Trucking & Rail Oct 10, 2026 · 9 min read

Inland freight costs climb as diesel bites in the US and UK

US truck spot rates hit $3.13 a mile and Maersk sets a 20% UK inland fuel surcharge. The DAT van spot rate rose 11 cents to $3.13 a mile in the week to 3 October, according to TheTrucker.com. In Britain, Maersk lifts its inland emergency fuel surcharge for the UK and Ireland to 20% from 12 October, Marine Insight reports. Our view: the inland leg is now where landed-cost surprises come from. US diesel is over 70% above a year ago, Euronews reports. Van rates before fuel are up 34% on the year, and fuel costs are pushing small carriers out, DAT says. Our call: US van spot rates stay above $3 a mile through November.

US truck spot rates hit $3.13 a mile and UK diesel breaks its record as fuel lifts inland freight costs
The DAT van spot rate rose 11 cents to $3.13 a mile in the week of 27 September to 3 October, according to TheTrucker.com. Reefer rose 7 cents to $3.69. Flatbed rose 11 cents to $3.71. These are broker-to-carrier rates, and they include the fuel surcharge.
The same week in Britain, diesel was sitting at an all-time record, and Maersk said it would lift its emergency fuel surcharge on inland transport in Britain and Ireland to 20% from 12 October.
Our view is simple. For the rest of 2026, the expensive surprises in a door-to-door quote will come from the truck, not the ship. Fuel started it. What keeps it going is that trucks are leaving the market, and none of the relief measures announced this month puts a single extra truck on the road.

US trucks: rates up, trucks scarce

The van load-to-truck ratio rose to 13.7 from 11.1, according to TheTrucker.com. That ratio counts the loads posted on DAT’s load board for every truck posted. Higher means shippers are chasing fewer trucks.
Linehaul rates tell the same story with fuel stripped out. Linehaul is the rate for moving the freight, before the fuel surcharge is added. Van linehaul was $2.25 a mile, reefer $2.74 and flatbed $2.65. Year on year, van linehaul is up 34%, reefer 33% and flatbed 28%, TheTrucker.com reports.
DAT’s analyst urges caution. Dean Croke sees the move as a quarter-end push rather than a lasting demand shift, according to TheTrucker.com. He said that “Fuel added to the gain” and that “Flatbed remained the tightest market”.
We take Croke’s point on demand. But the capacity squeeze is a trend, and the monthly data shows it.
The Logistics Managers’ Index (LMI), a monthly survey of logistics managers, scored transportation capacity at 34.4 in September, down 5.6 points, according to FreightWaves. Any reading below 50 means contraction. It is the tenth straight month of contraction. Transportation prices scored 92.7, up 2.7 points, and FreightWaves reports they “remained highly inflationary.” The overall LMI was 70.2. The report names record diesel prices and stricter regulatory enforcement as the forces squeezing truck capacity.
Aggregate logistics costs in the LMI hit 246.1. FreightWaves quotes the report: “This is the highest reading for this aggregate metric since April of 2022”.
The contract market shows where shippers are being pushed. In August, contract dry van linehaul was $2.39 a mile, 22 cents above spot at $2.17, according to U.S. Bank and DAT data reported by FreightWaves. Contract rates have risen every month since April. In June, spot had been 8 cents above contract. Patrick Pretorius of DAT told FreightWaves that “Higher fuel costs push smaller, thinner-margin carriers out of the market” and that the market is tightening from “two directions at once”.

Diesel: off the peak, still about 70% up

US on-highway diesel hit $6.529 a gallon in the week ending 21 September, according to TheTrucker.com. That was up 24.4 cents in a week and the highest weekly reading in EIA records going back to 2007. The next week it fell 14.7 cents to $6.382, the first weekly decline in four weeks.
A year earlier, the same EIA average stood at $3.754 for the week of 29 September 2025, according to Logistics Management. That is the gap a carrier’s fuel bill has had to absorb.
The AAA average was $6.32 a gallon on 5 October, just below the record $6.53 set on 22 September, Euronews reports. Reuters, cited by gCaptain on 9 October, put US diesel at $6.28, up about 70%.
Fuel’s share of the truck rate has grown with it. DAT’s Pretorius told FreightWaves: “Fuel made up about 21% of the per-mile broker-to-shipper spot rate on dry van loads in June,” and “By August, it was 24%, and diesel is trending higher into the fall.” Jeff Pape of U.S. Bank put the split plainly: “Fuel costs are increasing while linehaul pricing is softening”. That was August. Since then linehaul has firmed too, which is why September’s numbers bite harder.
In our view this is a refining problem more than a crude one. Prices have climbed since the Iran war began in February and disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Russia has curbed fuel exports after Ukrainian attacks on its refineries, according to Euronews. The White House itself blamed “a lack of refining capacity around the world,” Euronews reports.

