel yield up 9% to 15% across the three carriers in that table. Diesel spiked on top of that, with the EIA's 2022 average up 51.8%. You paid for both.
2026 has the diesel and modest base-rate gains. Volume is mixed: Saia moved 8.4% more tons a workday in the second quarter, XPO 1.0% more pounds a day, and Old Dominion 4.1% fewer tons a day, with its 42,332 shipments a day sitting 20% below the 53,096 it handled in the second quarter of 2022. FedEx Freight's annual report for the year ended May 31 blames its own 4% drop in daily shipments partly on "excess capacity in the LTL industry." What 2026 does not have is 2022's pricing power. Ex-fuel yields run from Saia's −2.2% (about +3% once you adjust for heavier shipments, Saia told analysts) to Old Dominion's +5.5%.
2022 had two reasons. 2026 mostly has one.
2. Same diesel week, one year apart
Take the first full week of October in both years. The EIA's national average diesel price was $3.711 a gallon for the week of October 6, 2025, and $6.199 for the week of October 5, 2026. Up 67%.
Now run both prices through each carrier's own published fuel table and put them on the same $1,000 linehaul:
| Carrier | At $3.711 (Oct 2025) | At $6.199 (Oct 2026) | $1,000 linehaul, invoiced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old Dominion | 27.82% | 52.32% | $1,278.20 to $1,523.20 (+19.2%) |
| XPO | 31.25% | 55.75% | $1,312.50 to $1,557.50 (+18.7%) |
| Saia | 31.62% | 56.12% | $1,316.20 to $1,561.20 (+18.6%) |
| FedEx Freight | 32.90% | 57.70% | $1,329.00 to $1,577.00 (+18.7%) |
| Estes | 30.0% | 56.0% | $1,300.00 to $1,560.00 (+20.0%) |
Old Dominion's pair comes straight off its fuel page, which quotes shipments from October 14 at 52.32% against "27.82% average one year ago today." XPO's and Estes's come from their published weekly histories, though Estes's two rates sit on different tables, more on that below. Saia's and FedEx Freight's 2025 figures come from the tables in force at the time: Saia's chart is dated September 18, 2024, and FedEx Freight's was effective June 9, 2025. I left ABF out because I could not pull its October 2025 rate. Old Dominion and XPO start billing off the $6.199 print next week. Estes, Saia and FedEx Freight already are.
Five carriers, five tables, 18.6% to 20% more on the same invoice. Nothing about your freight had to change. Nothing in your contract did either.
It shows up in the filings the same way. Between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, Saia's fuel surcharge per shipment went from $52.65 to $90.44, about 90% of the increase in what it collected per shipment. XPO's went from $56.60 to $94.71, about 83%. Old Dominion's went from $69.00 to $122.11, about 64%. The subtraction is mine, done on each company's own all-in and ex-fuel figures.
3. The rate card you cannot touch
For almost every shipper I deal with, the fuel surcharge is not on the table. Carriers do not want to negotiate it, and for most shippers they do not have to.
Everybody runs the same machine. Saia's own 10-Q calls fuel surcharges "widely accepted within the LTL industry." The tables bear that out. Every table in section 2 moves about a tenth of a point per penny of diesel. Old Dominion's tariff spells it out: half a point for every five cents above $5.10. ABF and Estes publish a tenth of a point for every cent above $5.00. When every carrier moves the same way, there is no slope to shop. Only the starting point differs.
The table belongs to them. FedEx Freight rewrote its table effective June 9, 2025. Estes rewrote its table in January: the same $3.711 diesel that billed at 30.0% in October 2025 billed at 31.2% in February 2026. FedEx Freight's own table says its percentages and trigger points are "subject to change without notice."
The share of the table they collect does not move. In the second quarter of 2025, with diesel averaging about $3.56, Old Dominion collected fuel equal to 16.6% of its ex-fuel revenue, against a published table that averaged about 26.6% by my reconstruction from its tariff and the weekly EIA prints. Call it 62 cents on the posted dollar. This year it collected 27.4% against a table that averaged about 45%. Call it 61 cents. If many Old Dominion shippers had won caps on fuel, you would expect that ratio to fall when diesel jumped about $1.80 a gallon. It slipped from about 62 cents to 61. Part of the gap is revenue the surcharge never touches, and part may be custom deals at bigger accounts. The filings do not split the two. What they show is that the gap did not widen when diesel spiked.
4. They do not lock in fuel. They do not need to.
You might assume carriers buy a year of diesel at a fixed price and pocket the difference while the weekly surcharge climbs. Old Dominion, Saia, ArcBest and FedEx Freight all say in their filings that they do not.
