Rates are swinging, fuel costs are unpredictable, and demand is shifting week to week. None of that is new to anyone who prices freight for a living. What’s changed is the pace. The market can move enough between the day you set a price and the day the freight moves that the number you agreed to no longer holds.
For brokers, that gap is margin. Quote a lane on last month’s market and you either leave money on the table or win the freight at a rate you can’t cover. For shippers, every RFP is a bet that the price you lock in still holds when it’s time to move the load. You can’t stop the market from moving. You can get better at pricing while it does.
Where the freight market stands right now
DAT’s read going into the back half of 2026 is direct. Spot rates are up close to 40% year over year, higher by some measures, and DAT expects that to hold through August rather than climb much further. Contract rates are the ones to watch, still ticking up as they catch up to the spot surge. Van, reefer, and flatbed are all sitting near the top of their five-year range.
Here’s why that matters for RFPs. If you’re still pricing against data from earlier this year, you can be running roughly 40% light of where you should be. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the gap between a lane that pays and a lane that bleeds. And freight isn’t one market. It’s hundreds of thousands of lane-level markets moving in different directions. LA to Dallas can run hot while Dallas to Chicago cools off, so a national average tells you the climate, not the price of your lane.
What repricing in real time looks like
Repricing in real time means checking your committed rates against where the market actually is, throughout the life of the RFP, and adjusting before the gap becomes a problem. It rests on two inputs.
The first is a clear read on the market. DAT iQ shows where rates, fuel, and demand stand right now, down to the lane, built on the broadest contributor network in freight. RateView separates linehaul from fuel surcharge, so a diesel spike doesn’t read as a linehaul move, and its historical trend tells you whether today’s number is an outlier or a direction.
The second is a way to see how far your rates have drifted from that market. Revised forecasts, built by Transfix on DAT market data, audit an RFP as it runs and flags when the cost you’re actually hitting pulls away from the cost you planned for. More important, it tells you why. If the whole market has moved, that’s your signal to go back to the shipper with data. If the drift is coming from your own operations, say a customer that promised two days of lead time but tenders same-day, that’s something you can fix without a rate conversation at all.
This matters because most pricing still happens once. As Jonathan Salama of Transfix put it, teams price a lane, expect a soft month to even out later, then lose money and ask what went wrong, when the answer is a decision made months earlier that nobody revisited. If a lane is worth $1,000 and you’re buying it at $2,000, that’s yours to fix. The shipper won’t.
What this means for shippers
Shippers get more out of this than a lower number. On the webinar, John Schilli of Unilever made the point that for a large shipper, rate is only the starting line. What decides a relationship is service: on-time pickup, on-time delivery, and how fast a partner responds when something goes wrong, because a late load can get the shipper fined by its own customer. Budgets are locked annually, so a broker who can explain a rate change with data is far easier to work with than one who can’t.
This only works if the conversation happens early. The brokers who reprice well keep a steady cadence with their shippers, flag tension on a lane a quarter before it bites, and build enough credibility that a repricing ask lands as market reality instead of a shakedown. As Jonathan Salama put it, the broker is the market tone for most shippers. Show up only when there’s a problem, and the shipper has no reason to believe you.
Repricing is a discipline, not a one-time event
Freight is uncertain by nature. Rates move, fuel moves, demand moves, often all at once. You can’t take the volatility out of the market. You can take the guesswork out of how you respond to it. That’s how brokers protect margin and how shippers hold the right partners, one RFP at a time.
DAT and Transfix broke down the full framework in our webinar, “Repricing in Real Time: A DAT and Transfix Playbook for Volatile RFPs.” You’ll hear a DAT market outlook on rates, fuel, and demand, then a step-by-step look at how to reprice the RFPs you’re working on right now.
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