Ways To Create an Effective Fuel Purchasing Program

Fuel costs are nothing new in trucking. What tends to catch fleets off guard isn’t that fuel is expensive—it’s how quickly small decisions start stacking up.

Take a tractor running about 110,000 miles a year at 5.5 miles per gallon. That truck will burn roughly 20,000 gallons of diesel annually. On paper, saving a penny per gallon doesn’t look like much. In practice, that’s about $200 per truck, every year. Across a fleet, fuel stops being a line item and starts becoming leverage.

That’s why fuel purchasing deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Where Fleets Often Get Stuck

Most carriers start with fuel cards. That’s not a mistake. Fuel cards are convenient, familiar, and easy to manage across multiple drivers and routes. Talk to most fleet managers and fuel cards come up almost immediately—not because they’re perfect, but because they’re the default.

The issue comes when the card becomes the entire strategy.

Fuel prices move for reasons that have little to do with discounts. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), retail diesel prices reflect regional supply conditions, distribution costs, and seasonal demand—not just crude oil prices. In other words, the same gallon of fuel can carry very different costs depending on where and how it’s purchased.

For fleets that never look beyond card reports, those differences often go unnoticed.

Fuel Is an Operating Decision

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) consistently ranks fuel as one of the top marginal costs in trucking. Its annual cost studies show how even modest inefficiencies can erode margins over time—especially for fleets running consistent lanes or predictable mileage.

For those operations, fuel decisions start to look less like transactions and more like planning. Where are trucks fueling? Why there? What time of day? What market?

Those questions don’t just affect fuel spend. They affect routing, driver time, and exposure on the road. That’s one reason fuel strategy often overlaps with broader operational risk management. Acuity explores that connection further on its Trucking Insurance page.

Looking Beyond Retail Fuel

As fleets grow—or as fuel usage becomes more predictable—some begin exploring bulk and contract options. That might include buying fuel by the truckload at terminals, often around 8,000 gallons delivered into on-site storage.

Pricing services like OPIS have long pointed out that bulk fuel pricing can vary significantly based on terminal access, delivery method, and local supply conditions. The upside can be meaningful savings. The tradeoff is added complexity.

Not every fleet wants storage tanks, delivery schedules, or price exposure. The mistake is assuming those options don’t exist—or assuming they’re only for very large fleets.

What Can Make the Difference

The fleets that tend to manage fuel best aren’t chasing the cheapest gallon every day. They’re paying attention. They know their numbers. They notice patterns.

Sometimes that means changing where trucks fuel. Sometimes it means locking in pricing during volatile periods. Sometimes it just means asking better questions of suppliers.

Fuel strategy isn’t flashy. But in an industry where margins are thin and volatility is constant, it’s one of the quieter ways fleets protect stability over time.

Sources

• U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) – Diesel Fuel Price Updates
• American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) – Operational Costs of Trucking
• OPIS – Fuel Pricing and Market Data