Fuel Surcharge Chart by Carrier

What Is a Fuel Surcharge Percentage?

A fuel surcharge is a fee carriers add on top of base freight charges to pass through fuel cost volatility. For LTL freight it is expressed as a percentage of the base linehaul charge, and it moves in lockstep with one public number: the U.S. Department of Energy's weekly national average on-highway diesel price, published by the EIA every Tuesday.

Each carrier publishes a schedule of diesel price bands — for example, "when the DOE average is between $3.70 and $3.79, the surcharge is X%". When the EIA publishes a new diesel price, every carrier's surcharge snaps to the band that price falls in. Same trigger, different tables — which is why the same week can produce different percentages at different carriers.

Because the trigger variable is the DOE diesel index, tracking surcharges starts with tracking diesel. See current diesel prices by state or pull the index directly from the Diesel Price API.

Fuel Surcharge Data via API

Re-keying carrier percentages into a TMS rate table every week is exactly the kind of chore an API should do. One request returns every covered carrier's latest published percentage with its effective date and the DOE diesel price that triggered it:

curl "https://api.oilpriceapi.com/v1/fuel-surcharge" \
  -H "Authorization: Token YOUR_API_KEY"

# {
#   "status": "success",
#   "data": {
#     "carriers": [
#       {
#         "carrier": "odfl",
#         "carrier_name": "Old Dominion Freight Line",
#         "surcharge_percent": ...,
#         "effective_date": "...",
#         "doe_diesel_price": ...,
#         "diesel_band": { "min": ..., "max": ... },
#         "retrieved_at": "..."
#       }
#     ]
#   }
# }