Tender acceptance
Tender acceptance is whether a carrier takes the load a shipper offers it at the contracted rate, and the acceptance rate is the share of tenders it takes. A falling first-tender acceptance rate is an early sign that a contracted rate has fallen below the market.
A tender is the shipper's offer of a specific load to a carrier under an existing award: this lane, this pickup date, this rate. Tender acceptance is the carrier saying yes. Measured over time, the first-tender acceptance rate tells the shipper how well the routing guide is holding: when the primary carrier accepts most tenders, the award is working; when acceptance drops, loads roll to backups and then to spot at higher rates.
Carriers reject tenders when the contracted rate is below what they can get elsewhere, when the lane no longer fits their network, or when they lack equipment or drivers that week. On cross-border lanes, a Mexican carrier may also decline because the crossing, the transfer partner, or the return load no longer works for them.
What this means when you move freight
Read acceptance as a price signal before it becomes a service problem. A lane where acceptance is sliding is usually a lane where the market rate has moved above the award, and the fix is a rerate or a mini-bid, not a stern email. Brokers holding an award should accept what they committed to and say early when a lane has stopped working; a broker who rejects quietly loses the position at the next bid. Shippers who track acceptance by direction will usually find northbound and southbound legs of the same lane behaving very differently.
Put the vocabulary to work
Cargado connects hundreds of brokers with 2,300+ vetted carriers moving Mexico and Canada freight every day.