“End of March, there’s definitely some increased tightness, increased rate volatility, across all three major modes,” said David Spencer, vice president of market intelligence at Arrive Logistics. “I really associate that with an end-quarter push, an increased willingness to pay, an understanding on the carrier side that increased willingness to pay is there from the shippers.”
Spencer said the price of diesel had the biggest short-term impact on spot rates. He noted that these trends came amid minimal downward pressure on rates, as those fuel costs gave carriers high pricing power.
“The overarching dynamics are still holding,” Spencer said. “We’re in a constrained supply-side environment, elevated rates are causing contract routing guide compliance issues for shippers, and that’s keeping spot demand high enough to keep that rate floor firm.”
Spencer noted that a sense of urgency among shippers has contributed to that environment. But he also noted there are limits, since that urgency also means the frequency of high-end rates declines. He said that the overall elevated spot rate environment has kept activity and demand relatively stable, but he expects some easing later in April.
“An important way to think about the spot market is to compare it to four years ago,” said Avery Vise, vice president of trucking research at FTR Transportation Intelligence. He noted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the U.S. attack on Iran this year both began in the month of February. “It had a similar effect on the energy markets,” he said.
Vise noted that there were slight differences between how the energy markets reacted to those wars, but the general trend was similar. That included a similar price increase during the first week of March, going from a 75-cent rise four years ago to a 96-cent jump in 2026.
“The big thing to recognize is that the freight market was cooling rapidly in early 2022,” Vise said. “Brokers did not have to offer compensatory spot rates in order to get capacity four years ago. So, while diesel prices were going up more than a dollar a gallon, spot rates for dry van and refrigerated continued to fall week over week.”
Vise even suspects that the diesel price surge four years ago created a lot of the pain that the industry has gone through since. But this time around, he pointed out, the trend has led to a spot market recovery with rates increasing in response to fuel prices and the lack of capacity.
“I suspect that, without the surge in fuel prices over the past five weeks, rates probably would’ve just been very stagnant, and would’ve fallen probably to the five-year average, for the most part, in dry van and refrigerated,” Vise said. “Flatbed is a completely different animal. … Flatbed volumes have been going up consistently for like a full quarter at this point.”
Uber Freight has observed the spot market tightening sequentially since December. The trend continued into the new year with the help of winter storms, followed by the Iran war’s effect on fuel costs. This all resulted in spot rates increasing about 30% this year when compared with 2025, with a 20% rise when excluding fuel.
“If we track the average fuel surcharge paid by shippers, it increased from about 40 cents a mile in February to close to 70 cents a mile in March,” said Mazen Danaf, principal economist at Uber Freight. “It was still increasing. So that’s a 25-cents-per-mile to 30-cents-per-mile increase just because of fuel.”
Danaf said the market is tightening on the supply side at a significant pace, and he has been warning his shipper customers that this trend is running counter to expected seasonal patterns.
“Carriers shed about 10% of their driving workforce over the last three years,” Danaf said. “They were also reducing tractor orders and trailer orders. … This means that carriers were organically reducing both their equipment count and the labor count because of the soft market.”
Danaf has more recently seen a surge in tractor orders, even as driver employment continues to decline. This indicated to him that carriers are hopeful the market tightening is here to stay. He also noted that the supply side has been mostly experiencing an organic capacity correction over the last few years, though this trend has been more recently met with regulatory pressure as well.
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