Where Does Your Freight Spend Go? 6 Freight Cost Drivers to Watch

Have you ever been responsible for a work dinner bill that was $200 more than expected?

Chances are, even if it didn’t seem like anyone ordered anything extravagant, once you start going through it line by line, you’ll begin to see where the issues are. Three people ordered the steak, there were two unexpected bottles of wine, and someone’s dessert got rung up twice. Each line tells a story about where the money went.

Now imagine this. A regional distributor ships 400 outbound truckloads a month. Then peak season hits, and sales rise 5%. So, what do you do when freight bills rise 19% in response?

Like the dinner scenario, this is a fictional case created for illustrative purposes, but the mismatch between sales growth and freight-cost growth is familiar to many shippers. Freight costs rarely point to one obvious culprit. Smaller, incremental increases across rates, routing, accessorials, and process work can add up and squeeze margins.

Like the case of the dinner bill, though, a little sleuthing can help you find the story hidden between the numbers.

Freight Costs Are Rising, and the Total Doesn’t Say Why

If you’re the regional distributor above, your first job is to find where the extra cost came from. While that process may seem more arduous than examining the dinner bill, you can simplify it by taking the following steps:

• Focus on one recent month where cost ran higher than expected. Examine your expenses for that month, rebuilding costs line by line, to uncover outlier increases.
• Identify which category each increased expense falls into, and who is in charge of each.
• Have each relevant team provide a root cause analysis of why the cost differed.

By finding the leaks in just one month of costs, you’ll be able to start addressing them on a larger scale. It also helps to know where each cost tends to hide.

Six Categories to Look for Hidden Freight Costs

Your invoices tell a story, but it’s not a simple one. A monthly freight total can hide different combinations of cost leaks, and the mix varies by shipper. Understanding your freight-cost breakdown starts with a close look at six separate categories:

Spot-Market Premiums

Spot-market premiums are often one of the biggest cost leaks for shippers and distributors, and they’re on the rise. Logistics provider C.H. Robinson forecasts that spot-market truckload costs per mile will increase about 10% year over year in 2027 for dry van, with refrigerated up 11% and flatbed up 10%. In peak times, especially, constrained capacity can lead contract carriers to turn down tenders, pushing loads down the routing guide and sometimes onto the spot market at a premium.

In 2026, for example, C.H. Robinson found that routing guide failures (loads that no preferred carrier accepted) peaked at 7.5% the week of July 4th, eased to nearly 5%, and have since climbed back above 6%.

It’s nearly impossible to avoid these premium rates altogether, especially during peak times. The question becomes: are you paying a premium more often than you need to be?

What to Consider

Ask procurement and carrier relations: which lanes and carriers send us to the spot market most often, and what do those loads cost against the contract? If your primary carrier’s tender rejection rate is high compared to those of their competitors, it can be worth paying a higher base rate to a carrier that turns down fewer tenders.

Carrier Selection and Rate Optimization

Clearly, base price doesn’t tell the whole story. The cheapest rate on paper can cost more when you factor in transit time, service performance, accessorial charges, and available capacity when selecting a carrier.

This is exactly why carrier selection and rate optimization should be treated as connected decisions, not separate ones. A carrier with weaker performance, heavier accessorial charges, or clear capacity gaps can cost more in the long run, even with a lower base rate.

What to Consider

Ask your carrier sourcing manager: how do total cost-per-shipment and carrier performance metrics compare between competing carriers? Then, use the comparison to understand where slow service, added accessorial charges, and capacity gaps may push up your current costs.

Mode and Route Optimization

Your route and mode of transportation (ocean, rail, intermodal, truck, air, or parcel) contribute to both your shipping costs and delivery time. That much is obvious to every transportation team. But there are costs hidden in those decisions that teams may still be overlooking.

A load shipped by truck only, when intermodal would have met the service window at a lower price, for example, becomes a cost leak. As does a route that looks efficient but has hidden constraints you haven’t planned for, such as access limits or facility congestion. Because they don’t show up as errors, though, these trade-offs can easily be missed.

