What DOE price should my fuel surcharge use?

Whichever one your contract names. The EIA publishes a national average and nine regional averages every Monday, and they differ by more than a dollar a gallon at times. A contract that says only "the DOE index" without naming national or regional, and without naming which week applies, is the source of most fuel surcharge disputes.

How is a truckload fuel surcharge calculated?

Subtract the peg price in your contract from the DOE diesel price for the applicable week, divide by the assumed miles per gallon in your contract, and multiply by the loaded miles. The result is the fuel surcharge in dollars for that load.

The diesel price the linehaul rate already covers. Only the amount above the peg is billed as a surcharge. A lower peg means a larger surcharge at the same diesel price, so the peg is worth checking against your contract.

Truckload fuel surcharge calculator

Pick the week your load moved and this uses the actual DOE diesel price published for that week, not an estimate. Enter the peg and MPG from your contract and you get what the surcharge should have been, with the arithmetic shown.

Week the load moved

DOE national average: $5.454 per gallon

Peg price in your contract

Diesel price the linehaul already covers.

Assumed MPG

Contract assumption, not the truck's real economy.

Lane miles

What the surcharge should be

$305.25

$0.4923 per mile, over 620 miles

($5.454 DOE − $2.50 peg) = $2.954 above peg

$2.954 ÷ 6.0 MPG = $0.4923 per mile

$0.4923 × 620 mi = $305.25

What were you actually billed? (optional)

The formula

(DOE price per gallon − peg price per gallon) ÷ assumed MPG = surcharge per mile

Every fuel surcharge argument is a fight about which four numbers go into that equation. Which DOE price, from which week and which region. Which peg. Which MPG. Which miles. The arithmetic is never the problem.

Where the disputes actually come from

The week. Contracts pick the applicable week three different ways: the index published the Monday before shipment, the index in effect on the pickup date, or the index in effect on delivery. All three are defensible and they are not interchangeable. On a load moving during a fast diesel run, they produce visibly different numbers.

The region. EIA publishes a national average and nine regional ones. In late July 2026 the gap between Gulf Coast and California diesel was more than $1.58 a gallon. A contract that says only "the DOE index" has not specified enough to settle an argument.

The peg and the MPG. Both are contract assumptions, not measurements. A peg set lower than your linehaul actually assumes, or an MPG set lower than a modern truck achieves, both inflate the surcharge on every load, permanently and invisibly.

Checking a real invoice

Enter what you were billed in the field above and this shows the gap. A gap does not by itself mean an error: it usually means the carrier used a different week, region, peg or MPG than the ones you entered. All four are written down somewhere, which is what makes fuel surcharge one of the more winnable billing disputes.

For the full worked example with real numbers, see how to calculate a truckload fuel surcharge from the DOE index.

Source

Diesel prices are the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Weekly Retail On-Highway Diesel Prices, U.S. average, published every Monday and free to anyone at eia.gov. This page carries the last five years of weeks, current through 2026-08-17. LTL fuel surcharges work differently: they are a percentage looked up from a carrier table rather than a per-mile calculation, so this calculator does not apply to them.