Market rate (tarifa de mercado)

A market rate, tarifa de mercado, is the going price on a lane, built from real recent pricing on that origin-destination pair, for that equipment, in that direction. Cargado's market rates come from carrier bids over the past 12 weeks. It differs from a list rate (what someone asks), a contract rate (what someone committed months ago), and an anecdote (what one dispatcher remembers).

The U.S. domestic market is saturated with rate benchmarks. Cross-border Mexico lanes are a different story: rate visibility has historically been thin, fragmented across brokers' private histories and carriers' quoting folklore, which is why data built from real cross-border carrier pricing carries unusual value, and why so many pricing conversations on these lanes begin from anchors nobody can verify.

What this means when you move freight

Use market rate data as the neutral third party in every pricing conversation. Quoting a shipper without a benchmark means either leaving margin on the table or losing the bid to someone better calibrated; negotiating with a carrier without one means arguing opinion against opinion. Direction matters enormously on cross-border lanes, northbound and southbound are different markets on the same geography, and so does seasonality, with produce season reshaping entire corridors. Treat any single number with suspicion: a lane's rate is a distribution, which is exactly what percentiles express, and the practical skill is knowing where in the distribution this load, this urgency, and this relationship should price.

For where Cargado’s own bands come from, and how the confidence score reads a thin lane, see market rates.