Paper Rates Don’t Move Freight

What Happens When the Carrier Doesn’t Show Up

A lot of companies think they have freight rates and transportation figured out. They ran the RFP, pushed hard on the carriers, got the low rates. The executive team felt pretty good.

Then the truck doesn’t show up.

That great rate on a spreadsheet doesn’t mean much when the carrier rejects the load, misses the pickup or forces your team to go five deep in the routing guide before finding capacity.

At that point, the savings disappear fast. These emergencies send you to the spot market. Your actual freight rates are nowhere near what you expected. And worse, your customer may still not get the product on time.

In 2026, I’m seeing capacity tighten across all markets. Anyone who lived through the pandemic era knows what comes next. Carriers become more selective. When carriers become more selective, low contract rates turn into what I call paper rates. Paper rates are what carriers agree to when they need freight. They’re the first rates to disappear when the market tightens.

To put it plainly: paper rates do not move freight.

The Breathing Room for Freight Rates Is Gone

For the last few years, companies had breathing room. Carriers wanted freight, and the market rewarded companies that kept pushing for lower rates.

That has changed.

Tighter capacity has increased tender rejections. Truckload and less-than-truckload (LTL) rates are continuing to climb in 2026. Spot rates reflect that and show the most volatility – and that’s a real problem for any shipper relying heavily on transactional capacity or broker-driven freight.

The April Logistics Managers’ Index backs that up. Transportation prices continued their sharp climb, reaching 95.0, while transportation capacity dropped to 28.4 – the second lowest reading ever. That is a major warning sign for shippers who got comfortable.

The first carrier rejected the tender. The second had no truck. The third didn’t want the lane. The fourth wouldn’t honor the rate. So now the load goes to the spot market at a much higher cost.

If your low-rate carrier accepts only one of five loads – and yes, that happens – what did you save? What would it mean to your customers if that same freight arrived on time five out of five times?

Your real freight rates don’t show up on a spreadsheet. They show up when you pay to get the load picked up and delivered.

Transportation is not just about the cheapest mode. It’s the right mode, on the right lane, at the right time, with the right service.

Going to Spot Costs You Twice

Plus, every time you go to the spot market, you risk using a carrier you don’t know. Maybe they do a good job. Maybe not. But you’re taking on more cost, more service risk and less control.

Many transportation leaders assume spot usage is just part of the business. Sometimes it is. But many times, spot usage grows because no one has gone back and studied the freight.

Maybe the company added customers or changed the distribution center network. Perhaps the carrier base got stale. Maybe the lowest-cost carrier keeps rejecting tenders. Or the routing guide has too many weak spots.

Whatever the cause, spot exposure gets expensive when the market tightens.

Your Routing Guide Has a Confession to Make

Your routing guide can tell quite a story.

A company may think it has a strong carrier base because the first page of the routing guide looks solid. But the freight may actually be moving with backup carriers, brokers or spot providers far more often than anyone realizes.

I’ve seen companies with excellent rates on certain lanes that absolutely should not be opened up in a broad RFP. They already have good coverage and pricing there. Opening those lanes could create increases they don’t need.

I’ve also seen companies with lanes where the rates look fine but the service doesn’t work. Carrier coverage is too thin. Broker usage is creeping up over time. The freight profile changed, but the routing guide never did.

Sometimes you need a surgical RFP. Sometimes you need regional LTL carriers instead of leaning so hard on one national provider. And sometimes dynamic freight needs a different approach than predictable freight that moves every Monday to the same destination.

Look at the actual freight patterns before you decide what to change.

What Paper Rates Look Like in Real Life

We recently worked with a healthcare company having transportation issues.

They were using one carrier across a lot of the country on the LTL side. They had systems issues, planning issues, questions about broker usage, contract coverage and whether they had the right national and regional carrier mix.

So we helped them study the freight.

Our team looked at contract moves versus broker moves. We looked at national carriers versus regional carriers. We examined lanes that were working and lanes that needed help.

They had a few lanes with very good pricing and strong providers. A full RFP on those lanes could have increased costs on something that was already working well. So the right answer was a surgical RFP focused on the areas where the opportunity actually existed.

That’s how you get smarter transportation savings. Not by throwing every lane into a blanket RFP and hoping for the best. You get there by understanding the freight, the service, the carrier behavior and the real cost of failure.

We’ve done this dozens of times. The patterns are pretty consistent.

Don’t Get Caught Holding Paper Rates

Rate increases are hitting every market through 2026 and into 2027 – truckload, LTL and contract. But we’re seeing the steepest increases in the spot market. 

Without the right plan and system in place, those increases will exhaust your projected transportation budget months before year end.

If your carriers are already rejecting tenders, if your team is already going deeper into the routing guide, if your spot exposure is already increasing, you need answers – where your freight is actually moving, who’s accepting it, who’s rejecting it and where you’re quietly bleeding money on spot.

We dig into your routing guide performance, your carrier mix, your broker usage. We find where costs are leaking and why. Sometimes the fix is a managed transportation solution. Sometimes it’s a surgical RFP. It could be just getting the right regional carriers in your routing guide.

Because in 2026, paper rates won’t move freight. The right carrier strategy will. That’s what Tompkins Ventures does.

 

Related Reading

 

• Many Won’t Recover a Dime from IEEPA Tariffs
• What a Total Transportation Evaluation Can Do
• Go Beyond RFPs with a Real Transportation Analysis