The Debrief: Your weekly read on what moved logistics costs.
Diesel jumped almost 20 cents in a week, and while the tariff coverage played out, three ocean carriers quietly repriced the Panama Canal.
Here is what actually moved your costs:
US-Canada duties are live. Confirm before you commit.
The 50% tariff on about $20 billion in Canadian goods took effect Saturday: Wine, furniture, cement, clothing, all on top of the steel, aluminum, auto, and lumber duties already in place.
A second round hits September 8. Canada is placing matching tariffs on US goods coming north: steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.
Here is the part that catches shippers: Your cross-border landed cost moved once this weekend, and it moves again in two weeks. A quote you build today off last week’s duty schedule is already wrong. Pin down where the rate actually landed before you put a number in front of a customer.
Don’t be surprised if the US and Canada ultimately come to an agreement that changes the landscape, again!
Diesel had its worst week of the summer
The national on-highway average hit $5.454 a gallon on August 17, a 19.7-cent jump in a single week. Highest since May, and roughly 47% over the same week last year. The next reading lands August 25, so treat today’s figure as a floor, not a fact.
What makes this one stick is where it is coming from: Diesel is climbing faster than crude, and the refining spread has stretched to record width. That is not a weather event or a one-week spike. It holds.
If your fuel surcharge still runs off a June or July average, you are billing yesterday’s diesel on today’s freight. Move it to the current weekly EIA index.
Ocean carriers are repricing the Panama Canal
Draft restrictions on the canal now come with invoices attached, and the carriers are not working off a common formula. MSC is taking its surcharge from $100 to $149 per TEU on September 12, while CMA CGM jumps all the way to $500 per TEU on September 10. Hapag-Lloyd added $130 per TEU back on August 15, and ONE is charging $150 per TEU on its transpacific eastbound routings. Two containers on comparable lanes can now carry very different canal costs, depending on which carrier you booked.
In an audit, the surcharge that burns you is the one nobody put in the model. Get these into your September landed cost now, while they are still a forecast and not an invoice.
De minimis is settled. Plan on duty-paid.
A federal trade court upheld the end of the sub-$800 exemption on August 14. A reversal would only have bought time anyway, since the law closes it for good by July 2027.
If any part of your model still assumes sub-$800 shipments clear free, rebuild it. Duty-paid is the permanent math now.
What the week is actually telling you
Fuel, ocean, and cross-border all moved inside five business days. The shippers who barely feel it are the ones who had the model open before the news broke.
Our team recovered $121,000 in billing errors from five months of one client’s invoices, exactly the kind of cost carriers bank on no one catching.
We run this math for shippers every week, and the pattern never changes: the invoice is the worse place to find a cost than the forecast. If you have not tested your current profile against this month’s moves, start there.
Book a free Logistics Cost Review, and we will model where these land before they reach your P&L.
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