Rate index

A rate index summarizes a market rather than a lane. Where a market rate tells you what Monterrey to Laredo pays this week for a dry van, an index tells you how dry van rates in that direction have moved since the base period. Indexes feed index-linked contracts, where the awarded rate moves up or down each month or quarter by the index change, and they anchor budget conversations: a rate that rose with the index is a market event, one that rose faster is a lane problem.

Cross-border Mexico has historically had far fewer published indexes than the U.S. domestic market, and the ones that exist rarely separate northbound from southbound or account for the crossing, so most cross-border rate tracking is still built from a company's own transaction history.

What this means when you move freight

Use an index for what it is good at: direction of the market, not the price of a lane. Index-linking a cross-border contract works when both sides agree on which index, which base period, and which share of the rate floats; it fails when a national van index is applied to a lane whose real driver is border wait times or produce season. Brokers should track their own lane-level bids against the index so they can show a shipper when a lane genuinely diverged from the market. Shippers should treat a rate that fell behind the index as a tender acceptance problem waiting to happen, and use percentiles to see where in the lane's own spread the contracted rate now sits.