DAT: Quarter-End Push Lifts Van Spot to $3.13/Mile as Diesel Tops $6.529

Let me get the facts on the table before I argue with them. For the week of 27 September to 3 October, DAT's all-in van spot rate printed at $3.13 a mile, 11 cents higher than the week before. Reefer printed at $3.69, up 7 cents. Flatbed printed at $3.71, up 11 cents. Alongside those, DAT published linehaul rates with fuel stripped out: van $2.25, reefer $2.74, flatbed $2.65 a mile. Very few people who write up this weekly report put the two rows next to each other, and they are the two rows that decide how much you pay in the first quarter.

Put them side by side and a third row falls out of them. Van: $3.13 less $2.25 leaves $0.88 a mile that is not freight at all. Reefer: $3.69 less $2.74 leaves $0.95. Flatbed: $3.71 less $2.65 leaves $1.06. As a share of what you actually hand over, that is 28.1 per cent of every van mile going into the tank, 25.7 per cent of every reefer mile and 28.6 per cent of every flatbed mile. Round it off and say it plainly: better than one dollar in four that you pay a trucker this week buys diesel, not movement.

You can back into the table that produced that $0.88. A surcharge schedule is normally written as the current diesel price minus a base price, the difference divided by an assumed miles per gallon. Solve backwards at 6.0 miles per gallon and the implied base is about $1.25 a gallon. Try 5.5 miles per gallon and the implied base is about $1.69. Try 6.5 and it falls to roughly $0.81, lower than anything I have actually seen written into a live agreement, so 6.0 is the likeliest of the three. Whichever pair your carrier used, those two numbers are sitting inside your contract right now, and they move more money than the headline rate does. A tenth of a dollar on the base price shifts the surcharge by 1.67 cents a mile at 6.0 miles per gallon, which is roughly $20 on a 1,200-mile load and roughly $1,000 a week if you run 50 loads. Move the divisor from 6.0 to 5.5 with the base held at $1.25 and the surcharge goes from $0.88 to $0.96 a mile: eight cents, $96 a load on that same 1,200 miles. Two carriers can both quote you three thirteen and differ by nearly a hundred dollars a load, and nothing about the difference will ever appear in a headline.

Then there is the diesel itself, and this is where I stop being polite about the summary everybody else will write. The EIA national average for the week hit $6.529 a gallon, up 24.4 cents, the highest in a series going back to 2007. That is the number that got picked up. The next week's print was $6.382, down 14.7 cents. At 6.0 miles per gallon that drop is worth 2.45 cents a mile, call it $29 on a 1,200-mile load, back in your pocket without a single phone call. Anyone who locks a fourth-quarter operating plan off this week's $3.13 is buying the top of the spike and will spend late October explaining why the budget missed.

So much for the price. The part of this report that made me sit up is the pair of numbers nobody leads with. Load posts rose 9 per cent to 3.3 million. Equipment posts fell 8 per cent to 170,691. More freight, fewer trucks advertised, and the ratio between them jumping from 11.1 to 13.7 in a single week, close to double the same week of 2025.

Here is the trap in that sentence, and it is the trap that turns a rate story into a bad decision. Equipment posts are not a count of trucks. They are a count of trucks somebody chose to put on this particular board in this particular week. Thirteen point seven does not mean there are 13.7 loads for every truck in the country. It means every truck offered on DAT's board this week attracted 13.7 load offers. That distinction carries the whole analysis, because there are three ways a truck fails to get posted and they point in three different directions.

One is that the truck found committed work before it ever reached the board: a contract lane, a routed commitment, a direct relationship that never touches spot at all. That reading genuinely supports higher prices, and it is the reading that fits a quarter-end push, when brokers pull coverage from committed fleets first and only go shopping once those are exhausted. Another is that the truck was available and its owner simply declined the price on offer, which is exactly what an owner-operator does in the closing days of a quarter when better freight is visibly coming. It can also be that the posting itself migrated: brokers covering loads on other platforms, or through automated matching, or simply working their phones, none of which a single board can see.

