If your drayage rates have been creeping up, you’re not imagining it. Rates are moving — and for reasons that are worth understanding, because they’re not going away anytime soon.
This isn’t a story about one carrier raising prices. It’s a story about a market that has been operating below its actual cost for years, and is now starting to correct.
The Rate You’ve Been Paying May Not Have Been the Real Rate
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about the intermodal drayage market: for the past several years, a significant portion of the industry’s capacity has been priced by operators who were not operating compliantly. Chameleon carriers, non-domiciled CDLs, underinsured equipment, creative back-office billing — all of it allowed some carriers to offer rates that legitimate operators simply couldn’t match without losing money.
When an RFP goes out and is sorted from lowest to highest, a rate built on a non-compliant cost structure drags the average down. The compliant carriers either follow it down or lose the business. Neither outcome is good for the long-term health of the market.
That dynamic is now changing. Regulatory attention has increased. Enforcement is catching up. Bad actors are getting shut down. And as they exit, the capacity they represented disappears — while the rates that remain in the market start reflecting what it actually costs to move freight the right way.
That’s one reason rates are rising. It’s arguably the most important one.
The Supply Side Is Tightening — Differently Than Before
For most of this industry’s history, a tight freight market meant demand outpacing supply: more shipments than trucks to handle them. What’s happening now is structurally different.
Supply is tightening on the driver side — not primarily because there aren’t enough people with CDLs, but because the pool of drivers operating in compliance with federal standards is smaller than it looks on paper. As non-compliant operators exit the market, the driver capacity they provided exits with them.
At the same time, the challenge of attracting new drivers into the industry hasn’t gotten easier. Trucking competes with the trades for the same 18- to 21-year-olds deciding what to do with their careers. A first-year pipefitter journeyman in a market like Chicago can earn significantly more than a starting truck driver, with union benefits, set hours, and time at home. The economics of truck driving, as a career choice, don’t yet support the kind of workforce growth the industry needs.
Until the industry gets driver compensation to a level that genuinely competes, that recruiting challenge remains structural — not cyclical.
The Accessorial Picture Is Changing Too
Even beyond line-haul rates, the accessorial environment has shifted.
Railroads eliminated weekend and holiday free days, meaning the clock now runs 365 days a year on rail storage charges. If a train arrives Friday night, there’s no grace period through Sunday anymore — every day counts, and the charges for missing those windows run $100 to $200 per container per day at many facilities.
Chassis availability issues, when they require a split—sourcing a chassis from an outside depot rather than the rail facility, can add hundreds of dollars or more to a single move when you factor in the depot trip and lift fees. These aren’t theoretical numbers. They’re what happens regularly in markets like Chicago, where finding available chassis sometimes means a driver spending hours driving across town before they’ve even gotten to the rail.
All of this feeds into what should really be the budget conversation: not the line-haul rate, but the total landed cost.
The Problem With Sorting by Line Haul
The way most RFP and RFQ technology is built, it looks at the line-haul rate. That’s the number that gets sorted. That’s the number that drives the decision.
But line haul is only part of the invoice. A carrier with a lower line-haul rate and a loose approach to accessorials can end up costing more than a carrier with a higher base rate and a transparent, standardized billing model. The difference doesn’t show up in the procurement system. It shows up weeks later, on an invoice that’s harder to dispute and harder to audit.
Some smaller operators — with minimal back-office infrastructure and manual processes — can play with those variables on a shipment-by-shipment basis in ways that larger, more systematized carriers can’t. That flexibility looks like pricing creativity from the outside. From the inside, it’s often the mechanism by which the gap between the quoted rate and the actual invoice gets manufactured.
The question worth asking of any drayage carrier isn’t just, “What’s your line-haul rate?” It’s: what will my total invoice look like, and can you show me proof of every charge on it?
What a Tighter Market Actually Means for Shippers
A tighter market isn’t all bad news — even for shippers.
When rates reflect actual costs, carriers can afford to pay drivers fairly, maintain equipment properly, invest in technology, and build the operational infrastructure that truly protects freight. A market where the cheapest option is the most dangerous option — financially and literally — isn’t serving anyone well.
Tighter markets also create better accountability. When capacity is scarce, the carriers who consistently deliver — who answer the phone, who pull multiple boxes on a compressed timeline, who don’t generate surprise charges three weeks after the freight moved — are the ones shippers want to maintain relationships with. That’s the environment where service differentiates.
The shippers who fare best in a rising-rate environment are typically those who already know their total cost, have carrier relationships built on trust rather than just price, and aren’t starting from scratch, looking for capacity when they need it most.
Budgeting for What’s Coming
Rates will continue to normalize upward as the market corrects. The timeline and magnitude will vary by market and lane, but the direction is clear. A few things worth factoring into your freight budget planning:
Accessorial charges are not going away and are worth modeling explicitly rather than lumping them into a contingency. The gap between a clean move and a move with a chassis split, rail storage, and detention can be material — and it’s more predictable than it looks if you understand your carrier’s infrastructure and your freight’s typical handling profile.
Carrier relationships built before a market tightens are worth significantly more than those built during a market tightening. If you’re in a freight downturn and haven’t deepened your carrier partnerships, that’s the time to do it — not when you suddenly need a truck on Friday afternoon and your usual option isn’t available.
And total landed cost — not line haul — is the number that should drive carrier selection. That may require pushing back against procurement systems that aren’t built to capture it, but it’s the only comparison that reflects what a move actually costs. Talk to your Mark-it Express representative to plan your upcoming freight drayage.