The LTL Fuel Surcharge API returns the current week’s fuel surcharge percentage, the Department of Energy diesel price that triggered it, and up to 26 weeks of history for any of the ten largest national LTL carriers. Every rate ships with a _verifiability block so you can audit an invoice, dispute a charge, or quote a shipment with a citable source.
Who uses this
- Freight brokers and 3PLs pricing LTL quotes that include fuel surcharges
- Shippers auditing invoices against the carrier’s own published rate card
- TMS and freight software pulling rates weekly instead of scraping carrier PDFs
- Procurement teams tracking fuel surcharge trends for RFPs and contract renegotiation
- AI agents answering “what is ODFL’s current fuel surcharge?” in a conversation
Endpoints
| Method | Path | Purpose |
|---|
GET | /v1/ltl/fuel-surcharge | Fetch current and historical rates for a carrier |
GET | /v1/ltl/carriers | List all supported carriers with full names and SCAC codes |
GET | /v1/ltl/accessorials | Coming soon. Returns 404 today. |
Request parameters
GET /v1/ltl/fuel-surcharge
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
|---|
carriers | string | ODFL | One or more carrier SCAC codes. See LTL Carriers for the full list. |
weeks | integer | 4 | Number of weeks of history to return (1–26). |
Response shape
{
"carrier": "ODFL",
"weeks": [
{
"effective_date": "2026-04-07",
"fuel_surcharge_pct": 42.3,
"doe_diesel_price_usd": 3.812
},
{
"effective_date": "2026-03-31",
"fuel_surcharge_pct": 41.9,
"doe_diesel_price_usd": 3.798
}
],
"_verifiability": {
"source_timestamp": "2026-04-10T14:22:11Z",
"extraction_confidence": 1.0,
"raw_data_evidence_url": "https://api.odfl.com/tools/fuel-history/v1.0/fuel-history.list",
"extraction_method": "api_mirror",
"data_freshness_ttl_seconds": 604800
}
}
Covered carriers
Ten national LTL carriers are supported today. Each has its own deep-dive page with extraction method, data availability, and example request.
| Carrier | SCAC | DOE price | History | Extraction method |
|---|
| Old Dominion Freight Line | ODFL | Yes | Full | API mirror (+ Playwright fallback) |
| Saia LTL Freight | SAIA | Yes | Full | Playwright DOM |
| Estes Express Lines | EXLA | Yes | 5+ years | Playwright DOM |
| ABF Freight (ArcBest) | ABFS | No | Full | Passthrough proxy / ScraperAPI fallback |
| R+L Carriers | RLCA | Yes | 52 weeks | Playwright DOM |
| TForce Freight | TFIN | No | Current week | Playwright DOM |
| XPO Logistics | CNWY | Yes | Full | Playwright DOM |
| Southeastern Freight Lines | SEFL | Yes | Current week | Playwright DOM |
| Averitt Express | AVRT | Yes | Current week | API mirror (hidden JSON) |
| FedEx Freight | FXFE | No | Current week | ScraperAPI (ultra_premium + render) |
Three carriers (ABF, TForce, FedEx) do not expose DOE diesel price in their public surcharge pages. The doe_diesel_price_usd field will be null for those rates. Confidence scoring accounts for this — those extractors require only the surcharge percentage and effective date.
Caching and freshness
LTL fuel surcharges update weekly, typically on Mondays. NexusFeed caches responses for 7 days (604800 seconds) keyed on the carrier and ISO week. A scheduled pre-fetch runs every Monday at 09:00 ET to warm the cache for all ten carriers before the first request of the week hits.
If you need a bypass of the cache (for example, to verify an extractor fix), contact support — there is no public cache-bust parameter, to prevent accidental upstream hammering.
Pricing
$0.03 per request through the RapidAPI LTL listing. Free tier is generous enough for development and small production workloads. For higher volumes, higher-tier RapidAPI plans or direct custom contracts are available.
Reliability
- Primary-plus-fallback on every carrier where possible. ODFL tries the JSON API first, falls back to HTML. ABF tries passthrough, falls back to ScraperAPI. The response always reports the method that actually ran.
- Deterministic confidence. If a field couldn’t be extracted, the score drops. You can gate on it.
- Honest about what we don’t have. Three carriers return
doe_diesel_price_usd: null. That’s a data gap on the upstream source, not an extractor bug, and the confidence calculation is aware of it.
