Fuel Overtook the Economy as Trucking's Top Worry, but Cost-Per-Mile Tracking Lags

For three years running, the people who run trucking companies told researchers that the economy was the thing keeping them up at night. This year the answer changed. Diesel has spent the autumn above $6 a gallon, and fuel has moved to the top of the industry's worry list. The uncomfortable part for fleet leaders is what the same research body found a month earlier: many carriers are not consistently tracking the number that shows what fuel is doing to their business.

Fuel Ends the Economy's Run at the Top

The American Transportation Research Institute released its 22nd annual Top Industry Issues report on October 18 at the American Trucking Associations' Management Conference and Exhibition in Charlotte. Nearly 3,100 stakeholders responded, more than 48% of them motor carrier executives and personnel and 26% truck drivers. Fuel prices took the top spot overall. The economy, ranked first for the previous three years, fell to sixth, while the driver shortage came in fifth, driver compensation ninth and driver retention tenth.

Carriers and drivers did not see the problem the same way. Drivers, owner-operators included, put fuel prices first, followed by truck parking and driver compensation. Motor carriers put lawsuit abuse reform first and fuel second, ahead of the driver shortage. Ben Banks, president of TCW, noted that diesel had topped $6.50 a gallon and called the spike particularly painful for small- to mid-size fleets.

The weekly government numbers explain the mood. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update put the national on-highway diesel average at $6.179 a gallon for the week of October 12, down two cents from the week before and about 20 cents below the $6.382 recorded for September 28. California was above $8. Prices have eased off the peak, but not by enough to change any fleet's budget conversation.

For small carriers the pressure is immediate. In Texas, where the average diesel price reached $6.02 on September 14, nearly double the 2025 average of about $3.30, independent driver Tyrell Robinson told FOX 4 he was spending around $3,500 a week on diesel. "Rates are low and plus the fuel is high," he said. Small companies make up roughly 80% to 85% of the trucking industry, according to the same report.

The Metric Carriers Rate Highest Is One a Quarter Do Not Use

A year ago fuel was the easy line on the cost sheet. ATRI's operational cost study, reported by FleetOwner in July, put the average cost of running a truck in 2025 at a record $2.336 per mile, with non-fuel costs at $1.854. The gap between the two figures implies fuel cost about 48 cents a mile, and fuel was one of the line items that rose more slowly than inflation. Budgets, contracts and fuel surcharge tables built on that year have been overtaken by a diesel price that has roughly doubled.

That is why the finding in ATRI's September study of key telematics performance measures matters more now than when it was published. Managing cost per mile received the highest importance score in the operations category, yet only 73% of respondents used it. The report's broader conclusion was that the most impactful metrics are not always the most widely used. Robert Braswell, executive director of ATA's Technology and Maintenance Council, described the study as a practical guide for evaluating what carriers currently measure.

Cost per mile is the number that turns a fuel spike into a decision. Without it, a fleet knows its fuel bill went up but cannot tell which lanes, trucks or customers stopped paying their way. With it, the same fleet can reprice an account, rebalance equipment or have a specific conversation with a driver. A carrier that does not track it is reacting to the invoice rather than managing the cost.

Every carrier knows its fuel bill went up. The ones tracking cost per mile know which lanes, trucks and habits are paying for it. Logistics Focus analysis

The Fuel Lever That Sits in the Cab

Fleets cannot set the diesel price, but they do control how their trucks are driven, and speed is the most visible example. In CVSA's 2026 Operation Safe Driver Week, results of which FleetOwner reported on October 13, enforcement officers contacted 8,083 drivers and issued 3,968 warnings and 2,604 citations. Commercial vehicle drivers accounted for 3,409 of the warnings and 1,956 of the citations. Speeding was the most common unsafe-driving violation, with 1,003 warnings and 691 citations.

Those were safety stops, not fuel audits, but the behaviors overlap. Speeding and hard braking already sit among the four most widely adopted safety metrics in ATRI's telematics research. The same driving that raises crash risk also burns more fuel per mile, which means many fleets already collect the data they need to connect the two. The gap is in putting the safety scorecard and the cost-per-mile report in front of the same manager at the same time.

The Playbook for Logistics Leaders

• Make cost per mile a weekly number. If fuel is the industry's top concern, the metric that captures it belongs in the weekly operations review, broken out by lane, customer and truck.
• Rebase budgets on this year's diesel. Plans built on 2025 assumptions, when fuel ran about 48 cents a mile, understate the current cost structure. Rerun them at today's prices.
• Check fuel surcharge tables against reality. Confirm that surcharge schedules in customer contracts reset often enough to track a diesel price moving by cents each week.
• Coach speed as a fuel issue, not only a safety one. Speeding topped CVSA's enforcement results. Framing speed coaching around both crash risk and fuel spend gives drivers two reasons to change the habit.
• Put safety and cost data on one screen. Telematics data on speeding and hard braking is far more useful when the manager reviewing it can see the same truck's fuel cost per mile beside it.
• Watch the small carriers in your network. Small companies make up most of the industry and feel diesel first. Expect rate pressure and capacity churn from carriers with the thinnest cushions.

Fuel topping ATRI's list is a signal that the industry knows where the pain is. Knowing where it is and measuring it are different things. The fleets that come through this stretch in good shape will be the ones that treat cost per mile as a management number rather than an accounting one, and that use the driving data they already collect to bring it down.