Spot-market load offers rose sharply across 14 major European corridors in the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, contracted carriers rejected loads at record rates, while year-on-year rate growth moved into double digits in March on most of the analysed routes.
The figures, drawn from Trans.eu data presented during a webinar on Q1 market conditions, point to a market shifting more freight from contract to spot; not only as a reaction to the latest Middle East conflict, but because the wider cost stack carried by hauliers has been outpacing contract pricing for several quarters.
Trans.eu recorded more than 800,000 load offers in a recent week, around 12 to 13% above its previous peak. Carrier searches for loads fell in January and February before rebounding in March, suggesting that more freight was reaching the spot market just as hauliers became more selective about which loads they were prepared to accept.
The webinar, hosted by Michal Pakulniewicz from the European Road Transport Institute and Trans.eu, brought together operators and market specialists from Spain, Italy, Poland and Austria. The panel included Ewa Wegorkiewicz, chief commercial officer at Trans.eu Group; Jose Manuel Pardo from Spanish road transport association ASTIC; Tobia Mazzi from Italian operator Arcese Trasporti; Jalna Afridi from Fercam Austria; and Maciej Zwyrtek from Polish carrier Kuźnia Trans.
Diesel is the easy cost to pass on. The rest isn’t.
Diesel is the most visible part of the price increase, but operators on the panel were consistent in saying fuel is the trigger, not the underlying cause.
Tobia Mazzi, transportation purchasing senior manager at Italian operator Arcese Trasporti, said carriers now have to break out each cost element when negotiating with customers: driver wages, truck maintenance, contract management, Mobility Package compliance and the cost of moving to smart tachographs.
“Costs are rising and the companies that are not able to make any kind of profitability are going to shut down,” he said.
Maciej Zwyrtek, general sales director at Polish carrier Kuźnia Trans, said operators have to track profitability by lane and by customer in close to real time, because monthly reviews now come too late to act on.
He pointed to early March, when oil-price pressure was already visible in the first week, but spot rates only rose from the second week. Carriers absorb cost increases immediately; the market recognises them with a delay, leaving thin-margin operators to finance the gap.
Compulsory fuel surcharges are not stopping the rejections
Several European countries already have automatic mechanisms to address fuel volatility.
Jose Manuel Pardo, head of the technical department at the Spanish association ASTIC, said Spain’s compulsory mechanism currently passes 40% of any rise in diesel costs between the contract date and execution onto the transport price. The adjustment is automatic and cannot be waived by agreement with the customer. Italy, France and Germany have similar arrangements, he added.
Those protections are not preventing rejections. Ewa Wegorkiewicz, chief commercial officer at Trans.eu Group, said rejection rates on contracted business reached record levels in the fourth quarter of 2025 and continued into early 2026, even where fuel surcharges applied.
Surcharges cover one cost only. Driver wages, regulatory compliance, vehicle costs and financing pressure have all moved against hauliers at the same time.
Shipper behaviour has begun to shift in response. Where shippers traditionally kept around 95% of volume on contract and treated spot as a residual buffer, Ewa Wegorkiewicz said many were now leaving a larger share on spot, on the basis that contracted carriers would turn down loss-making loads anyway.
One customer can sink a carrier of any size
The fastest casualties have come at the smallest end of the carrier base, but the dividing line drawn by the panel was dependency rather than scale.
Pardo said a haulier with only one customer has little room to pass on cost increases, regardless of fleet size. The same pressure can squeeze a mid-sized firm tied to too few clients.
For Trans.eu, a small carrier typically means a company with one or two trucks. That group accounts for around 80% of the platform’s carrier base in Poland, and Wegorkiewicz said many such firms were leaving the market or moving into charter work for larger operators because the independent model no longer paid.
In Italy, the pressure on micro-operators has prompted an industry proposal — not yet approved, Mazzi stressed — under which some small carriers would be paid €15,000 to exit the market.
A fuel shock would normally strengthen the case for moving away from diesel. In a survival year, that is unlikely to happen quickly. Zwyrtek said carriers without margins of 2 to 5% cannot fund electric, hydrogen or other alternative-fuel investments, particularly on long-distance routes.
LNG offers a recent precedent. When LNG prices rose after the start of the war in Ukraine, many LNG-powered trucks were taken off the road because the fuel was no longer competitive. The EU’s ETS 2 emissions trading scheme will add further pressure to diesel costs in the coming years, Zwyrtek said.
AI’s bottleneck is no longer the algorithm
Digital adoption is following a similar pattern. Jalna Afridi, innovation and digital projects manager at Fercam Austria, said many companies were investing in AI but struggling to integrate it into day-to-day operations because the underlying manual processes had not yet been defined.
Ewa Wegorkiewicz said AI in freight matching depends on three elements: algorithms, data and trust. The hardest part, she argued, is no longer the algorithm, but having reliable data and a vetted network, backed by payment guarantees and cybersecurity controls.
A platform can match a shipper with a carrier. But if the carrier cannot be trusted with the cargo, or if payment risk remains unresolved, automated matching alone does not solve the problem.
Surviving 2026 to rebuild for 2027
The view from the panel was that 2026 is a year for survival rather than expansion.
Mazzi said the immediate target for many operators was not growth, but avoiding losses so they could rebuild for the following year. Pardo was more positive in the medium term: road transport remains essential, and surviving operators are likely to benefit from tighter capacity over time.
Zwyrtek added that the driver shortage would keep capacity under pressure, citing industry estimates that Europe could be short of around one million drivers by 2030.