Each of those leaves a different map, and that is why I read a national ratio as a question about nodes. Thirteen point seven is an average over a country the size of a continent. Your freight does not move on an average. It moves from node to node, and in October three kinds of nodes decide almost everything you pay.

Start with the port gates: Los Angeles and Long Beach, New York and New Jersey, Savannah, Houston. This is where an importer first touches a truck, and it is where a national average is least useful. A 40-mile dray has not priced at $3.13 a mile in any cycle I can remember, because chassis time, missed appointments, gate queues and pure waiting all get folded into it, and each of those gets worse when capacity is scarce. Assume a 40-mile dray quotes at 6 dollars a mile against 3.13: that is $240 instead of $125 for the same distance, and the difference is not freight, it is waiting. If your budget runs one blended number across dray and linehaul, this is the week it quietly stops being true.

Intermodal hand-off points come next: Chicago, Dallas, Memphis, Kansas City, Atlanta. This is the only node where the mode choice is genuinely made, and it gets made days before anybody asks for a rate. Freight that stays on rail pays none of this week's eleven cents. Freight dumped off rail because it was thirty hours late into the ramp and had to make a delivery pays every cent of $3.13, plus whatever the delay costs. In a week like this one, the highest-value work a transportation manager can do is know which boxes are going to miss before they miss.

That leaves the borders. Laredo remains the largest inland port in the country by truck value, and El Paso, Detroit-Windsor and Blaine each have their own version of this week's squeeze. Border nodes deserve separate treatment because they are the hardest to substitute away from. If Laredo backs up you can point the truck at Eagle Pass or Del Rio or Presidio, but every one of those has less dray capacity on the far side, worse empty-return economics and a different holiday calendar. I have worked enough of these crossings to know how the arithmetic actually lands: rerouting is never free, and the cost rarely appears on a rate sheet, because it lands in detention, in driver hours and in a customs entry filed a day late.

Reefer carries its own calendar this month, and it deserves a separate line. Late September is when California produce begins handing volume down to the Yuma and Imperial desert valleys, and when that migration runs, the national reefer web rearranges itself underneath your contracts. Equipment that used to come out of the Central Valley loaded starts repositioning differently, backhaul lanes that were dependable for eight months stop being dependable, and lanes that never required booked capacity suddenly do. Reefer all-in rose only 7 cents this week, less than van, which reads as benign until you notice two things: reefer carries a $0.95 fuel gap, wider than van's in absolute terms, and a reefer burns a second engine that most surcharge schedules do not mention at all.

Why does any of this node business matter if you are paying one blended rate? Because switching nodes costs money and switching modes in October costs more, and both decisions have to be made before the rate quote arrives rather than after. Releasing a confirmed intermodal booking back to truck costs you the truck price plus the delay plus, in most weeks, the appointment. Moving a port from Los Angeles to Oakland or Houston costs you a new dray pool, different chassis, a different rail ramp and about a month of working with people who do not know your freight yet. None of that shows up in a weekly rate report. All of it shows up about five weeks later, which is precisely long enough that nobody connects the two events.

Let me put arithmetic on this so it stops being theory. Assume you discharge at Los Angeles/Long Beach, you move 10 tons — call it 20 pallets — per load, your DC sits outside Chicago, and the truckable distance is 1,200 miles. Assume you run 50 van loads a week on that lane.

At this week's all-in number, one load costs 1,200 times $3.13, which is $3,756, and the week costs $187,800. Split it: the linehaul portion is 1,200 times $2.25, which is $2,700, and the fuel portion is 1,200 times $0.88, which is $1,056. The weekly move itself is worth $132 a load, $6,600 a week, and about $28,600 over four weeks if it holds and you change nothing.

