September 2026 Market Update

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS

September’s market tightened across every mode as spot rates rose, capacity contracted and access—not price—became the greatest risk to moving freight.

The August pullback did not repeat – spot turned back up in every mode

• Last month’s month-over-month softening looked like the start of relief. It wasn’t. Spot rose in all three modes in September—dry van +4% to $3.42/mi, reefer +4% to $3.93/mi, flatbed +1% to $3.58/mi and all three sit 43–49% above last year. Rejections remain structurally elevated against 2025: van +169%, reefer +62%, flatbed +17%. Reefer rejections climbed again month-over-month to 22.59. Dry van tender volume is down 12% year-over-year while rejections are up 169% over the same period. Less freight is being tendered and far more of it is being turned down. That is capacity contracting, not demand surging.

Contract stopped tracking spot, and that spread is where your exposure lives

• Dry van contract held flat at $2.68/mi while spot climbed to $3.42— a $0.74 gap. Reefer is wider and moving the wrong way: contract fell 0.8% to $2.39 while spot rose 4% to $3.93, a $1.54 spread. Flatbed has inverted entirely, with contract at $4.04 sitting above spot at $3.58. When contract and spot decouple this far, the number on your rate sheet stops predicting what you actually pay—routing guide depth does. The same dynamic is showing up in LTL, where general rate increases have gone off-cycle and density

The binding constraint has moved from rate to access

• Fuel drove the LTL cost-per-hundredweight spike to $46.77/cwt, and surcharge reset frequency now determines how much of that a shipper absorbs. On the border, a 50% Section 338 duty escalates to outright import bans on certain Canadian vehicles, dairy, and alcohol September 29—regardless of USMCA origin—with Canada’s matched counter-tariffs on $27.6B of U.S. goods already live as of September 8. Into Mexico, nine trailers now sit for every available B-1 driver. On the water, transpacific rates broke $10,000/FEU while schedule reliability deteriorated to two-week rollovers. Across every mode, what you can’t move or can’t clear is costing more than what you pay per mile.

View the full September 2026 Market Update below.