Third-quarter earnings will start arriving in mid-October, and one issue on analysts’ minds is likely to be fuel costs — which, as anyone who has visited a gas station recently already knows,  have been rising painfully all summer long. 

Trucking and transportation businesses will be among those firms likely to report slower growth, higher costs, or both as a result of increasing fuel costs. For example, just last week J.B. Hunt Transport ($JBHT) warned analysts that Q3 earnings will be 5 to 10 percent below expectations amid ““some of the most radical and abnormal swings” in fuel costs that the company has ever seen.

Calcbench can help analysts understand the effect of those costs (and how companies are trying to stay ahead of that pressure) because many companies in trucking, transportation, and related sectors disclose what they’re paying for fuel, plus any surcharges they’re imposing to pass along those costs to customers. Finding those disclosures is a breeze with Calcbench tools, so let’s consider a few examples. 

First up: JB Hunt. 

It turns out that Hunt has imposed a fuel surcharge for many years. Hunt reports the revenue from those surcharges every quarter, alongside all the other operating revenue it gets excluding fuel surcharges. For example, in Q2 2026, the company reported $2.85 billion in operating revenue and another $641.5 million in fuel surcharge revenue (up 10.8 percent and 83.2 percent, respectively, from the year-ago period). 

But since each of those revenue streams are tagged, one can also use the Calcbench “See Tag History” feature to examine those numbers backward through time. That’s exactly what we did, for quarterly revenue for the last several years. The result is Figure 1, below.

Note the trend lines. Both segments (operating revenue in red, fuel surcharge revenue in blue) have trended down, but operating revenue has declined at a decidedly faster pace than fuel charge revenue.

JB Hunt also reports fuel and fuel taxes as an operating expense. Calcbench lets you pull out that disclosure for individual analysis too. Figure 2, below, shows fuel costs compared to fuel surcharge revenue and the “profit margin” for each quarter, since surcharge revenue far exceeded fuel costs in every quarter. 

Now let’s truck on over to another example.

Knight-Swift

JB Hunt isn’t the only transportation company that discloses fuel items. Knight-Swift Transportation ($KNX) does the same, for both fuel costs and what it calls a “truckload and LTL fuel” surcharge. (LTL means “less than truckload,” a term of art in the industry that means smaller deliveries.)

Figure 3, below, shows how other revenue and fuel surcharge revenue stack up for Knight-Swift.

That’s a very different tale from JB Hunt. Other operating revenue has been rising in the last several years, while fuel surcharge revenue has held essentially flat.

And Figure 4 shows fuel surcharge revenue against fuel costs. As you can see here, in many quarters fuel surcharge revenue was below fuel cost for the same period. 

Looking at all that data, analysts might wonder: Has Knight-Swift been charging too little for fuel surcharges? Has JB Hunt been charging too much? 

Calcbench doesn’t profess to know, but we do have the line-item data that helps you see what’s really going on in the business, so you’ll know which questions to ask.