Fill up your ProMaster today and you're paying more than you were three weeks ago. A lot more.
EIA weekly data shows regular gasoline climbed from $3.911/gallon on July 6 to $4.131/gallon on July 20 — a 5.6% jump in fourteen days, the fastest two-week climb since early summer. For a fleet running gas-powered Ram ProMaster 2500s and Ford Transit 350s at 18-19 mpg, that's not a rounding error. It's real dollars leaving the P&L before a single package gets delivered.
Run the math on a standard 150-mile daily route: at 18 mpg, that's roughly 8.3 gallons burned per van, per day. The July 6 price put that route's fuel cost at $32.45. By July 20, the same route cost $34.29 — an extra $1.84 per van, per day, purely from the price move. Multiply that across a 40-van fleet running six days a week and you're looking at close to $1,800 in additional monthly fuel spend that didn't exist three weeks ago, with nothing on the operations side to show for it.
Fuel typically runs 8-10% of total cost per stop for gasoline-powered last-mile fleets, according to Pexara fleet benchmark data — which means a move like this doesn't just dent the fuel line, it shifts the whole per-stop number enough to matter in a rate conversation. Operators who haven't re-run their numbers since June are working off stale math right now.
The EIA updates its weekly retail gasoline survey every Monday. If competitors in your market are quoting old numbers, that's a negotiating gap worth knowing about — not assuming.
See how this affects your cost per stop — free calculator at pexara.ai/calculator.