Every week, SONAR’s Research team distills the freight market down to a single number: the Pricing Power Index (PPI). It’s a quick answer to the question that shapes procurement strategy, bid timing, and carrier negotiations alike — is pricing power sitting with carriers, or with shippers, right now?
The index isn’t a gut-check or a narrative built after the fact. It’s a direct-weighted, data-driven composite 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 — each ranked against five years of its own weekly history and combined into a single 0–100 score. A reading of 50 marks a historically balanced market. Above that, leverage tilts toward carriers; below it, toward shippers. A companion three-month outlook applies the same methodology to a 90-day-forward projection, so readers get both where the market stands today and where SONAR’s model expects it to be heading into the next quarter.
What this week’s release shows
The PPI has been on a five-week slide since peaking in mid-July, as capacity has eased and a couple of demand signals that had been running hot — rail volume, ocean import bookings — cooled off. The spot-to-contract spread, which hit a record high just a month ago, has narrowed sharply in recent weeks. The three-month forecast has pulled back too, now converging much closer to the current reading than it was diverging a few weeks ago.
Whether that’s the start of a genuine shift in carrier leverage ahead of peak season, or a seasonal pause before conditions retighten, is exactly the kind of question the PPI is built to help answer — and it’s covered in full in this week’s release.
Where to find it
The Weekly Pricing Power Index publishes every week and is available through two channels:
- FreightWaves Market Monitor (getfreightdata.com) — full access to the PPI release, at $199/month.
- SONAR platform Research library — enterprise SONAR customers can pull up every PPI release, along with the full research archive, from the clock icon in the platform’s upper-right menu, under Research (https://sonar.surf/research-library).
Freight markets rarely move on one signal alone. The PPI’s value is in doing the synthesis — consistently, quantitatively, and against real historical context — so readers don’t have to reconcile eight indicators in their head every week to know who’s holding the leverage.
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