Gas is supposed to get cheaper after Labor Day. Refineries switch to winter-blend fuel, summer road trips wind down, and prices usually ease off through the fall. Not this year. The national average for regular gasoline hit $4.48 a gallon in late September, according to AAA’s fuel price tracker — the highest the average has ever been for this point in the calendar, beating the previous September record of $3.83 set in 2023.
The culprits are mostly out of any local owner’s control: continued volatility around the Strait of Hormuz and stubbornly high crude oil prices are keeping pump prices elevated even as seasonal demand should be pulling them down. But the effects land squarely on Main Street. If your business puts people or vehicles on the road — deliveries, service calls, job sites, even just a staff that has to commute in — this is a cost line that’s quietly gotten bigger over the past month, and it’s worth a deliberate response rather than just absorbing it.
Who feels this first
Not every business is equally exposed, but a lot more are exposed than owners tend to realize. The obvious group is anyone running a delivery fleet or a fleet of service vehicles — restaurants with their own delivery drivers, plumbers, HVAC techs, landscapers, home cleaners, mobile pet groomers, contractors hauling materials between job sites. For these businesses, fuel is a direct, variable cost that shows up on every job.
The less obvious group is everyone else. Higher gas prices squeeze household budgets, and that can mean fewer discretionary trips to a boutique, salon, or sit-down restaurant, particularly for customers driving in from outside a walkable core. It can also affect staffing: hourly employees commuting 20 or 30 minutes each way feel a real pinch when a fill-up costs $10-15 more than it did in August, and that pinch shows up as increased no-shows, requests for schedule changes to cluster shifts, or turnover toward jobs closer to home.
Should you add a fuel surcharge?
For delivery- and service-heavy businesses, a fuel surcharge is a legitimate and increasingly common tool — but it only works if it’s structured well. A few principles from businesses that have done this without losing customers:
- Tier it by distance, not a flat fee. A short in-neighborhood delivery shouldn’t carry the same surcharge as a 20-mile service call. Many service businesses set a mileage threshold (say, the first 10 miles included) and apply a per-mile or percentage surcharge beyond that.
- Tie it to something objective. Freight carriers like UPS and FedEx index their fuel surcharges to a published fuel price benchmark and adjust automatically rather than negotiating case by case. You don’t need anything that sophisticated, but picking a simple, disclosed trigger (e.g., “surcharge applies when the regional average exceeds $4.25/gal”) makes the charge feel like a policy rather than an arbitrary markup.
- Be consistent and upfront. Apply it to every customer the same way, disclose it before the job or delivery is confirmed, and be ready to explain it in one sentence. Surcharges that show up as a surprise line item on the final invoice generate far more complaints than ones flagged at booking.
- Revisit it when prices fall. A surcharge that never comes off when gas prices normalize erodes trust fast. Building in a review point — monthly, or tied to the same benchmark that triggered it — protects the relationship.
If you’re not ready to formalize a surcharge, even a modest, one-time price adjustment on delivery minimums or service call fees can cover the gap without restructuring your whole pricing model.
The employee side of the equation
Fuel costs don’t just hit your vehicles — they hit your staff’s willingness and ability to show up reliably. A few practical levers:
- Cluster shifts geographically or by day so employees aren’t making unnecessary extra trips in for short shifts.
- Consider a modest gas stipend or mileage reimbursement for roles that require personal vehicle use for work errands, deliveries, or multi-site coverage — this is often cheaper than the cost of turnover and easier to budget than it sounds.
- Route optimization software, even a free tool, can meaningfully cut miles driven for businesses running multiple stops a day. A few extra minutes of planning a run can save real fuel over a month.
Don’t forget the tax side
If you or your employees use personal vehicles for business purposes — sales calls, supply runs, job sites — mileage is deductible. The IRS set the 2026 standard business mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile, up 2.5 cents from 2025. That rate is meant to approximate the full cost of operating a vehicle, including fuel, so as gas prices climb well above where they were when the rate was set, it’s worth tracking mileage carefully rather than estimating — the deduction is more valuable this year than it was last year, and sloppy record-keeping is the easiest way to lose it in an audit. A simple mileage log app, synced to a business vehicle or personal vehicle used for work, is enough to substantiate the deduction.
The takeaway
Nobody controls crude oil prices or Strait of Hormuz shipping risk, but every delivery- or service-dependent business has real levers here: a fair, transparent surcharge structure; smarter routing and scheduling; a look at whether a mileage reimbursement is cheaper than the turnover it prevents; and disciplined mileage tracking to capture the full tax benefit available this year. The businesses that come out of this fall with healthy margins won’t be the ones that got lucky on fuel prices — they’ll be the ones that built a policy for this before the next spike, rather than reacting to each one as a surprise.
