In the first week of July, a gallon of on-highway diesel averaged $4.578 across the country. Six weeks later, in the week ending August 17, the same gallon averaged $5.454. That is 87.6 cents. The U.S. Energy Information Administration posts the figure every Monday, so anyone running trucks can check it against their own receipts.
Freight volume did not take off over those six weeks. The volume of goods moving through the wholesale channel actually fell. What went up was the cost of moving it, and the amount of truck available to do the moving went down at the same time.
That lands on both sides of the load. A carrier pays for fuel this week and gets paid for the load a month later. A business that ships product pays a rate set by a truck market that keeps getting tighter. The two seats run short of cash in different places, so it is worth taking them separately.
Six weeks and 87.6 cents at the pump
The Energy Information Administration tracks what a gallon of on-highway diesel actually costs at retail, averaged across the country, once a week. Its July 6 reading of $4.578 was the low point of the summer. Every reading after it climbed: $4.796, then $5.134, then $5.313 to close out July. August gave a little back in the week of August 10, at $5.257, then jumped almost twenty cents to $5.454 in the week of August 17.
For perspective, that is the highest weekly average since the week of May 25, when diesel read $5.523 on its way down from the spring peak.
There is less truck available than at almost any point on record
Once a month, researchers at five universities survey supply chain executives for a report called the Logistics Managers' Index, published together with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. It asks whether things like available truck capacity, freight prices, and warehouse space went up or down that month, and scores each answer on a scale where 50 means no change. Above 50 means the thing is growing, below 50 means it is shrinking.
Start with the headline. The overall index, which blends all eight readings into one number, came in at 68.9 for July, down from 71.1 in June. That is still comfortably above 50, so the logistics business as a whole is still expanding. The trouble is in which readings are doing the growing.
In the July report, released August 4, available truck capacity scored 28.4. That is not merely shrinking, it is shrinking at very close to the fastest pace the survey has ever picked up. The authors put it at a tie with April of this year for the second-fastest contraction ever recorded for any measure in the index's history, behind only September 2020. July was the eighth month in a row of contraction.
In plain terms, the freight that needs to move has fewer trucks to move it. The survey's reading on how hard the remaining trucks are working came in at 65.0, down 9.7 points from June's 74.7, so fleets eased off an unusually heavy June while capacity kept getting tighter.
Rates are still high, and the pressure is not evenly spread
Freight prices in the same survey read 86.9 in July, down 5.5 points from June. That is still far above the 50 line, which means many more companies reported paying more to move goods than paying less. The authors describe it as the lowest reading for that measure since hostilities with Iran started in late February, and still a significant rate of increase.
The size split is worth reading twice. The survey separates companies with a thousand or more employees from everyone smaller. The larger group reported faster freight price growth, 90.4 against 83.3, and a much tighter capacity picture, 21.9 against 35.2. The most extreme conditions in this market are being reported at the big end of it, which is also the end that can absorb them.
Asked what they expect over the next twelve months, the same respondents put future freight prices at 89.2 and future capacity at 40.4. As of the July survey, in other words, the people who buy and sell freight for a living were budgeting for prices to keep rising and capacity to stay tight for another year. That is an expectation rather than a forecast, but it is the one the market is planning around.
If you ship product, your volume moved the other way
The Census Bureau's June wholesale trade report, released August 6, put sales by merchant wholesalers at $794.1 billion, down 3.0 percent from May. Census flags that decline as large enough to be real rather than statistical noise. Sales were still up 14.1 percent from June a year earlier, though that comparison is not adjusted for price changes, so a share of it is higher prices rather than more goods.
The freight survey says the same thing from the warehouse floor. Its inventory reading fell to 55.0 in July from 60.5 in June, and almost all of the drop came from retailers, who went from a strong 66.0 in June to 46.3 in July, meaning their stock actually shrank. Wholesalers and manufacturers barely moved, from 59.1 to 59.0. The goods bought early this spring are still sitting upstream.
The cost of holding them kept climbing. The survey's inventory cost reading rose to 77.0, its highest in a year. Fewer goods moving, more expensive to hold, and more expensive to move.
Four things worth doing before the next fuel bill
- Reprice against this week's diesel, not last quarter's. A fuel surcharge set when diesel was $4.578 is quietly losing money at $5.454. If you buy freight rather than sell it, the same arithmetic is heading into your next rate conversation. The government number is free and published every Monday, so both sides of a negotiation can work from the same figure instead of arguing about it.
- Put a dollar figure on the wait. Freight brokers and shippers typically pay on Net 30 terms, sometimes longer, and fuel does not wait 30 days. Your weekly fuel spend times the number of weeks until you get paid is the size of the gap you are already financing out of pocket. Our guide on how invoice factoring works covers one way to close it when the receivable is the entire problem.
- Keep the cost problem separate from the volume problem. With wholesale volume down and freight costs up, cutting your price to chase loads or orders can make the squeeze worse rather than better. Cost the freight into the quote first, then decide what the work is worth taking at.
- Protect the maintenance line. Deferred maintenance is the cheapest thing to cut this month and the most expensive thing to have cut when a truck goes down in a market where replacement capacity is this scarce. More ideas on holding the line are in our guide to improving business cash flow.
When the fuel stop comes before the check
Nothing in the July data describes a permanent change to anyone's business. It describes a timing problem: costs that land weekly against revenue that lands monthly, in a market where the cost side moved 87.6 cents in six weeks. A working capital loan sized to that gap, with a payback you can see the end of, is a different decision from borrowing because the business is in trouble.
At Monera Capital we fund transportation and trucking businesses, from owner-operators and small fleets to freight brokers, along with the wholesalers and manufacturers on the other end of the load. Amounts run $10,000 – $500,000, most decisions come back inside 4 – 8 hours, and the operations we work with have usually been running at least six months on $10,000 or more a month. Asking costs nothing on your credit report, because the first check is a soft pull, and the full cost of an offer is on the table before you decide anything. If the distance between your fuel spend and your receivables is what is capping the loads you can take, see what you qualify for.
Fuel prices in this article come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's weekly series on U.S. No 2 diesel retail prices, released August 18, 2026. Freight, capacity, and inventory readings come from the July 2026 Logistics Manager's Index report, released August 4, 2026, a joint project of researchers at Arizona State University, Colorado State University, Florida Atlantic University, Rutgers University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. Wholesale sales come from the U.S. Census Bureau's Monthly Wholesale Trade report for June 2026, released August 6, 2026. Figures are the latest available as of publication and are subject to revision by their sources.