October 5, 2026
Fuel Management Mistakes Costing Fleets Thousands
By Patricia Waguespack, VP of Revenue Operations at Multi Service Fuel Card
The True Cost of Fuel Beyond the Price at the Pump
The logic behind fuel purchasing often seems straightforward. Negotiate the best discount, direct drivers to the lowest-cost location and watch your cents per gallon savings add up. But what if the cheapest posted gallon isn’t the least expensive gallon?
The true cost of fuel extends well beyond the number on the sign at the truck stop – or even the discounted price on a fleet’s fuel card statement. Where a truck fuels, how far it travels to get there, whether every gallon purchased actually reaches the intended fuel tank can all change the economics of a fleet’s fuel program.
For fleets looking to uncover additional savings, this post will cover three often overlooked areas of opportunity: fuel quality, off-route mileage, fraud leakage, and IFTA tax liability.
Fuel Quality is One of the Strongest Influences on Operational Efficiency
While most on-road diesel sold through reputable truck stops should meet required fuel specifications, that does not mean every fueling location delivers the same operating outcome. The differences often come less from the truck stop chain name and more from how fuel is sourced, stored, treated and maintained at the individual site.
Several factors can affect fuel quality from one truck stop location to another, including tank condition, water contamination, sediment, fuel age, fuel turnover, seasonal blending, biodiesel content, additive packages and how well the site manages filtration and tank maintenance. A high-volume location with strong fuel turnover and clean storage practices may deliver a very different result than a lower-volume location with older tanks, poor water management or inconsistent housekeeping.
For a heavy-duty fleet with predictable lanes or regional coverage, the question is less about fuel chain and more about individual fuel locations. Fleets can evaluate fuel quality by connecting fuel card transactions with telematics, engine data and maintenance records. If certain locations are followed by more frequent fuel filter replacements, water-in-fuel alerts, injector issues, cold-weather plugging, abnormal fuel economy changes or road calls, the fleet may have a fuel quality issue that is costing more than the discount is saving.
Fuel testing can also play a role, especially when a pattern emerges. Fleets may choose to test for water and sediment, microbial contamination, particulate contamination, cetane, lubricity, cloud point, cold filter plugging point or biodiesel blend levels. But testing is most valuable when combined with real-world operating data from the trucks themselves.
For over-the-road fleets (OTR), the challenge is more complex. While a regional fleet may be able to identify reliable fueling locations through repetition, an OTR fleet spreads fuel purchases across dozens of states, terminals, climates and supply markets in a single week. That makes fuel quality harder to manage manually. To help pinpoint potential problem locations, monitor each truck for 7-14 days after fueling. Watch for water-in-fuel alerts, filter plugging, injector-related faults, MPG drops, derates, no-starts or road calls and then flag that vehicle’s fuel locations within that time period. As you monitor these trends across a fleet, you will also begin to identify root-cause fuel locations that can then be flagged for other drivers.
In addition to this long-term data-driven strategy, leverage your boots-on-the-ground (drivers) to provide immediate feedback on individual sites. There is a lot your drivers can assess in person: slow pumps, dirty islands, poor winter performance, visible contamination, unusual odor or frequent filter warnings, which can and should immediately notify to avoid those locations.
For OTR fleets, fuel quality management is less about knowing every pump in advance and more about building a feedback loop that quickly identifies bad patterns, protects drivers from repeat exposure and turns maintenance data into smarter fuel purchasing decisions.
There is a Hidden Cost of Getting to an Off-Route Pump
If you have a preferred truck stop chain, your fuel card has a limited acceptance network or you are directing your drivers to the deepest discount option, the savings can disappear quickly if a driver has to leave their route to get to it.
According to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 Operational Costs of Trucking report, the average cost to operate a truck reached $2.336 per mile in 2025. Even excluding fuel, fleets averaged $1.854 per mile in operating costs. That makes every out-of-route mile meaningful.
Consider a truck stop located just two miles off-route. That adds 4 incremental miles at $2.336 per mile, representing $9.344 in additional operating costs. Now, assume the driver purchased 100 gallons at a $0.05 discount. The fleet saved $5.00 at the pump, but potentially incurred $9.00 in additional operating cost to get there. The apparent savings just became a loss.