Old Dominion's second-quarter 10-Q: "We do not use diesel fuel hedging instruments; therefore, our costs are subject to market price fluctuations." Its average cost per gallon was up 70.5% year over year. ArcBest's annual report says it does "not have any long-term fuel purchase contracts or hedging arrangements." FedEx Freight's says it has no fuel derivatives and "no plans" to use them. Saia's says: "We do not hedge against the risk of diesel fuel price increases."
So none of those carriers is sitting on cheap diesel it bought last fall. They pay roughly what the market charges, week to week.
The money comes from somewhere simpler. The surcharge brings in more than the diesel costs. Back in 2022, when XPO still broke fuel out on its own line, its LTL business billed $1,014 million in fuel surcharges against $424 million of fuel and fuel-related taxes. Some of that difference covers fuel buried in what XPO paid outside carriers, but the gap was bigger than its entire $499 million purchased transportation bill that year. Here is how the second quarter changed this year:
| Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025 | Fuel surcharge revenue | Expense line that holds fuel |
|---|---|---|
| XPO, North American LTL | $183M to $314M (+$131M) | Fuel, operating expenses and supplies: +$53M |
| Saia | About $119M to $213M (+$94M, my math) | Fuel, operating expenses and supplies: +$37.1M |
| Old Dominion | About $198M to $331M (+$133M, my math) | Operating supplies and expenses: +$35.2M |
XPO discloses its surcharge revenue. Saia's is its disclosed share of revenue (22.3% vs 14.6%) times its revenue. Old Dominion's is the gap between its all-in and ex-fuel revenue per hundredweight, times its tonnage. None of them report fuel-only dollars, those expense lines carry other things, and more fuel hides in what they pay outside carriers, so this is not a clean measure of fuel profit. It is the direction, and the direction is not close.
The carriers say it themselves. ArcBest: "fuel surcharge revenue generally more than offsets the increase in direct diesel fuel costs when applied." It adds, fairly, that the effect on its other costs "is difficult to ascertain." Saia, explaining its 2022 in its annual report: the increase in operating income "resulted primarily from pricing actions and fuel margin."
Fuel margin. Their phrase.
And the second quarter paid. Operating income was up 30% at Old Dominion, 26% at Saia and 43% at XPO's LTL business. ArcBest credited higher fuel surcharge revenue first in a 650-basis-point sequential improvement in its asset-based non-GAAP operating ratio, then guided its third-quarter operating ratio flat with the second, saying lower fuel surcharge revenue would be partly offset by restructuring savings. Some of that is genuinely good operating. Some of it is the table.
5. If anybody had locked in last October
None of the carriers that disclose it did. But the futures market tells you roughly what it would have cost, at the wholesale level, before taxes and delivery.
Average the daily settlements for the next 12 months of NYMEX ULSD futures across the first week of October 2025, per Sprague Energy's daily settlement sheets, and you get about $2.19 a gallon. Do the same across the first week of October 2026: about $4.01. New York Harbor wholesale diesel on the EIA's daily series went from $2.303 on October 6, 2025 to $4.713 on October 6, 2026. Last October the EIA's own forecast had 2026 retail diesel averaging $3.40. Its forecast now is $5.19.
The surcharge cuts both ways for carriers, too. It is a bigger number than the fuel bill, so when diesel falls, surcharge revenue drops faster than the cost. XPO lived it in 2023: with the EIA's average diesel price down 15.5%, its LTL fuel surcharge revenue fell $157 million, from $1,014 million to $857 million, while its whole fuel, operating expenses and supplies line fell $27 million.
The EIA has diesel averaging $5.81 this quarter and falling to $4.30 by the third quarter of 2027. The futures curve agrees: on Sprague's sheet, November 2026 ULSD settled at $4.88 on October 8 and October 2027 at $3.63.
When that happens, your invoice comes down on its own, and the carriers' fuel margin comes down with it. Neither of you will have negotiated a thing.
What's next
Next week I am switching to the part of this business that ends in somebody's living room: e-commerce and retail furniture, which I last wrote about from the delivery side in Skill, Portfolio, or Physics, and the thing that drives almost all of it, which is the housing market. People buy couches when they move, and right now not many people are moving. I have opinions about where housing goes from here, and I am going to share all of them.
I am holding the carrier earnings issue until every Q3 print is out. Old Dominion reports October 28, XPO, Saia and TFI on October 29, and ArcBest closes it out on November 4. When the last one lands, I will read the ex-fuel line at all five, because after this quarter the fuel line will tell you almost nothing about the business.
In the meantime, do one thing. Pull your last three months of LTL invoices and split each one into linehaul, fuel and accessorials. If fuel is a bigger share than you thought, you now know which rate card did the moving.
See ya next week.
Gabe
Here is what I want to know: has anyone actually gotten a carrier to move the fuel table itself? Not a cap. The table. Reply and tell me what you got and roughly how big you had to be to get it. My bet is that for most of this list the answer is "they would not even discuss it," and I would like to know if I am wrong.