What to Consider

Ask your transportation or logistics manager: what would the total cost of this shipment have looked like if we used another route or mode, and would it still have met the delivery window? Mode and routing decisions compound costs when they’re made in isolation. This question addresses whether a cheaper mode would have met the service window, and whether anyone compared the options before the load was booked.

Manual Process Overhead

When shippers rely on manual processes across route planning, load building, carrier selection, and documentation, additional labor costs and cost errors can compound. That is especially true given the frequent order changes and shipment planning strategy adjustments that are common in transporation today. Changes like these can be difficult to keep up with manually, adding to the potential for error.

Our research with international research firm Vanson Bourne shows that 48% of global organizations across the manufacturing, retail, wholesale, consumer goods, grocery, and food and beverage sectors spend more than 10% of their transportation logistics budget on errors and disruptions.

What to Consider

Ask your planning and operations teams: how many hours go into tendering, booking, and documentation each week, and which recurring errors start in those steps? Don’t ignore the labor costs that go into planning and executing every shipment, or the errors that can follow when a team is overworked or rushed.

Accessorials and Detention

Added time demands, extra handling, or specialized equipment can add accessorial charges you may not have planned for. Unplanned detention time at pickup or delivery locations can also add to costs. These aren’t always enough to break the bank when taken individually, but they can add up fast.

Because they often sit outside the base rate in your contract, accessorials can also be a way for a low-bid carrier to make up the difference. Track accessorials and detention fees across shipments to see where they add up, by carrier and by facility. Be sure to include those charges alongside the base rate to compare each carrier’s true total cost.

What to Consider

Ask your operations and finance team: which carriers and facilities generate the most detention and accessorial charges? In some cases, it may make sense to renegotiate your contract to include certain charges in your base rate. In other cases, a new carrier may be the better option.

Freight Audit and Settlement Failures

Without a freight bill audit, some of the hidden costs above will never come to light. Even invoices that look okay at the start may contain overbilling, unvalidated accessorials, fuel surcharge errors, or duplicate payments. Teams can also miss recurring errors or upward cost trends without a proper audit, losing out on the chance to address them early.

Yet the very act of auditing every invoice adds to labor costs. It may also add to late or missed payments, or other settlement failures, if your team falls behind. If they’re overworked, errors like duplicate payments can further add to costs.

What to Consider

Ask your finance team: what share of invoices get a line-by-line check, and what happens with the rest? Understanding how invoices are audited and the level of attention they each require, compared to what they currently get, will help you consider what added checks and balances may be needed.

Also, an invoice audit has its limits. It can check overbilling, unapproved accessorials, and duplicate payments; it generally won’t explain operational causes such as carrier selection, mode choice, or why a load incurred a detention.

How Manhattan Helps You Understand and Reduce Total Freight Costs

When the wait staff shows up at your table with a dinner bill that’s higher than you expected, it’s only natural to examine the charges line by line to see where things added up. The same should be true when your freight charges start to escalate.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to transportation planning. With seasonal differences and supply chain disruptions, combined with constant changes to shipment sizes, carrier capacity, deadlines, and route access, the best plan today may not be the best plan next week.

Optimizing your costs, then, means staying on top of every aspect of your shipping process. But doing so manually only adds more costs to the mix.

A transportation management system (TMS) like Manhattan’s ActiveTransportation™ runs rating, routing, tendering, and settlement on one platform, so cost, service, and capacity are decided together, and invoices are managed by exception. Because the same platform also runs warehouse, labor, and yard management, a carrier delay or a dock backlog is visible across teams before it turns into a cost. Built-in AI agents monitor live operations and act on disruptions like rejected tenders and unexpected detention, so your team spends less time chasing problems and more time deciding how to cut costs.

ActiveTransportation comes in three editions (Essentials, Enterprise, and Enterprise Premier). You can start with the rating, routing, and execution you need today, then add multimodal optimization, fleet management, and network modeling as you grow, without replatforming.