Cass data for September shows shippers paying a fifth more to move barely more freight. Contract rates are still climbing as spot prices soften, and the carriers collecting the money are running margins too thin to give much back.
Key Takeaways
Freight volumes have finally stopped shrinking. After 42 months of annual declines, shipments are growing again, and that should have been welcome news for anyone with a transportation budget. Instead, September's numbers show the bill growing more than ten times faster than the freight. Shippers are not paying more because they are moving much more. They are paying more because every load costs more, and the parts of that cost that are rising fastest are the parts least open to negotiation.
The Cass Freight Index for September recorded shipments up 1.9% year over year and 2.3% from August, the second consecutive annual increase. Expenditures, which capture what shippers actually paid, rose 20.4% year over year. Cass attributed the jump to higher volumes, rates and fuel surcharges together. In seasonally adjusted terms, spending rose 4.0% from August after a 6.0% gain the month before, and Cass says the expenditures component is on track for a 12% gain across 2026.
The two-year view is starker. FreightWaves reported that shipments are still 3.6% below September 2024 levels, while expenditures are 23.1% higher. In other words, shippers are paying almost a quarter more than two years ago to move less freight than they did then. If seasonal patterns hold, Cass expects October shipments up 4% and expenditures up 23%, so the gap is set to widen before it narrows.
Fuel explains a large share of the increase. Diesel prices were up 68% year over year in September and 15% higher than in August, according to the same FreightWaves report. But the linehaul rate, which strips out the fuel story, is rising too. The Cass Truckload Linehaul Index reached 154.8 in September, up 10.1% year over year and 0.6% from August, its 21st straight month of annual growth.
The detail that matters for budgets is where the pressure now sits. Cass attributed the slower monthly gain to a pullback in spot rates and fewer contract bids at this time of year, but said the much larger contract market is still moving higher even as spot rates decline modestly. Werner guided to a 10% to 13% year-over-year increase in rate per total mile for its one-way fleet in the third quarter. A softer spot market can look like relief on a weekly rate report while the contract freight that makes up most of a shipper's spend keeps repricing.
Capacity is not loosening fast enough to change that. In its October truckload outlook, C.H. Robinson says routing guide failures peaked at 7.5% over the summer, fell to nearly 5%, then rose back above 6% in recent weeks. It forecasts dry van spot cost per mile up 30% in 2026 and roughly another 10% in 2027. Carriers also expect federal enforcement tied to commercial driver licenses, visas and English-language proficiency to shrink the driver pool, while fleet expansion remains limited.
Higher freight bills would normally mean fatter carrier margins, and a shipper might expect room to push back. The cost data says otherwise. The American Transportation Research Institute put the average cost of operating a truck at a record $2.336 per mile in 2025, with non-fuel costs up 4.2% to $1.854. Repair and maintenance rose 8.6% and tolls 13.2%. Truckload and refrigerated carriers operated on margins below 1.0%, and flatbed carriers averaged an operating loss of 0.5%.
Carriers have already cut where they can. ATRI found they reduced truck counts by 2.4%, the largest reduction since the freight recession began in 2022, left about 10% of trucks unseated on average, and cut non-driver staff by 7.8%. Fleets are also losing time to their own systems. In a Q2 survey by Motive and FreightWaves Research, reported by FreightWaves, 80% of fleets named rising maintenance and repair costs their top operational challenge, only 13% described their technology as well integrated, and 29% said their teams spend 11 to 20 hours a week moving data between systems.
That combination is the real constraint. A carrier with thin margins, fewer trucks and seated capacity it cannot easily expand has little reason to discount contract freight, and every reason to price the next bid for the costs it is already carrying.
With linehaul, fuel and capacity all pushing the same way, the savings available to shippers are mostly in how much freight they buy and how they buy it, not in the rate itself.
The return of volume growth is real, but it is small, and the price of moving freight is rising for reasons that sit outside the rate negotiation. Shippers who treat September's 20% jump as a temporary spike will keep budgeting against a market that no longer exists. The ones who reduce wasted loads and give carriers freight worth keeping will spend less of that increase than their competitors.
Guide
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