Now split that eleven cents. Assume 6.0 miles per gallon, so a 1,200-mile run burns exactly 200 gallons. Every ten cents on diesel is therefore $20 a load. This week's 24.4-cent jump cost you $48.80 a load in fuel. Next week's 14.7-cent fall hands back $29.40 a load. Because the fuel piece moved by 24.4 cents divided by 6.0, which is 4.07 cents a mile, the rest of the eleven cents — call it 6.9 cents a mile — is genuine capacity tightening. Roughly two-thirds of what you are looking at is negotiable. One third is a formula running itself, and I would not spend a minute of a negotiation on it.

Which brings me to the piece of this I would underline in front of anybody renewing a contract this month, and it is the thing no headline about this report will tell you. Once fuel has been lifted out of the rate and published separately, the number you actually negotiate is $2.25, not $3.13. The $0.88 sitting on top is arithmetic that executes itself, and by week two it will be lower, because diesel already printed $6.382. Walk into a renewal arguing about the all-in number and you are arguing about the wrong figure, and you will lose the argument you should have won, which is the base price and the miles-per-gallon divisor hidden inside the surcharge table. Carriers know exactly how this works. A shipper who arrives with six weeks of linehaul in one column and the surcharge formula in the next column is a shipper whose rates move less, in both directions.

One mechanical detail worth checking before you sit down, and it is boring enough that almost nobody does. Confirm which diesel series your contract keys to. Some agreements point at the national average because it is what anybody can verify, others use a regional average, and in a month when California and the Gulf Coast are moving differently that choice is real money on every mile. Confirm the lag too: whether the table refreshes weekly from the Monday print or monthly from an average. A two-week lag on a 24.4-cent weekly move is not a rounding error when you are running 50 loads.

Who absorbs what here depends less on the size of the shipper than on how their freight is bought. A shipper with nothing under contract pays the full eleven cents now, because emergency freight always lands on spot. A shipper running 70 per cent contractual and 30 per cent spot pays about a third of it immediately and the rest at renewal, which means the same money arrives later and larger, usually in the middle of a budget year nobody has room left in. Reefer buyers carry a second exposure: most schedules I have seen price fuel for the tractor, and if the refrigeration unit's burn is not inside that formula it does not disappear, it gets absorbed into the linehaul you negotiate, which is one reason reefer's $0.95 gap is wider than van's. Flatbed buyers have the worst of it this week. Flatbed load-to-truck printed at 44.1 alongside an all-in of $3.71 and a linehaul of only $2.65, giving it the widest fuel gap of the three at $1.06.

About that 44.1, and I will be blunt: it is not a market reading, it is a symptom. When a board shows forty-four loads per truck, a meaningful share of those postings are the same load offered several times, or a broker hunting for capacity that does not exist at any price. Real flatbed capacity is genuinely thin in October, no argument there. Forty-four point one is not a number you plan capacity from. Test it instead with a question every shipper can ask this week and almost none do: how long does your quote stay valid. If the answer is until close of business, your true price is whatever you discover when you phone back tomorrow.

Timing is where most of the money leaks out of this. A DAT weekly print describes freight moved between 27 September and 3 October, and by the time anybody reads it those moves are history. What matters is the fixed dates ahead. The payback window comes first, because it bites soonest. Assume the nine per cent jump in load posts included freight borrowed from October to make 30 September look good; on that assumption volumes soften somewhere between 10 and 20 October and anything you can legitimately hold past 20 October should quote below this week's peak. I do not mean hold everything. I mean hold what inventory days allow, and measure the result.

The bid cycle is the fixed date after that. Annual agreements and mini-bids in this market mostly open in November and December for a January start. You have somewhere between six and ten weeks to build the linehaul-versus-fuel file before you sit down across a table. Six consecutive weekly prints entered in two columns will give you something most shippers walk in without: an argument you can win on evidence rather than tone.

