2027 Fleet Costs Are Already Priced In

Tyreese: Look. It's Wednesday, November eleventh, Veterans Day. Before anything else, if you served, thank you. Genuinely. I mean that, and then I'm gonna get straight to business, because today is a money day and I don't want you to miss it.

Here's the thing. This morning I told you gas just dropped under four bucks for the first time since July. Three dollars and ninety-seven cents a gallon, national average, down from four-fourteen a week ago. And that is real relief, and you should use it. But I need you to hear the other half of the story, because while the pump got cheaper, everything else in the fleet world just got more expensive. And the prices for next year? They're already written down. Not guessed. Written down.

Fleet Maintenance magazine put it out on Wednesday, November fourth, and the headline says it plain: fleet maintenance costs are set to rise as 2027 approaches. I read the whole piece twice, because this one is a playbook disguised as a warning. Let me walk you through the numbers, and then I'm gonna tell you exactly what to do with them before December thirty-first.

First, the American Transportation Research Institute — ATRI — found repair and maintenance costs for trucking fleets rose eight point six percent in 2025, to twenty-two cents a mile. Twenty-two cents a mile just to keep the truck running. That's nearly forty-five percent above where it was in 2019. Not five years of creep. Forty-five percent.

Then parts. Imported medium and heavy duty truck parts have carried a twenty-five percent tariff since November first of last year. Passenger vehicle parts have had one since May. Steel and aluminum duties are sitting at fifty percent. And it shows up in the real numbers. Decisiv and the Technology and Maintenance Council track this stuff — parts costs up three point seven percent year over year, and that's the average. Rear drive axles are up twenty point six percent. Wheels, rims, hubs and bearings, up fifteen point five. Multi-piece filter kits, up almost twelve percent. That's not inflation, that's a different price list.

Then labor. Fullbay's annual State of Heavy-Duty Repair report found the median shop labor rate rose seven point four percent in 2025, from a hundred thirty-five dollars an hour to a hundred forty-nine. And median technician pay rose ten percent. Now, I'm happy techs are getting paid more — they should be — but that money comes out of somebody's invoice, and that somebody is your fleet customer.

And then the big one nobody's pricing in yet. EPA 2027. The low-NOx standard for heavy duty engines is on schedule for January, and a fully compliant engine is expected to add ten to fifteen thousand dollars to the price of a new truck. Ten to fifteen thousand. So what do fleets do? They keep the trucks they have. Average truck age already went from three point four years to three point six years in 2025, and miles per truck climbed about four percent. And here's the kicker from Fleet Advantage: a Class 8 truck's maintenance cost goes from two cents a mile in its first year to sixteen and a half cents a mile in its sixth year. Sixteen and a half. So the truck you keep to avoid the new-truck price costs you eight times as much per mile to maintain. That's the trap.

And the fleets know it. Element Fleet Management surveyed fleet managers and thirty-six percent of them said they're delaying vehicle replacements. More than one in three. So you've got an aging fleet, parts that cost more, labor that costs more, and a calendar that says every one of those costs goes up again on January first.

Now here's where it gets worse, and this is the part the article really nails. Every December, the same trade gets made in fleet offices. The brake job, the slow coolant leak, the check engine light that's been on since October — all of it gets pushed to January so the 2026 maintenance line looks a little cleaner on paper. But deferring a repair doesn't make the cost go away. It moves it into 2027, where parts cost more, shop labor costs more, and the shops are buried in winter work. The brake pads you skip today become pads and rotors in February, plus a tow, plus however many days that vehicle sits waiting for a bay.

And winter turns deferrals into breakdowns. The first hard freeze takes out weak batteries across a whole yard overnight, and every fleet in the region calls the same shops that same week. A vehicle you could have scheduled in November now waits behind collision work and everybody else's emergencies, and you take whichever shop has an opening at whatever rate they quote. That's how routes go uncovered and deliveries get missed. And customers remember that.

