Look — the published general rate increase has been running 5.9 to 6.9%, and the realized increase on actual invoices has been coming in 100 to 200 basis points higher than that headline (S2 — CNBC, on the surcharge machinery behind the gap). So when the January announcement lands and your team reports "carriers took six points," the correct CFO response is: six points of what? The GRI is the sticker price. Nobody pays sticker — most shippers pay more, a disciplined few pay less, and the difference is whether anyone in the building can decompose the number.
Your rate shopper knows the published rate. Not your invoice.
This one's for the CFO, because negotiation season just opened and the side with the better decomposition wins it.
The four-layer decomposition
The effective rate increase on your network is the published GRI plus three layers of drift, each with its own mechanics and its own negotiating counter.
Layer 1: Base GRI times your mix. The headline percentage is an average across services. Your network isn't average. The increase lands differently on ground versus express, lightweight versus heavy, zone 2 versus zone 8 — so the first job is reweighting the announcement against your actual service and zone profile. Shippers routinely discover their mix-weighted GRI runs a point above or below the headline before any surcharge enters the picture.
Layer 2: Dimensional weight. DIM pricing was extended to small packages by UPS and FedEx in 2014 (S6 — same source) and it functions as a stealth rate increase forever after: every divisor change, every packaging decision, every SKU-mix shift reprices your cube. No GRI announcement required.
Layer 3: Fuel. The tables ratchet up when oil rises and don't come back down when it falls (S7 — it's the oldest trick in the file). Reconcile the contracted table against what was actually applied last year, week by week. It's an afternoon of work and it finds money more often than not.
Layer 4: Accessorial creep. Residential and delivery-area fees have been growing on the order of 100 to 150 basis points a year in our index work (S9), plus whatever peak fees bled into Q1. This is the layer that turns a 6% announcement into an 8% reality, one "minor adjustment" at a time.
Run all four against your own invoice file and you have your number — your effective increase, on your network. That number is the only honest input to the freight inflation line in your plan, and it's the opening exhibit in every negotiation.
Why January, specifically
Because negotiation season opens now, and so does next peak. Peak is a project that starts in January, not October. Those are the same project, and here in the region you can watch them converge: the Chicago gateway spends January telling you how October will go — dwell trends at the Elwood and Joliet ramps, chassis availability, which of the six Class I railroads is quietly metering. The shippers who read those signals negotiate Q4 protections in Q1: demand-fee caps, trigger thresholds, service commitments on the lanes the gateway will stress. The ones who don't will read about their October in their December invoices, like always. [S-cite: January gateway dwell as a leading indicator of Q4 service performance].
Work the calendar, not just the number
One more piece of January craft: the announcement and its effective date are not the same event, and the weeks between them are the cheapest negotiating window you'll get all year. Carriers expect pushback in that window; account teams have latitude in that window; and a shipper who shows up with a four-layer decomposition of last year's invoices — instead of a complaint about the headline — gets treated like a counterparty instead of an account number. Sequence it: decomposition done by mid-January, asks tabled by month-end, agreement language locked before the spring volume reviews. Show up in March with the same exhibit and you're negotiating against rates that already took effect. The math didn't change. Your leverage did.
A note on what not to do with the decomposition: don't hand it to the team as a stick. Layers 2 through 4 usually trace to decisions on your side of the dock as much as the carrier's — packaging that DIMs out, residential mix nobody priced, service selections made by a rate shopper that's never seen a real invoice. The decomposition is a map of leverage, and some of the leverage is operational, not contractual. The negotiating tradeoff is real too: every fee cap you win has a price somewhere else in the agreement. Knowing your four layers tells you which trades are worth making and which are sticker-price theater.
Concrete ask, same one I give every January: our surcharge audit takes three days with your invoice files and hands back the full decomposition — surcharge share of spend, your effective increase versus the published number, and the five biggest line items worth negotiating. Free, fast, and it turns "carriers took six points" into a one-page exhibit your negotiators can put on the table. Sticker price is for people who walk onto the lot without doing the reading. You're the CFO. Do the reading.