A simple calculation can help put fuel discounts in context:
Your Break-Even Fuel Discount = (incremental miles * operating cost / mile) / gallons purchased.
In the example we just looked at:
$0.09 = ( 4 miles * $2.336)/100 gallons
|
Roundtrip Off-Route Miles |
CPM |
Gallons Purchased |
Break-Even Discount |
|
2 |
$2.336 |
100 |
$ 0.047 |
|
4 |
$2.336 |
100 |
$ 0.093 |
|
6 |
$2.336 |
100 |
$ 0.140 |
|
8 |
$2.336 |
100 |
$ 0.187 |
|
10 |
$2.336 |
100 |
$ 0.234 |
Fuel You Paid For – But Didn’t Actually Use
Extra mileage isn’t the only place fuel costs can quietly leak from a fleet’s bottom line. A Freightwaves survey found that 49% of responding fleet operators estimated that up to 5% of their fuel spend was fraudulent. Not only that, but they identified employee “friendly fraud” as a significant category of concern. In this case, friendly fraud would include behaviors such as side fueling, siphoning, inflated transactions or multiple pump transactions.
This friendly fraud can be particularly difficult to identify because the transaction itself may look perfectly normal. The right driver may use the right card and PIN at an approved truck stop to purchase diesel. It’s just that some of those gallons didn’t go into the company tank. By connecting fuel card data with vehicle data, fleets can identify discrepancies such as fuel purchases made when the vehicle was physically in a different location or purchases that exceed what the truck’s fuel level and total tank capacity would reasonably allow.
This is where transaction controls alone don’t tell the entire story. A successfully authorized transaction doesn’t necessarily mean every dollar was a legitimate fleet expense.
The Tax Hidden Inside the Price
IFTA adds another wrinkle in shopping for the best fuel price. Under the International Fuel Tax Agreement, qualified interstate carriers track miles traveled and tax-paid fuel purchased by jurisdictions. The fleet’s average fuel economy is used to calculate taxable fuel consumption in each jurisdiction, and tax-paid gallons are credited against that liability.
In practical terms, that means, where you buy fuel and where you ultimately owe fuel tax aren’t necessarily the same thing. And, because fuel tax is often bundled into the posted price of fuel, it can become very difficult to identify the net cheapest fuel option available to you.
Imagine diesel costs $3.20 per gallon in State A and $3.40 in State B. At first glance, State A wins by $0.20. But, State A’s price contains $0.20 of applicable fuel tax while State B’s contains $0.50. Removing those taxes reveals something very different.
|
|
State A |
State B |
|
Pump Price |
$3.20 |
$3.40 |
|
Fuel Tax |
$0.20 |
$0.50 |
|
Tax-Adjusted Fuel Price |
$3.00 |
$2.90 |
The fuel that appeared to be $0.20 more expensive is actually $0.10 cheaper before the tax difference.
Why does this matter? Because IFTA reconciles tax-paid gallons with taxable fuel consumption based on where the fleet traveled. Overpayments in one jurisdiction can offset liabilities in another one, and some jurisdictions even impose surcharges that aren’t collected at the pump.
For a fleet, chasing lower posted price simply because it is in a lower-tax jurisdiction can produce misleading savings.
Start Measuring the True Cost of Fuel
None of this means cents-per-gallon discounts aren’t important. They absolutely are, but a discount should be one component of a broader fuel strategy – not the entire strategy. A 15-cent discount quickly loses value if reaching it costs $0.20 per gallon in incremental operating expense. A $0.03 improvement in negotiated pricing doesn’t accomplish much if one percent of fuel spend is leaking through misuse. And a lower posted pump price may be misleading if the difference is primarily driven by taxes that will ultimately be reconciled through IFTA.
For fleets trying to protect an already-tight margin, the opportunity may not be finding a cheaper gallon. It may be getting smarter about the total cost of putting that gallon into the right truck at the right location along the right route.