Pull up the cheapest lane from your 2026 RFP and see how much of that bargain you’re still getting.
Maybe Memphis to Dallas went for $2.04 a mile while everyone else was around $2.20. Back in February, that looked like a clean win. You locked in the low rate, booked the savings, and moved on.
Then the market moved.
A few months later, that carrier has better-paying freight to chase, and your $2.04 lane starts getting passed over. Now the planners are covering rejected tenders on the spot market, paying more for freight that was supposedly already bought cheap.
By June, FreightWaves was reporting that contract rates from this bid season weren’t holding, which tells you plenty about how quickly the old playbook has started to crack.
Lowest-bid freight procurement worked for years because the market gave shippers room to get away with it. But that room is disappearing, and five current trends explain why cheap freight today can look a lot more costly tomorrow.
The Truck Surplus Is Gone
The first crack in the lowest-bid playbook was simple: all those spare trucks disappeared.
Back in 2023, a rejected load barely qualified as a problem. Your coordinator called a broker, found another truck at or below contract, and kept moving because the truckload market had more capacity than it knew what to do with. Paying extra for reliability could feel like buying insurance on a toaster.
But of course, three lean years changed the equation. Roughly 89,000 carriers exited trucking, while tighter non-domiciled driver rules threaten to remove even more capacity.
Tender rejections add even more context to the story. They hovered near 5% through the downturn, then hit 14.3% in early February.
In other words, one in every seven loads was already getting turned down when that shiny $2.04 Memphis award went out.
The backup truck baked into the bid wasn’t waiting anymore.
When Spot Beats Contract, Lowest Bids Get Rejected First
Once that backup truck disappeared, carriers got pickier about what freight moved on the truck they had.
A dispatcher staring at more loads than trucks is going to notice when your $2.04 Memphis contract is sitting next to better-paying freight. Early last year, contract rates still beat spot by about 39 cents a mile. By March, that cushion was down to 11 cents, and in June, dry van spot passed contract for the first time since 2022.
That’s where the bargain starts getting expensive. If one in three Memphis loads bounces to a $3.40 spot cover, your $2.04 award really costs $2.49 a mile, 29 cents above the bids you rejected.
The savings slide still says you won 16 cents. The P&L has a less sentimental view, which is exactly how cost per load can look fine while total cost bleeds.
Record Carrier Costs Set a Floor Under Every Freight Bid
Even if your $2.04 carrier keeps accepting the load, there’s another problem: somebody still has to make money hauling it.
ATRI puts the 2025 cost of running a truck at $2.336 a mile, while truckload margins fell below 1%.
Then, diesel went berserk, hitting $6.28 a gallon in September before passing $6.50.
Fuel surcharges help, eventually. The carrier still buys the diesel today and waits for you to pay the invoice. For a small fleet already running on fumes financially, that wait matters.
Which brings us back to Memphis.
If one carrier is offering $2.04 when everyone else wants $2.20, there’d better be a good reason. Maybe it has a perfect Dallas backhaul. Without one, you may have found a bargain, or you may have found a carrier that priced the risk wrong.
Montgomery and Cargo Fraud Made Carrier Vetting a Procurement Issue
Here’s where the cheap rate can get genuinely expensive.
If your Memphis carrier walks on Friday, and Dallas still wants the load Monday, somebody has to find a replacement fast. Cargo thieves know exactly what that kind of Friday afternoon panic looks like. The FBI put 2025 cargo theft at nearly $725 million, while CargoNet logged $304.6 million in losses in Q2 alone.
Your legal exposure got more complex too.
In May, the Supreme Court’s Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II ruling left brokers open to negligent-hiring claims over carrier selection.
So carrier vetting can’t be the thing somebody remembers at 4 p.m. after the cheapest option bails. Price-only freight procurement pushes already elevated risk downstream.
We publish our carrier qualification requirements, and we believe that in your next RFP, you should ask every bidder to do the same.
A 12-Month Rate Can’t Survive a Market Repricing Weekly
Even a well-vetted carrier can’t make a February rate behave forever.
That $2.04 Memphis award was set when diesel was around $3.50. Since then, fuel jumped, trade policy kept changing, and lane economics moved right along with it. The cheapest bid had the least room to absorb any of that.
You can already see annual pricing starting to strain. Cass says contract rates are adjusting higher midyear, while CSCMP describes truckload as a collection of lane-level markets.
That’s the final problem with lowest-bid freight procurement. You’re pricing September freight with February assumptions.
Keeping up means treating freight as a variable cost and having options like rail and intermodal ready when a lane stops behaving.
What Comes After Lowest-Bid Freight Procurement?
Five trends later, we’re back where we started with that $2.04 Memphis lane. It looked great in February. But by September, the only number anyone cares about is what it really cost after the rejected tenders, spot recoveries, carrier headaches, and hours spent keeping the freight moving.
Freight procurement has to account for that whole year, which is also why the relationship behind the rate matters more when the market gets ugly.
KBX Logistics™ learned freight from inside of Koch Inc., managing Koch’s own transportation spend. If we made a bad call, there was nowhere to hide it and nobody downstream to hand the bill to. You learned to find the backhaul, change the mode, rethink the lane, or solve whatever problem showed up next.
That same approach helped Georgia-Pacific™ cut conveyor shipping costs 57% and got DEPCOM’s critical shipment to Puerto Rico with Hurricane Milton bearing down.
Before another low number wins on sight, put your finalists through these six questions and send us the bid sheet. Memphis included. We want to know what that $2.04 costs once the truck has to show up.