Watch how fast it happened this year.
Within weeks of the Strait of Hormuz disruption in early 2026, emergency fuel surcharges appeared across the market, and by spring every major container line had an active EFS or EBS program, with some extending the charges to inland and intermodal legs. June brought a wave of peak season surcharge announcements on the Asia to Europe and transpacific trades, with carrier announcements and trade press reporting surcharges in the range of $500 to $1,200 per container; and in some cases, up to $2,000 per FEU. When fighting in the Middle East intensified again in late July, a second round of emergency fuel surcharges followed for August, reversing reductions that had only just begun.
Three surcharge waves in six months, on top of the general rate increase announcements arriving in between. The surcharge has become the freight industry's default response to volatility. Whatever the disruption, the answer arrives as a new line item, at short notice, mid-contract, and outside anything you budgeted.
For procurement and operation teams, that makes un-forecasted surcharges a permanent feature of the job rather than an occasional irritation. It also makes them the hardest line to defend internally, because a charge you never forecast is, by definition, a variance you now have to explain. We covered what that conversation with finance looks like in A number you can defend: what finance really asks about your freight budget. This is the part of the freight bill where that defence gets tested most.
A peak season surcharge without a peak
Here is what makes the trend more than a cost story.
Look at the market the 2026 surcharges landed in. Capacity on the major trades sitting at record highs. Blank sailings running below 10 to 15% of offered capacity. Demand is healthy, tracking around 5% year on year against an original forecast of 3 to 3.5%. On the fundamentals, that is a well-supplied market. And yet peak season surcharges kept appearing, on some corridors before any seasonal peak had arrived, and increasingly tied to geography and disruption rather than the calendar.
Carriers are managing capacity to keep networks balanced and rates sustainable, which is a rational commercial response. However, the consequence is that a surcharge is no longer a reliable signal of genuine scarcity or genuine cost. Sometimes it reflects a real, measurable increase, such as the extra bunker consumed rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope. Sometimes it reflects a pricing decision that would once have been called a rate increase.
From the invoice alone, the two are indistinguishable. Trade press commentators spent June asking whether the concept of a peak season even means anything in supply chains this disrupted – and it is a fair reflection. Procurement and operations leaders can already see where this is heading: as one sourcing executive at a global engineering group put it to us, surcharges are growing as a share of total landed cost precisely because of the volatility, which is turning surcharge management from an invoicing detail into a strategy question.
The industry debate has turned on one word: transparency
Shippers are no longer only disputing amounts.
They are disputing the basis.
Through 2026, trade press coverage documented cargo owners openly questioning whether emergency fuel charges reflect genuine cost increases at all; one shipper quoted by The Loadstar put it bluntly: "trust has gone on fuel prices." When one major carrier sharply raised its full-year profit guidance in July, shipper representatives responded by accusing lines of exploiting the disruption through "opaque surcharges" and reduced contract allocations. The Global Shippers Forum has been sharper still about the flurry of announcements, with its director telling The Loadstar Podcast that shippers "don't want surcharges, they want solutions," and noting that the 2026 fuel charges arrived on top of the established bunker adjustment factors that already exist to recover fuel costs, rather than through them.
That layering point is the substantive one, and it matches what shippers told us at our freight roundtables this year.
Emergency fuel requests arrived at anywhere from $150 to $600 per container, often with limited explanation of the calculation, and frequently running alongside existing BAF mechanisms rather than replacing them, raising the obvious question of which fuel costs were being recovered twice. Several carrier notices published surcharge programs while directing customers to sales representatives for the actual levels. The most effective challenge shippers described was also the simplest: if bunker prices fell tomorrow, would the money come back?
A true cost-recovery mechanism moves in both directions. A charge that only ratchets upward is a pricing decision, and pricing decisions are negotiated with market evidence, the way rates are.
None of this requires assuming bad faith. Carriers face real cost pressure during disruption: longer routings burn more fuel, and networks under strain cost more to run. The frustration on the shipper side, echoed by forwarder associations as well, is about proportionality and proof, which is precisely the ground where independent data settles arguments that relationships alone cannot.
What the data says: the market pays a range, never a rate
Strip away the announcements and look at what actually gets paid, and the surcharge story changes shape.
Xeneta's benchmark data has long shown that the same surcharge on the same trade covers an enormous range. On Southeast Asia to North Europe, fuel surcharges have run from a market low of $190 per FEU to a high of $770, a fourfold spread for a charge nominally recovering the same commodity on the same routing. Different shippers on one trade face entirely different surcharge combinations, and a shipper paying more line items can still hold a lower all-in rate than one paying fewer. The announced level, in other words, is a starting point. Where you land inside the range is an outcome of negotiation, and of whether you can see the range at all.
The 2026 disruption confirmed it. In our own conversations with shippers this year, so many negotiated the emergency fuel charges announced at $3,000 to $4,000 per container that the average level actually passed through sat well below the announced figures. One exchange captured the whole dynamic: a shipper reviewing market data asked why a widely announced $5,000 peak season surcharge on one trade wasn't visible in the benchmark, and the answer was that a large share of shippers never paid it, having removed it entirely or negotiated it down. The announced charge made headlines; the market paid something else. Every shipper who pays/paid the announced number as if it were a tariff is settling at the top of a range most of the market is negotiating down.
The willingness to push back on surcharges is itself measurable, and it is rising fast. Across our conversations with shippers, the share of surcharge discussions involving active negotiation or pushback held at roughly a quarter throughout the 2024 Red Sea crisis. Through the 2026 disruption it has run between 38% and 47%, peaking in the second quarter at nearly half of every surcharge conversation. Two crises apart, shippers are close to twice as likely to challenge a charge as they were in 2024.
