Record Diesel Prices Squeeze Owner-Operators as Shippers Weigh Broader Freight Cost Pressures
Diesel reached a record $6.53 per gallon on Sept. 22, according to AAA figures cited by The Wall Street Journal, which reported that prices are up 77% over the past year. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly survey put the national on-highway average at $6.382 for the week of Sept. 28, down from $6.529 the prior week. California averaged $8.181 per gallon, the highest of any region the EIA tracks, and the Gulf Coast was lowest at $5.955.
Truckload rates have risen alongside fuel. Shippers paid an average contract rate of $3.11 per mile in August, including fuel surcharges, according to DAT Freight & Analytics data reported by the Journal. That was up 29% from a year earlier and the highest level since August 2022. DAT principal analyst Dean Croke told the Journal that a driver covering 500 miles a day, six days a week, would have paid $15,000 more for diesel since the war in Iran began.
Transportation companies typically pass higher diesel prices to customers through fuel surcharges, the Journal reported. Shah Rahmanov, CEO and co-founder of Datatruck, said many owner-operators do not have that protection.
“Freight rates are rising, but not fast enough to keep up with diesel. Owner-operators are feeling it the most,” Rahmanov said. “Many of them haul at an all-in rate with no fuel surcharge, so every increase at the pump comes straight out of their margin.”
Rahmanov said drivers are changing where they run to manage the gap. “What we’re hearing from drivers is that they’re avoiding California and other states where fuel is most expensive, and staying closer to the Midwest and South. But even there, margins are getting tight.”
He said the carriers holding up best know their true cost per mile on every load. That means being strategic about where trucks fuel, watching deadhead miles, and “being willing to walk away from freight that looks good on paper but loses money once fuel is factored in.”
J.B. Hunt Transport Services faces at least a $10 million sequential headwind from the rise in fuel prices, the Journal reported. CFO Brad Delco told investors at a Morgan Stanley conference that the company has “seen some of the most radical and abnormal swings in fuel prices that we’ve ever seen.” He said J.B. Hunt expects about $25 million more in driver recruiting, advertising, onboarding, training and sign-on bonus costs in the third quarter than in the second.
Companies also cite a shortage of drivers as a factor in rising trucking costs, according to the Journal. The U.S. Department of Transportation says it has removed more than 28,000 truck drivers from the road for failing English-proficiency tests since early 2025. It has also pushed states to cancel more than 30,000 commercial driver’s licenses it says were illegally issued to foreign drivers. There are about 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S., the Journal reported.
Other modes are raising fuel charges as well. Farmers shipping grain paid a fuel surcharge of 48 cents per mile per railcar in mid-September, up from 19 cents a year earlier, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data cited by the Journal. UPS and FedEx have both raised fuel surcharges, and the U.S. Postal Service added a fuel and transportation surcharge on parcels for the first time this year.
Dave Giblin, executive vice president of transportation management at ODW Logistics, said it is “easy to overfocus on fuel and miss the bigger picture.”
“Fuel is one of many costs carriers are managing today alongside insurance, equipment, compliance requirements, fraud prevention efforts, and driver-related challenges,” Giblin said. “When you stack all of those pressures together, they can influence capacity and ultimately transportation costs much more than diesel prices alone.”
Giblin said shippers get more from network efficiency than from forecasting fuel. “Better planning, load consolidation, route optimization, and reducing empty miles can have a much larger impact on total transportation spend than fuel fluctuations by themselves,” he said.
He added that fuel and capacity pressures can compound. “If fuel costs rise at the same time capacity tightens, the market impact can be amplified,” Giblin said. “That’s why we encourage customers to look beyond the fuel surcharge and focus on the underlying health and efficiency of their supply chain.”