So. That's the news. Now here's the play, because this is where the independents beat the chains, and I want you to hear me on this.

The chains are feeling the exact same squeeze. Valvoline just reported their third quarter — system-wide store sales crossed a billion dollars in a quarter for the first time ever, same-store sales up eight percent, and more than three quarters of that growth came from pricing actions. Not more cars. Higher prices. And on their own earnings call they said finished lubricant costs could run about sixty percent above March levels, which works out to five to seven dollars more per oil change. So the big guys are raising prices and telling Wall Street about it. They pass it through with a press release.

You pass it through with a phone call. And a phone call wins, because you can do something Valvoline can't do. You can be standing in their lot in December.

Here is the play, step by step, and I want you to run it this week, not next week.

Step one. Call your five biggest fleet contacts. Not an email blast. A call, or a text with your name on it. And you do not say "let me know if you need anything before the holidays." That is a nothing sentence. You give them a date. "I've got Tuesday, December sixteenth open for your lot. I can run the whole fleet that day." A date makes a decision. A vague offer makes a delete.

Step two. When you get in there, you run the triage list, in this order. Safety items and open recalls first — every time, no exceptions, that's the standard around here, every vehicle we touch gets checked. Then the stuff that gets more expensive the longer it sits: brakes near minimum, tires near the tread limit, weak batteries, coolant and oil leaks, any fault code a driver's been living with. A few hundred dollars now turns into a few thousand in February. Third, the work that depends on scarce shop capacity — the stuff only a few shops can do. And cosmetics can wait. Cosmetics always wait.

Step three. Sell the price lock, and say it out loud. "My twenty twenty-six price holds through December thirty-first. In January it moves, because my oil and my filters move." That is not a threat, that is a fact, and fleet managers respect facts. They have a budget line that closes December thirty-first, and money left in this year's budget is the cheapest money they'll ever spend, because the same job costs more in January. Give them a reason to spend it with you now.

Step four. Fix the approval bottleneck before the holidays eat it. A lot of year-end downtime has nothing to do with the repair. The vehicle is diagnosed, the estimate is written, and it sits because the person who approves it is out until January fourth. So ask your contact right now: who approves estimates during the holiday weeks, and who is the backup with the same authority? Get a dollar threshold for routine work they can finish without calling. Three extra days off the road almost always costs more than the part waiting on a signature. And get the invoices in before year end, so December work lands in the twenty twenty-six books instead of surprising them in the first quarter.

Step five. Stock ahead of the supply calendar, for yourself. Chinese New Year falls on February sixth, 2027. Factory output slows for weeks before it, workers come back gradual after, and parts ordered from Chinese suppliers in mid-January might not hit American shelves until spring. So whatever you burn through in winter — batteries, wiper blades, belts, hoses, filters — buy it now, while it's on the shelf at today's price.

Now, why does this work for you and not just for the chains? Because the chains sell a transaction and you sell a relationship. The fleet manager who gets a call from you in November, with a date and a price lock and a triage list, doesn't shop that job in January. You already did the thinking for them. And here's the number that tells you the market is on your side: MOTOR magazine ran a piece on November fourth — Lang Marketing's analysis — and the United States aftermarket for light duty vehicles is forecast to grow five point two percent in 2026, to four hundred fifty-seven billion dollars. Four hundred fifty-seven billion. And the total cost of owning and operating a vehicle has gone from about fifty cents a mile in 2002 to eighty-four cents a mile in 2025. People are holding their cars longer, driving them further, and every one of those miles needs somebody to maintain it. The work is growing. The question is only whether it lands on your truck or somebody else's lift.

So here's your takeaway, and it's one thing. This week — before Friday — call five fleet contacts and offer each one a specific December date and a twenty twenty-six price that holds through December thirty-first. Five calls. Not a blast, not a post, five calls. The fleets are about to spend next year's money at next year's prices unless somebody gives them a reason to spend this year's money now. Be that somebody.

That's the show. Go run your numbers, and go make those five calls. See you at the next one.