Every fill-up this month is costing your fleet more than it has in years. National gasoline prices are sitting between the 75th and 90th percentile of their five-year trading range, and DSP fleets running gas-powered Ram ProMasters and Ford Transits are absorbing the hit at the pump before it ever shows up on a P&L.
EIA weekly data puts the national average for regular gasoline at $4.14 per gallon for the week ending August 10, 2026 — up from $3.91 just five weeks earlier, per the same EIA series. Prices have eased slightly from a late-July peak of $4.23, but the broader trend this summer has been up, not down, and the current price sits well above the five-year median of $3.50 a gallon. That matters more for last-mile than it does for diesel-reliant carriers, since the ProMaster 2500 and Transit 350 that make up most DSP fleets run on gasoline, not diesel.
The math is not abstract. A ProMaster 2500 averaging 18 mpg on a 120-mile route day burns roughly 6.7 gallons — about $27.60 in fuel at today's price. Against that same five-year median, the same route day now costs roughly $4.30 more per van. Multiply that across a 20-van route board and today's prices are adding upward of $85 a day to the fuel line versus a typical baseline — before a single mile of route inefficiency enters the picture.
Operators who haven't rerun their per-stop fuel assumption since spring are working off numbers that are already stale. The gap between budgeted fuel cost and actual fuel cost is exactly where margin quietly disappears mid-quarter.
See how this affects your cost per stop — free calculator at pexara.ai/calculator