Thanksgiving week belongs in that calendar too, along with the produce migration I mentioned. Either one can produce a second bump inside the payback window, and if you have set your plan around a smooth glide path, both will look like proof the world changed. It did not. It is seasonal.

Now the conditions that would make me wrong, because I could be. If load posts hold above roughly 3.2 million for two more weeks while equipment posts keep falling, then this was not a borrowing of freight, it was capacity leaving the market, and my whole waiting argument is upside down — in that case you book linehaul now, even at $2.25, because January is going to be worse and you will wish you had. If diesel reverses above $6.60 on a refinery outage or a heavier distillate draw, waiting gains you nothing on linehaul and costs you real money on the surcharge, and all-in goes back over $3.20 no matter how clever the negotiation was. If the vast majority of shippers in your lane simultaneously decide to move freight off rail and onto truck, the December intermodal option disappears right at the moment you planned to use it. Those are the three variables. Watch them in that order.

There is one more consequence of a 13.7 week that does not show up on any rate report and always surprises people, and it is worth naming because it bites hardest at exactly the nodes described above: the first casualty is your drop-trailer pool. When trucks are this hard to find, carriers stop leaving trailers sitting for drop-and-hook, because the asset is worth more turning than waiting, and yard pools that were reliable in June quietly thin out. Assume you have 20 live unloads a week averaging two hours each. That is 40 driver-hours a week gone, and at an assumed $75 an hour for a truck with a driver standing still you are burning about $3,000 a week in waiting. A drop programme that converts even half of those to drop-and-hook recovers roughly half of that. You will not get it agreed to in a 13.7 week. You get it agreed to in a 7.0 week, which is why it belongs on this month's to-do list even though it cannot be delivered this month.

What about leaving truck entirely. Intermodal is the obvious answer and October is exactly the month to price it honestly instead of emotionally. Every lane that physically fits a 53-foot domestic box should be priced this week against truck with the transit assumption written down in advance. I would assume two to four extra days, not one, because that is what actually happens once a box touches a ramp, and if the saving survives that assumption it is a real saving worth taking. Cross-border freight should be re-quoted through a second crossing now rather than in the week the first snow closes I-80. And whatever you do, track intermodal failures by box count rather than dollars, because the dollars are a symptom: every diverted container becomes an unplanned, un-bid truck move priced by whoever answers the phone first.

So does this road still go. It goes. Nobody should redesign a network over an eleven-cent weekly move, any more than anybody should have redesigned it over last week's correction in the other direction. What changed this week is the price at which three decisions get made over the next six weeks: whether freight dated 6 to 20 October can legitimately be held past the 20th, whether intermodal substitution survives a honest transit assumption on your top five lanes, and whether your next bid packet separates linehaul from the surcharge table before it goes in the envelope. Get those three right and the eleven cents is weather. Get them wrong and you will pay it twice, once now and once at renewal.

• Before any Q4 or January bid goes out, rebuild your top five lanes as two columns: linehaul plus surcharge-separate fuel, with the base price and the miles-per-gallon divisor written into the quote, target: no all-in-only quotes accepted after 20 October.
• Re-price any load scheduled between 6 and 20 October that can legally wait past the 20th, target measurable relief of $0.05-$0.11 per mile on lanes averaging 1,200 miles, roughly $60-$132 a load.
• Ask your three largest flatbed carriers in writing how long a quote stays valid and re-check one quote against its own validity window this week, target: zero loads booked by phone without a written expiry time.
• Confirm which diesel series and which refresh lag your surcharge tables use, and request regional averaging if your freight runs predominantly California or Gulf Coast before the Nov-Dec bid cycle opens.
• Price every lane that fits a 53-foot domestic container against truck this week using an explicit two-to-four-day extra transit assumption, target: move at least 10 per cent of suitable volume before 1 December.
• Open the drop-trailer conversation now for the January agreement even though nothing can be delivered in a 13.7 week, target: convert half of your live unload hours to drop-and-hook by Q2.