☕ Contract Season, Contested Costs| Cargoccino 5.6.26
Annual service contracts are wrapping up, or stalling out, against a backdrop where the base rate is only one part of what shippers will actually pay. Fuel surcharges are moving faster than notice periods allow. Tariff refund money is coming, but only to those with clean documentation. Enforcement tools designed to protect shippers are landing with less force than advertised. The market is not chaotic. The cost math is.
Top of the Cup: Contracts signed, fuel surcharges still wide open
Midsize importers are generally satisfied with the base rates in their 2026-27 service contracts, but many are at the mercy of ocean carriers as to how emergency fuel surcharges are being handled. The base rate negotiation went in shippers' favor this year thanks to overcapacity. The surcharge question is where that leverage ends. Some carriers have been pushing for monthly rather than quarterly BAF adjustment cycles, meaning the number on a shipper's July invoice may look nothing like what was modeled in April. The FMC has declined several waiver requests, offering procedural protection, but not elimination of the charges.
A signed contract with open-ended surcharge language isn't cost certainty. It's a base rate with an unknown variable on top, and the variable is moving faster than most shipper finance teams are tracking.
Why it matters: Teams without systematic invoice tracking won't see the overrun until it's already been paid. The gap between contracted rate and total invoice cost is what BlueCargo closes.
Source: JOC
Rail earnings signal how tight trucking has gotten
More shippers are converting to rail freight as they contend with higher fuel and trucking costs, with CSX SVP and Chief Commercial Officer Maryclare Kenney noting that "intermodal business has good momentum with tighter trucking supply and higher diesel prices creating tailwinds for freight conversions." The railroad handled intermodal volumes up 6% year over year in Q1, with revenue for the segment up 5%.
When railroads are openly crediting the fuel spike for volume gains, it means trucking capacity is getting meaningfully more expensive and constrained. Shippers who haven't modeled their domestic routing costs under current diesel conditions are running on outdated assumptions.
Why it matters: Fuel pressure is driving mode-switching decisions across the supply chain, and the surcharges that come with each mode are stacking.
Source: Supply Chain Dive
IEEPA tariff refunds open; data quality decides who gets paid
CBP expects to begin issuing refunds for defunct tariffs as soon as May 12, having accepted roughly 21% of all entries submitted to its CAPE portal since launch on April 20. About 3% of those entries have already been liquidated and moved into the refund process. The portal is running better than expected given its accelerated development timeline, but the bottleneck is shipper data.
CBP also retains the right to audit entries for another two years after returning funds, meaning clean underlying data matters both for getting the refund and for surviving any subsequent review. Teams that treated freight invoices as pass-throughs, or didn't reconcile payments against actual duties collected, are likely to struggle.
Why it matters: This is recoverable money, and the documentation bar is real. Freight invoice audit capability is the operational foundation that determines whether a shipper captures this refund or leaves it on the table.
Source: Supply Chain Dive
Shippers are openly disputing whether fuel surcharges are legitimate
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz appears to be changing the frequency at which carriers calculate fuel surcharges, with recent wild swings in bunker prices prompting emergency fuel surcharges to be adjusted on a more regular basis. Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen framed this as a transparency improvement, noting customers are moving toward monthly adjustment rhythms. The shipper-side read: more frequent adjustments mean charges can move faster and more often.
Hapag-Lloyd is also carving out new surcharge line items to cover rising charges from its suppliers, including haulage, intermodal costs, and third-party feeder operators. Habben Jansen pegged Hapag-Lloyd's fuel cost increase at roughly $50 million per week since the Hormuz closure. That math may be reasonable, but shippers have no reliable way to verify it and the FMC's enforcement of the 30-day notice period is the only structural backstop available.
Source: The Loadstar
☕ What’s brewing at BlueCargo?
Upcoming Events: 2026 AgTC Annual Meeting
Our team is headed to Tacoma May 18-21; if you're attending and want to connect, reach out to Grant to set up some time.
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