Home › Guides

Peak season 2026 for brokers: diesel at $6.291, dry van spot up 32.6%, 33,000 drivers out of service

Published 2026-11-06 · facts checked 2026-11-06

Brokers head into the 2026 holidays with record fuel costs and tighter capacity: diesel averaged $6.291 a gallon in September [1] and dry van spot linehaul was $2.23 a mile in the last week of October, up 32.6% from a year earlier [2].

Rates and fuel

• September 2026 broker-to-carrier spot rates: dry van $3.01 a mile (up 96 cents from September 2025), reefer $3.62 (up $1.18), flatbed $3.61 (up $1.11) [1].
• Average fuel surcharges set records for all three: van 84 cents, reefer 92 cents, flatbed $1.01 a mile; the previous highs were from June 2022 [1].
• Diesel averaged $6.291 a gallon in September vs $3.722 in February — about $214 more per day for a truck running 500 miles at 6 mpg [1].
• Week ending Oct 31: dry van linehaul (without fuel) $2.23 a mile, up 32.6% year over year and 22.9% above the nine-year seasonal average of $1.81 [2].

Capacity: drivers leaving the road

• FMCSA reports 33,000 drivers placed out of service for English-language proficiency since April 2025, up from 26,000 reported in August; 31,000 illegally issued CDLs revoked and nearly 10,000 driving schools shut [3].
• Ohio reviewed about 5,000 non-domiciled CDL holders and has downgraded around 2,000 since May; FMCSA's final rule is expected to take about 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders off the road [4].

What this means for a broker

• Expect more loads covered late and more first-time carriers on your board. That is when vetting gets skipped.
• A driver who is placed out of service mid-trip leaves the load sitting; you find out faster if you are watching the truck rather than waiting for a check call.
• Quote fuel separately; record surcharges make all-in rates from earlier in the year stale.

Double brokering

Tight capacity pushes brokers to cover fast, and fraud now arrives mostly through communication: Highway's Q2 2026 Freight Fraud Index says compromised inboxes, spoofed e-mails, account takeovers and impersonation calls were 50% of classified fraud vectors (42.7% in Q1); it blocked 784,201 fraudulent e-mails and intercepted 109,995 spoofed calls, and ownership-change fraud was 25.6% of reported thefts [5]. A rushed holiday tender to a carrier you haven't used is the typical setting for a load being re-brokered.

FMCSA update

In the third wave of Operation Highway Shield, a 48-hour blitz, 393 drivers and vehicles were placed out of service — 183 for English-language proficiency — with 44 criminal arrests and one stolen trailer recovered (reported Nov 5) [3]. Separately, Ohio is ending non-domiciled CDLs under FMCSA's new requirements (Nov 4) [4].

What PingPoint does and doesn't do here

Does: shows each truck on a map from the driver's phone, logs arrival and departure at every stop by geofence, and e-mails you when a load is running late, has had no position for 20 minutes, or sits at a stop for an hour — useful when you are covering more loads with carriers you haven't used. You can send the shipper a tracking link instead of answering status calls.

Doesn't: find capacity, set rates, vet carriers, or stop a load from being re-brokered. If the driver never opens the text-message link, you see that the load isn't tracking — nothing more.

$0.65 per load · $0.02 per position read over the API · live map and tracking link in the cabinet free · no subscription

Create an account — $10 to start

Related

• US cargo theft in 2026: Q3 numbers and fictitious pickups
• Shipper tracking link
• Replace check calls with live GPS tracking

Sources

Every source above was opened and compared with the text on 2026-11-06.

Facts checked 2026-11-06.