What the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern Merger Means for Fuel Surcharges

Nothing changes yet. The Surface Transportation Board (STB) has not ruled on the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger, and Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern still publish separate fuel surcharge programs with different strike prices and steps. For December 2026, on the same $6.252 a gallon diesel average, Union Pacific's mileage-based surcharge is $0.84 a mile and Norfolk Southern's is $0.94 a mile.

The four Board decisions we read for this article do not mention fuel surcharges, so what a combined railroad would charge is an open question that this article does not try to answer. Shippers who want the Board to consider it have a deadline: comments, protests and requests for conditions are due Nov 18, 2026.

The case is STB Docket No. FD 36873, Union Pacific Corporation, Control, Norfolk Southern Corporation. The railroads notified the Board of their intent to file on Jul 30, 2025. The Board rejected their first application, filed Dec 19, 2025, as incomplete on Jan 16, 2026. They filed a revised application on Apr 30, 2026, which the Board accepted for consideration on May 28, 2026.

On Aug 18, 2026 the Board set the procedural schedule (Decision No. 30). There is no ruling on the merits and no date for one. The schedule puts the final decision 0 to 90 days after the close of the record, and the date the record closes is still to be determined.

On Aug 6, 2026 the Board received three motions for summary denial of the revised application: one from BNSF Railway, one from CSX Transportation, and one filed jointly by five shipper associations (the American Chemistry Council, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, Alliance for Chemical Distribution, National Industrial Transportation League and The Fertilizer Institute). Canadian Pacific Kansas City filed comments to the same effect. This is the Board's own account in Decision No. 37.

The Board denied the motions on Sep 18, 2026 and kept the schedule. The decision's digest says the Board "reaches no conclusions on the merits of the transaction," and the decision says nothing in it prevents the parties from renewing their arguments in the comments due Nov 18, 2026.

The applicants' position, in a letter from Union Pacific chief executive V. James Vena filed with their Jul 27, 2026 supplement: "We're confident in our plan and its great public benefit."

Both railroads publish a per-mile surcharge tied to the U.S. average on-highway diesel price reported by the Energy Information Administration. Both use a calendar-month average and apply it in the second month after. The strike price and the step differ.

OPA calculation: on a 1,000-mile carload move in December 2026, the published per-mile surcharges come to $840 under the Union Pacific program (1000 × $0.84) and $940 under the Norfolk Southern program (1000 × $0.94). That compares the surcharge only. It says nothing about which railroad's total price is higher, because the base rates differ and are not compared here.

We recomputed each published value from the published formula. The Union Pacific formula reproduces all three months. The Norfolk Southern formula reproduces November and December 2026; for October 2026 it gives $0.75 a mile on the printed $5.462 average, against the published $0.74. Cutting the average to whole cents ($5.46) before applying the formula reproduces all three months. Norfolk Southern's page does not state that rounding, so treat it as our inference; the tariff governs.

Each railroad also publishes surcharges charged as a percentage of the line-haul freight charge. Here the index differs as well: Union Pacific's standard program follows diesel, and Norfolk Southern's two tariffs follow West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil.

The percentages are not comparable on their own. They are applied to different base rates, under different rate documents, and a rate that carries one program does not carry the other.

These are public programs only. Union Pacific also lists coal and intermodal programs on its surcharge index, and Norfolk Southern directs customers to their marketing representative for private fuel surcharge rates. Contract surcharges are private and are not covered here. Norfolk Southern describes its page as a courtesy that is non-binding: the terms of the applicable rate authority govern.

Very little that we could find. We searched the text of four Board decisions for the word "surcharge": the schedule decision (No. 30), the denial of the summary-denial motions (No. 37), and the two served Nov 4, 2026 (No. 45 and No. 46). It does not appear in any of them.

In the applicants' 412-page Jul 27, 2026 supplement, "fuel surcharge" appears five times, each in the list of past cases in an expert witness's résumé and not in a statement about pricing after the merger. The Vena letter in the same supplement says the applicants are "proposing a rate arbitration process."

We did not search the full revised application, which the Board posts as a single 7,032-page file, or the other filings in the docket. So this article makes no claim about what they say on fuel surcharges, and none about what a combined railroad would do with the programs above.

Under 49 CFR 1243.3, every Class I railroad files a quarterly report of fuel cost, consumption and surcharge revenue, and the Board publishes each one. For the quarter ending Sep 30, 2026:

Both railroads billed more in fuel surcharges than they spent on fuel in that quarter. The filings report company totals. They do not show whether any one shipment, tariff or customer paid more than its fuel cost. The public programs above also bill on a two-month lag, so a quarter's surcharges are set by earlier fuel prices than the fuel bought in that quarter.

1. Find which program your rate refers to. Union Pacific applies a surcharge to line-haul charges that "make reference to this fuel cost recovery program." Norfolk Southern's tariffs apply to rate authorities with notes that reference Tariff NS-8003 or NS-8004. The rate document tells you which table to audit against.
2. Check the invoice against the published month. Both railroads list the surcharge, the basis month and the index average on the pages linked above. A December 2026 shipment uses the October 2026 average on both.
3. File by Nov 18, 2026 if you want to be heard. Comments, protests and requests for conditions go through the STB's Formal Filings portal under Docket FD 36873, with service on all parties of record. In Decision No. 45 the Board said it will accept all comments filed by the deadline whether or not the filer earlier gave notice of intent to participate, and that anyone who files and serves a comment and a notice of intent by Nov 18, 2026 will be deemed a party unless the Board orders otherwise.
4. Know that filings can be confidential. The same decision invites stakeholders to report any perceived, threatened or actual retaliation related to the case and allows that information to be filed as Confidential or Highly Confidential under the protective order. The applicants told the Board in their Jul 27, 2026 supplement that they "will treat all customers and stakeholders fairly, regardless of the views they express."
5. Watch Feb 16, 2027. That is when responses to comments, protests and requests for conditions are due, along with the applicants' rebuttal in support of the revised application.

This is a summary of public documents, not legal advice. The Board's decisions and its filing instructions govern.

The diesel-indexed programs of both railroads move with one number, the EIA U.S. average on-highway diesel price. We publish it on the weekly DOE diesel index page and the diesel price page, and serve it through the fuel surcharge API. The fuel surcharge hub covers truck and parcel carrier programs.