Diesel hits US record as freight rates climb to highest since 2022

J.B. Hunt warns of $25 million in added quarterly hiring costs

The price of diesel fuel in the United States set a fresh record of $6.53 a gallon on September 22, 2026, according to AAA — up 77% over the past year. Trucking expenses broadly are at their highest level since the Covid pandemic disrupted global supply chains around the world, while freight railroads are adding surcharges and the nation’s busiest port is processing more containers than ever.

Customers moving products by truck paid an average contract rate of $3.11 a mile in August, up 29% from a year earlier and the highest since August 2022, according to data from DAT Freight & Analytics. A driver covering 500 miles a day, six days a week, would have paid about $15,000 more in diesel since the war in Iran began, according to DAT principal analyst Dean Croke. Transportation companies typically impose fuel surcharges that pass higher diesel prices along to their customers.

The rising cost of moving goods reflects a truck driver shortage tied in part to tightened enforcement of commercial driver’s license rules by the Trump administration, companies said. Tens of thousands of immigrants — often the ones most willing to handle the less popular long-haul trucking routes — have lost their certifications, contributing to the rise in trucking costs. The US Transportation Department said it has removed more than 28,000 truck drivers from the road for failing English-proficiency tests since early 2025. The department has also pushed states to cancel more than 30,000 commercial driving licenses it says were issued illegally to foreign drivers and has purged more than 8,000 unqualified training schools from the federal motor carrier registry. The country has around 3.5 million truck drivers.

Trucking giant J.B. Hunt Transport Services is mounting a major hiring push, but chief financial officer Brad Delco warned investors last week that the effort will be costly. “The cost of recruiting, advertising, onboarding, training, sign-on bonuses — help me if I’m missing one of them, we’re going to see about $25 million more in Q3 versus Q2,” Delco said at a Morgan Stanley investor conference. J.B. Hunt also faces at least a $10 million sequential headwind from rapidly rising fuel prices. “We have seen some of the most radical and abnormal swings in fuel prices that we’ve ever seen,” Delco said.

The Port of Los Angeles, America’s largest import hub, handled a record 2.9 million containers from June through August — the busiest three-month stretch ever at the port. Importers raced in deliveries over the summer ahead of the expiration of a set of Trump administration tariffs in late July, largely because they weren’t sure if the next round of tariffs would be higher, said Gene Seroka, the port’s executive director. “People knew what they had to pay and hustled in products like back-to-school and fall fashion to beat the deadline,” Seroka said.

Container shipping rates have followed volume higher. The spot price of sending a shipping container from Shanghai to Los Angeles hit $8,102 for the week of September 18, according to the Freightos Baltic Index — the highest since mid-2022, when prices spiked during pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions. The war in Iran has lengthened routes: ships bringing merchandise from Asia to Europe have been diverting from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and sailing around South Africa instead, adding at least 10 days to voyages. For goods coming by ship, costs won’t return to normal until the war ends.

Freight rail customers are also paying more. US railroads typically use diesel-electric locomotives, which are cheaper for shippers and more fuel-efficient than trucks. Farmers shipping grain paid a 48-cent fuel surcharge per mile per railcar in mid-September, more than double the 19-cent surcharge from a year earlier, according to US Department of Agriculture data. Some businesses have shifted freight from truck to rail to escape higher trucking rates, raising bills for existing rail customers including chemical companies, manufacturers and agricultural producers.

Parcel shippers face similar increases. UPS and FedEx have both imposed higher fuel surcharges, and the cost of shipping a ground-parcel package rose 5.2% on average in the third quarter compared with a year earlier, according to data from AFS Logistics. The US Postal Service added a fuel and transportation surcharge on parcels for the first time earlier this year.

Several consumer-facing companies have publicly flagged the impact on their businesses. The chief financial officers of Clorox, Constellation Brands and Primo Brands — the company behind Poland Spring and La Croix — have cited the rise in trucking costs as a factor crimping margins in recent remarks to investors. Michael Kirban, co-founder of coconut-water maker Vita Coco, said: “We just don’t have the drivers.” Kirban said Vita Coco’s ocean freight costs are also rising as the company imports millions of liters of coconut water a year, though he said he believes heightened ocean freight rates are “probably more temporary in nature” because “fluctuations of this magnitude have historically been temporary.”

“Any goods that you see in a grocery store or a department store got there in a truck,” said Joseph Firrincieli, sales manager at OEC Group New York, a logistics and freight-forwarding company. “Inevitably, there will be an impact on the everyday consumer.” Constant shifts in diesel prices, transportation costs and the tariff environment have emboldened businesses to feel justified in passing costs on to consumers, Firrincieli said. “I don’t see this ending soon,” he said. “Chaos increases prices.”

Rising transportation costs are likely to spread across the US economy, hitting food, clothing and construction materials, with refrigerated groceries and perishable goods feeling the squeeze first because their shipments cannot be put off for long. The cost pressures reflect the unusual scale and reach of the US freight network: US ports unload more than $1 trillion in goods each year, and the country’s railway network — the world’s largest, with around 140,000 miles of track dedicated mostly to freight — moves much of what arrives.