Washington’s fixes buy time, not trucks

Executive Order 14435, “Emergency Tax Relief on Diesel Fuel”, was signed on 5 October and published in the Federal Register on 9 October. It tells Treasury to defer federal diesel excise tax incurred from 5 October to 31 December 2026, “without any penalties, interest, additional amount, or addition to the tax,” to the extent the law allows. It also tells the IRS not to penalise dyed diesel used on the highway in that period. Dyed diesel is red-dyed fuel meant for farm and off-road use, normally sold without highway tax.
The White House said: “The federal diesel tax is 24.4 cents per gallon, or about $60 on a 250-gallon fill,” according to Euronews. At the 5 October average price, that fill costs about $1,580, Euronews calculates. So the relief is worth roughly 4% of a tank.
Read the order carefully. It is a deferral. Section 4 only says the Treasury Secretary “shall explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation to pay the amounts deferred.” The date the deferred tax is due is left to later guidance. A small carrier that spends the deferred tax in November may face a bill in the new year.
The second fix is supply. After a call with Vladimir Putin, President Trump said on 9 October that Russia would release more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, 1 million tons shortly after and possibly 3 million more, gCaptain reports. OFAC (the Treasury office that enforces sanctions) issued General License 135, which allows transactions in Russian diesel, including imports into the US, through 7 April 2027. gCaptain is blunt: “Whether those measures will translate into lower prices at U.S. fuel pumps remains uncertain.” Destinations, shipping arrangements and timing have not been set.
In our view neither measure changes the capacity picture before year-end. Cheaper or deferred fuel helps the carriers still running. It does not bring back the ones that already parked their trucks.

Britain: record diesel and a 20% surcharge

UK diesel set an all-time average record of 199.18p a litre, beating the June 2022 high, according to RAC Fuel Watch data reported by PetrolPrices.co.uk on 30 September. It was 142.38p at the end of February. Simon Williams of the RAC said: “This spells pain not only at the pumps for drivers, but for everyone who buys goods or services”.
For hauliers, Trans.info reports the rise since February adds around £350 a week per truck. Richard Smith, managing director of the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said: “Businesses in our sector operate on slim profit margins, typically about 2%,”. Logistics UK chief executive Ben Fletcher has said “Fuel accounts for roughly one-third of a HGV fleet’s running costs”, according to Transport News. Smith’s verdict on where that cost goes: “There is nowhere for additional costs to go but onto customers.”
Maersk is now passing it on. Its emergency fuel surcharge on inland transport in Britain and Ireland rises to 20% from 12 October, Marine Insight reports, citing soaring fuel prices tied to the Middle East conflict. It will be reviewed regularly. An 18 September advisory had held Maersk’s UK intermodal fuel fee for truck and rail at 10.6% from 1 October. The reports do not make clear whether the 20% replaces that fee or sits on top of it. Maersk’s surcharges differ from country to country.
The tax picture in Britain points the wrong way for 2027. The 5p fuel duty cut runs to 31 December, and a 3p rise is scheduled for January unless the 28 October Budget changes it, according to PetrolPrices.co.uk and Transport News.

What this means for forwarders and shippers

First, door-to-door and port-to-port quotes now move differently. A shipper who sees a lower ocean rate may still pay more landed, because drayage and on-carriage are rising. Say so before the invoice does.
Second, quote validity on inland legs needs to shrink. Weekly re-quotes for US truck and UK haulage are sensible until diesel settles. Show fuel as its own line, tied to a published index such as the EIA weekly average, so it can move both ways.
Third, check carrier haulage into UK and Irish ports. Carrier haulage is when the shipping line arranges the truck. If a Maersk quote predates 12 October, ask whether the 20% applies and whether it replaces the 10.6%. Merchant haulage, where the forwarder or shipper books the truck, may now price lower on some UK lanes.
Fourth, watch carrier health. With UK margins around 2% and the RHA reporting hundreds of failures this year, a cheap haulier is a risk to service. In the US, a carrier relying on deferred tax may face a cash squeeze in early 2027.
Fifth, US contract bids for 2027 will open above this year’s levels. Contract has risen every month since April. Waiting for spot to fall before signing may not pay.

Our call

This is our forecast, not a certainty. We expect the DAT van spot rate to stay above $3.00 a mile, fuel included, through the end of November. DAT’s own RateCast puts van linehaul near $2.24 in early November, roughly flat, and fuel is unlikely to fall far before Russian volumes arrive in size.
In Britain, we expect at least one more major container line to raise its UK inland fuel surcharge within six weeks, and Maersk’s 20% to still be in place at year-end.

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