Two weeks ago this newsletter told you that fuel was the one line on the truck that behaved in 2025, and that the damage came from tolls and tires and brake jobs instead. That was true. It also aged badly in about ten days.
The government’s weekly survey put on-highway diesel at $5.97 a gallon on September 7, up 37 cents in a single week and $2.20 above the same week last year. By the weekend AAA had the national average at $6.20, a record, and on the West Coast it was already there and gone: $6.99 across the region in the government survey, $7.76 in California. The cause is the shipping disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, with strikes on Russian refining capacity stacked on top, and neither one is resolving on a schedule that helps you.
So the cost you were watching is now the cost that moved. The good news is it’s the one cost the industry already knows how to pass along. The bad news is that most distributors running their own trucks never set that up.
The mechanism everyone else already has
Every for-hire carrier you use has a fuel surcharge, and it’s the most boring, well-oiled piece of pricing in transportation. It works the same way everywhere. There’s a base diesel price written into the contract. There’s a published index, almost always the government’s weekly national average. And there’s a table: for every nickel or dime the index sits above the base, the surcharge steps up by a set amount per mile or a set percent of the freight bill. It resets every week, automatically, and nobody has to have a conversation about it.
That’s why your parcel and LTL invoices in October will already reflect this week’s diesel, and nobody at the carrier will have to call you to explain. The rails run the same way. The mechanism is old, everybody understands it, and customers accept it because it’s tied to a number they can look up themselves.
The carriers didn’t get faster at raising prices. They stopped needing to.
The distributor who owns the trucks
If you run your own fleet, you are the carrier, and the question is whether you have the same clause. In our experience the answer comes in three flavors.
Some distributors have a fuel surcharge in their terms, tied to the same index, and it’s been quietly adjusting all summer. Those companies are fine this month and they know it.
More have one on paper that nobody has touched since 2022, when diesel last spiked. The base price in the clause is from a different era, the table was built for a different fleet, and the person who set it up may not work there anymore. It exists, so it feels handled, and it isn’t.
And a lot have nothing at all. Delivery was always free, or built into the price of the goods, and fuel got absorbed as a cost of doing business. That was survivable at $3.69, which is where diesel sat in January 2025. At six dollars, on a truck burning a gallon every six miles, a route that ran 200 miles a day just got about $80 a day more expensive, per truck, with nothing on the invoice to show for it.
None of those three is a character flaw. The fleet was always a service you gave away inside the price of the goods, and Issue #4 was about how services you give away are the ones that never get measured. Fuel is the first line where that stops being an abstraction.
What a workable clause looks like
You don’t need a lawyer for this, and you don’t need to invent anything. Borrow the carriers’ design.
- An index. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly on-highway diesel price. It publishes every Monday, it’s free, and it’s the same number your customers’ other vendors are using. Pick the national average or your regional one, and say which.
- A base. The diesel price at which the surcharge is zero. Set it where your delivery pricing was actually built, not where diesel is today, or you’re just baking in the spike.
- A step. For every ten cents the index sits above the base, the surcharge moves by a set percentage of the delivered order, or a flat amount per stop. Per stop is simpler and matches how you actually incur the cost.
- A cadence. Weekly, following the Monday release, is standard. Monthly is easier to administer and lags badly in a market like this one.
- A floor of honesty. The surcharge comes off when diesel comes down. Customers accept a surcharge tied to a public index precisely because it moves both ways.
Then the part that takes the actual work: deciding which customers it applies to. A published surcharge across the board is clean but blunt. A surcharge that only lands on the accounts where you’re truly the delivery carrier, and not on the ones who pick up or ship parcel, is fairer and gets fewer calls. That distinction lives in your customer records, or it lives in a rep’s head, and only one of those scales.
The play to run this week
- Find out which of the three flavors you are. Pull your standard terms and look for the word fuel. If it’s there, find the base price and the date it was written.
- Pull one week of routes and add up the miles. Divide by your fleet’s real miles per gallon and multiply by the gap between the diesel price your pricing assumed and this week’s. That’s the number leaving the building unnoticed.
- Sort your delivery customers into two groups: the ones where your truck is the only way the product arrives, and everyone else. The first group is where a surcharge belongs.
- Write the clause using the five parts above, date it, and put the base price in it. Then put a reminder on the calendar to look at it every Monday, or set the system to do that for you.
Step four is where this either becomes routine or becomes another 2022 clause that goes stale. A surcharge that recalculates from a published number every week is a report, not a project, and it’s the kind of thing a platform that already knows your routes, your stops and your customers should be doing without anyone remembering to.
We’ll say it plainly, because we said the opposite two weeks ago: fuel is now the cost to watch. It’s also the only one with a fifty-year-old, customer-approved way to pass it through. The carriers are using it this week. Nothing stops you.
Sources
- Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update · U.S. Energy Information Administration, weekly on-highway diesel prices, week ending September 7, 2026
- Diesel prices hit record $6.20 amid US-Iran war, Hormuz disruption · Fox Business, September 13, 2026, citing AAA
- Fuel Behaved. Everything Else Didn’t. · Workd Weekly, Issue #4