If you’re not checking the SONAR Pricing Power Index (PPI) every week, you’re missing the single fastest way to answer the question every shipper, broker, and carrier is asking right now: who has the leverage in this market — and is that about to change?
The PPI has become one of SONAR’s most-read weekly releases for a simple reason: it distills eight of the freight market’s most important indicators into one number. No scrolling through five different index charts trying to figure out if tightening capacity is being offset by softening demand. No guessing whether this week’s spot rate move is noise or signal. Just a single, data-driven score — plus a forward-looking three-month outlook — that tells you where pricing power sits today and where the model expects it to be in 90 days.
Why it’s valuable
Freight markets don’t move on any one metric. Tender rejections can climb while volumes fall. Spot rates can spike while contract rates stay flat. Rail can run hot while truckload stays soft. Trying to synthesize all of that in your head, every week, is exactly the kind of work that leads to bad calls on pricing, procurement timing, and capacity planning.
The PPI does that synthesis for you — quantitatively, consistently, and on a five-year historical basis so you know whether today’s reading is actually extreme or just looks that way in the moment. It’s the fastest gut-check available for:
- Shippers timing RFP and bid strategy against where carrier leverage is heading
- Brokers and carriers gauging whether current pricing power is durable or seasonal
- Analysts and executives who need one clean number to bring into a leadership meeting
This week’s read
This week’s PPI eased again — the index’s fifth straight weekly decline since its mid-July peak — as capacity continued to loosen and a couple of demand signals that had been running hot cooled off. The spot-to-contract spread, which hit a record wide reading just a month ago, has been narrowing fast. The three-month outlook pulled back too, now converging much closer to where the current index actually sits.
Is this the start of a real shift in carrier leverage heading into peak season, or a seasonal pause before things tighten back up? The full breakdown — including what’s happening under the hood in capacity, demand, and pricing power, and where the three-month model expects each to land — is in this week’s article.
Where to find it
The Weekly Pricing Power Index is published every week and available in two places:
- FreightWaves Market Monitor (getfreightdata.com) — $199/month gets you the full PPI release along with the rest of Market Monitor’s weekly market intelligence.
- Inside the SONAR platform — Enterprise customers can find every PPI release (and the full research archive) under Research, accessible from the clock icon in the upper-right menu (https://sonar.surf/research-library)
About the quantitative SONAR PPI
The SONAR Pricing Power Index is calculated using a direct-weighted, data-driven model. Each of eight SONAR metrics — tender rejections, accepted volume, rail volume, ocean TEU bookings, spot rates, van contract rates, the spot/contract spread, and intermodal contract rates — is converted to a percentile rank (0–100) against its own five-year weekly history, then combined using fixed weights (35%/15%/7.5%/7.5%/10%/5%/15%/5%, respectively) to produce a single composite score from 0 to 100. A 50 represents a historically balanced market; higher readings indicate pricing power favors carriers, and lower readings indicate it favors shippers.
The three-month outlook is built the same way, but applied to a 90-day-forward projection of each metric that blends its current four-week average with where it stood 13 weeks ago and 104 weeks ago, adjusted for recent and year-over-year momentum, before being percentile-ranked and weighted using the same methodology.
Whether you check it once a week or track it daily, the PPI is designed to answer one question fast: is this market tightening, loosening, or holding steady — and who benefits?
