DHL, FedEx & UPS Fuel Surcharge Rates — 20-Year Tracker

As of the week of 2026-09-21 the three express carriers sit DHL 45.00%, FedEx 43.25% and UPS 46.25%. On fuel alone, FedEx is the cheapest of the three by 1.75 points over DHL and 3.00 points under UPS. That spread looks small, but it is persistent: across the last 13 weeks DHL and UPS have traded the top spot several times while FedEx held the middle. The trap is to chase the headline number. Fuel is only one of three charges on an express invoice — the freight base, the zone/destination rate and the surcharge together decide the bill. A shipment where UPS has the lowest base rate can still cost less overall even when its fuel line is higher. Read the total, not the percentage.

The gap also moves at different speeds. DHL revises on a Monday cadence, FedEx and UPS on their own weekly schedules, so for a few days each cycle one carrier is measurably cheaper before the others catch up. If you tender volume on a fixed day, check the three rates that morning rather than quoting from last week's screen.

The number on the carrier's fuel-surcharge page is a percentage of freight, not a fixed fee — yet the invoice line rarely equals freight × published%. There are three reasons, and only one of them is a mistake:

• The rate moved between booking and invoicing. You quoted at 43%, the shipment tendered two weeks later, the weekly figure had risen to 45%. The invoice uses the effective-week rate, not your quote rate.
• Accessorials are inside the base. Carriers sometimes apply the surcharge to freight plus certain surcharges (fuel on fuel, in the worst cases). The base you multiply against is larger than the line you remember.
• Currency and regional rounding. A USD index converted to a local billing currency, then rounded at the invoice, produces a penny-level delta on every shipment.

The fix is contractual, not forensic: ask the carrier or your forwarder for the rate and effective week in writing at tender, and reconcile the invoice against that, not against the public page. Example — a USD 20,000 shipment quoted at DHL 43% should show roughly USD 8,600 of fuel. If the invoice shows USD 9,000, the rate moved to 45%, not an error.

To make the percentage concrete, take a 100 kg document-and-sample express shipment from Shenzhen to Los Angeles. A realistic freight charge for this lane and weight, before any discount, lands in the low-to-mid hundreds of USD. At the current DHL 45% the fuel line is roughly 45% of that base:

Carriers publish the surcharge; they do not usually negotiate it with shippers directly. The lever sits with your forwarder, who buys capacity in volume. Three clauses are worth putting on paper:

• Cap or floor the pass-through. Agree that the forwarder applies the published rate with no markup, and that any "fuel on fuel" accessorial is itemised, not blended.
• Lock the base rate separately. Negotiate the freight per-kg and the surcharge line as two distinct components so a rising index cannot hide inside a "all-in" price.
• Quarterly true-up. Instead of accepting weekly swings, average the surcharge over the quarter and settle the difference — this removes the bookkeeping noise that produces the "invoice never matches" complaint above.

A forwarder that resists itemising the surcharge is, in practice, marking it up. The 20-year history on this page is your reference: at a 20-year average of 27.56% (DHL), any sustained quote far above that, or any refusal to show the line, is a flag.

The 13-week linear forecast on this page points to a continued high plateau rather than a sharp drop. The reason is the underlying index: 2026 has been an expensive year, with DHL running at 48.29% in late June — 20.73 points above its own 20-year average and only 2.02 points below the 2022 record. Jet-fuel prices have been sticky because of refinery margins and seasonal demand, and the carriers' coefficients amplify index moves. The prudent planning assumption for 2027 budgeting is DHL in the low-to-mid 40s, FedEx high-30s to low-40s, UPS mid-40s, with the historical 27.56% average treated as a floor that is unlikely to return before a real demand recession. Build quotes on the current rate, not the average.

For shipments leaving Shenzhen, Guangzhou or the Pearl River Delta, two local factors matter. First, most China-origin express volume is billed from the Hong Kong or mainland gateway the forwarder uses; the surcharge is identical, but the transit and the base rate differ, so compare the total landed cost, not the percentage. Second, the peak season (typically Q4 for US-bound e-commerce and the pre-Lunar-New-Year rush) pushes both the base rate and the surcharge up at the same time, so the fuel line compounds the peak-season surcharge rather than adding to a flat base. If you can shift a shipment by a few weeks outside those windows, the seasonality table above shows September averages 28.64% across 20 years versus February at 26.02% — a gap worth real money at volume.

The weekly rate series behind this page (DHL, FedEx and UPS, 2006–2026, reconstructed from the public US Gulf Coast kerosene-type jet-fuel index, FRED series MJFUELUSGULF, and anchored to each carrier's published rate) is offered for reference and attribution. A permanent, citable version is deposited at Zenodo (DOI pending); until then cite the page directly:

The express bill carries at least two separate surcharges that shippers routinely merge in their heads. The fuel surcharge tracks the jet-fuel index and moves weekly, as this page tracks. The peak-season surcharge is a fixed add-on the carriers switch on for a few months a year (Q4 for US-bound e-commerce, the pre-Lunar-New-Year window for Asia outbound) and is unrelated to fuel. In a heavy peak month you are paying both at once, which is why a September or December invoice looks nothing like a February one. When a carrier announces a "peak-season surcharge for 2026", it is a different line from the 45% fuel figure, and it stacks on top. Budget the two separately: fuel as a percentage you can monitor weekly here, peak as a fixed per-kg or percentage add-on you know in advance from the carrier's annual calendar.

The weekly rates on this page are not a hand-typed table. Each carrier publishes its current surcharge; we anchor those verified points to the public US Gulf Coast kerosene-type jet-fuel index (FRED series MJFUELUSGULF), which the carriers themselves reference, then reconstruct the historical curve between published snapshots using each carrier's own coefficient and floor/ceiling. The shape of the 20-year history is reliable because it follows the index; the absolute pre-2006 and between-snapshot levels are estimates and are labelled as such. Where a carrier's own published rate exists for a week, that published number wins over the reconstruction. The practical upshot: use the historical highs, lows and averages for budgeting and negotiation context, but always quote the verified current rate from the cards at the top of this page for an actual shipment.