The reasons are not mysterious.
The first is learning: 2024 was this cycle's first big surcharge challenge, and the shippers who demanded sunset clauses and separable line items watched those terms work, while charges that went unchallenged stuck and proved hard to unwind once spot rates fell.
The second is proof: the announced-versus-paid gap stopped being a suspicion and became visible experience, and once a team has removed one charge, accepting the next one unexamined became a choice rather than a default.
The third is practice: benchmarking a surcharge before accepting it moved from advanced tactic in 2024 to standard procedure in 2026, with some of the world's largest shippers now refusing whole categories of charges outright and accepting fuel increases only against documentation.
And the fourth is internal: with finance scrutinizing every variance against the budget, an unexplained charge now costs more to accept inside the building than to challenge outside it. Pushback has stopped being confrontational and very quickly became procedure.
The other side of the table sees it too. A commercial lead at a major forwarder described customers who monitor the market and take every opportunity to challenge or remove surcharges based on current conditions, adding that any self-respecting procurement team would come prepared for exactly that conversation.
A fair question at this point: how do you benchmark a surcharge at all, when surcharges are not even applied consistently across contracts?
The honest answer is that you can't do it by decomposition. On any port-to-port trade, the average all-in long-term rate is one number, but the surcharges inside it vary contract by contract, so no one can say what percentage a specific surcharge contributes to the trade's average. What a shipper can do, and what our data is built to show, is look at each individual surcharge on the trade, the market average paid for that specific charge, and the spread around it, and hold their own invoice against that. Charge by charge, corridor by corridor. That is the view that turns "this is the standard charge" from a statement you have to accept into a claim you can test.
What shippers can do when the next line item lands
The teams handling this well are not the ones refusing every charge. They are the ones who have made surcharges subject to the same discipline as rates, and the playbook starts before the request arrives.
Sort first. A surcharge explicitly contemplated in your contract is an obligation, to be verified against its own formula and trigger. A charge introduced outside the contract is a commercial negotiation, whatever the email says. That single sort changes the posture of everything that follows.
Then hold every negotiable request to conditions like these:
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A measurable trigger tied to current conditions rather than assumptions about next quarter,
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A defined end date (an emergency measure without a sunset is a rate increase with a sympathetic name),
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A disclosed methodology,
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and no overlap with fuel or security mechanisms you already pay.
Benchmark before accepting. A $400 charge means nothing in isolation; against a market view showing what other shippers pay for the same charge on the same corridor, it becomes a negotiating position. This is the step that turns the announced-versus-paid gap from something that happens to other shippers into something that happens for you.
Book what you accept with the evidence attached. An accepted surcharge belongs in the market bucket of your variance report, alongside the benchmark and the sunset date, where it reads as a market movement your team saw, measured, and negotiated. Filed without evidence, it reads as a surprise, and a team that keeps reporting surprises loses standing at exactly the moments budgets and headcount get decided.
There is also a structural answer gaining ground, and the market is currently pushing both sides of the table toward it. Fixed contracts have a known failure mode that runs in both directions. When spot rates climb well above older fixed contract rates, as they have through stretches of this disruption, carriers have every commercial incentive to favor higher-paying spot cargo, and shippers have reported feeling exactly that: rolled boxes, reduced contract allocations, and surcharges, which seen through this lens are the mechanism that pulls a fixed rate toward spot mid-term, a repricing of the number you signed without a renegotiation you agreed to. It is not a new pattern either. In the 2024 crisis, a European retail group described finalizing its tender in early March, watching rates surge within weeks, and having its allocation immediately cut, with a $1,000 per TEU peak season surcharge layered on the volume that remained.
When the market inverts and spot falls below contract, the defection does switch sides, with shippers under-delivering on commitments and drifting to the spot market instead. Both behaviors are well documented across recent cycles. and neither party is being uniquely unreasonable; a fixed rate is simply a bet on where the market will sit for twelve months, and whoever loses the bet starts looking for the exit.
Shippers, for their part, have responded by shortening the bet. In Xeneta customer surveys, preference for 12-month contracts fell from 52% to 43% between 2023 and 2024 while 3 to 6 month contracts doubled from 13% to 26%, a shift driven by risk management rather than preference, as we examined in 3-6 month contracts: preference or necessity?. Shorter terms reduce the risk of being stranded on a stale rate, but they buy that flexibility with more frequent negotiations, in a market that already renegotiates itself every few weeks.
Index-linked contracts are where those pressures meet.
To be clear about what the alternatives really are: fleeing to the spot market is no shelter from surcharges, since the 2026 emergency fuel charges applied to spot cargo too. The honest comparison is three ways of being exposed to the same market:
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A fixed rate is a price that gets repriced by surprise, through surcharges and allocation cuts.
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Spot is the live price with no rules and no protection.
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An indexed rate is the live price with rules: the rate moves with an agreed market index under pre-agreed mechanics, the shipper keeps the capacity and service of a term commitment without holding a rate the market has left behind, and the carrier keeps the volume without giving up the upside that currently makes spot so attractive, which is exactly why carriers engage with indexing too.
Crucially for this article, a well-structured indexed rate defines up front what is included, so the next disruption arrives without a negotiation about whether its costs sit inside or outside the contract, and without a surcharge doing the repricing that the index already handles. Interest in indexing has grown visibly through this cycle, alongside the broader shift we described in How to build a freight procurement strategy that holds up when the market doesn't: treating market intelligence as a continuous input rather than an annual event, because the market has stopped saving its moves for tender season.
The next disruption is already forming somewhere. And if 2026 is any guide, the surcharge announcements will follow within weeks, as they did in March and again in August of this year.
The announced number will be an opening bid.
What you pay depends on what you have on hand when it arrives.