West Coast truckload rate index

What the index is, and what it is not

The table on this page lists the lanes we run and quote, out of and into the Los Angeles basin and the Inland Empire, the Central Valley, the Bay Area, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Portland and the Puget Sound, and shows for each one what a full truckload is likely to cost today. Each lane carries up to four lines, one per trailer type we run: dry van, flatbed, power only and box truck. Each line has a low figure, a typical figure and a high figure.

It is an index of estimates. The figures are not quotes, not offers and not a tariff. They describe where the market for that lane sat on the day shown, as our own model reads it. A real load has a date, a weight, a commodity, an appointment window and a receiver, and any of those can move the price up or down from the typical figure. The quote form is the way to turn an estimate into a price we will stand behind.

Refrigerated loads are not in the index. Our records hold no reefer loads, and we do not list reefer as a service, so the model has nothing honest to say about reefer rates.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure is computed by the pricing model inside our transportation management system, which looks at two things. The first is our own lane history: the loads we have booked and moved on that lane and on lanes like it, how they were priced, which trailer carried them and how the price changed through the year. The second is the diesel price of the day, because fuel is the largest single cost that moves from one week to the next, and a model that ignores it goes stale within a month.

From those two inputs the model produces a low, a typical and a high figure for each lane and trailer type. The typical figure is the middle of what the lane has been clearing. The low and high figures mark the range a normal load falls into, so a quote near either end is not a mistake, it is the lane on a soft day or a tight one. A lane with a long history gets a tighter range; a lane with a short history leans on similar lanes and gets a wider one.

Nothing in the index is typed by hand or adjusted by a person. The model rebuilds the whole table once a day, early in the morning Pacific time, and this page shows whatever the model produced for the date printed above the table. If the feed is late or empty, the table is empty too, rather than carrying yesterday forward as if it were today.

What a figure covers

Each figure is for a full truckload, one shipper, one trailer, one trip, and includes the linehaul and the fuel. It does not include accessorial charges that depend on what happens at the dock, such as detention when a truck waits beyond the free time, a lumper fee at a warehouse that uses its own unloading crew, a driver assist, or a second stop. Those are added to a quote only when they apply, and the quote says so.

The miles column is the road distance the model uses for the lane, measured market to market. A pickup on the far side of one market or a delivery on the far side of the other adds a few miles and a little cost, which is one of the reasons the index shows a range and not a single number.

How to read the table

Find the lane, then the trailer type you need. If your freight loads from a dock and fits inside a 53 foot trailer, read the dry van line. If it loads from the side or the top, read the flatbed line. If you own the loaded trailer and need a tractor and a driver, read the power only line. A short, light load inside a city or on a nearby lane may fit the box truck line, where one exists.

Then look at the date. The table is only ever today’s table. If you are reading a copy of it somewhere else, the date tells you how old it is, and the figures for a lane can move by a noticeable amount in a week when diesel jumps or when a season starts, such as the produce season out of the Salinas Valley or the retail peak into the Inland Empire warehouses.

A lane you need that is missing from the table is not a lane we refuse. It is a lane the model does not yet have enough history to price with confidence, so we would rather quote it by hand than print a guess. Send the quote form with the two cities and the date.

Using and citing the index

The table is free to reuse with a credit. Cite it as "West Coast truckload rate index, Lifetime Logistics Services LLC, Covina, California" with the date shown, and link to this page, which keeps the same address every day. The same rows are available as a CSV file and as plain text at the addresses linked under the table, and an RSS feed carries one entry per day so a reader or a newsroom can follow it without visiting.

Journalists, analysts and other brokers are welcome to quote a figure from it. Shippers are welcome to use it to sanity check a quote from anyone, including us. If a figure looks wrong for a lane you know well, tell us; the model is only as good as the history behind it, and a lane that has changed is worth a second look.

The lanes behind the index

The lanes in the table are ones we run or quote: the corridors between the Los Angeles basin and Phoenix, Las Vegas, the Central Valley, the Salinas Valley, the Bay Area, Sacramento, Portland, the Puget Sound, Salt Lake City, Boise, Reno, Tucson and El Paso, in both directions where we have the history to price both. Each of those lanes has its own page with the distance, the drive time, the transit days by trailer, the corridor and its seasons, and the same daily estimate block for that one lane.

The index is maintained by Lifetime Logistics Services LLC, a freight broker and trucking company in Covina, California, with its own fleet of dry vans and vetted partner carriers for flatbed and specialized loads, serving the eleven western states. The company books and runs loads on these lanes itself, and its own loads on them are where the history comes from.