587.742.6023Sign inSell grainWhat does it cost to truck grain?
The cost depends on where your grain is going, how much you’re moving, and when it needs to get there.
A short haul isn’t always cheap. Loading, unloading and waiting take time, whether the truck travels 15 miles or 150.
That’s why a trucker needs the details of your load before giving you a reliable rate.
What affects your trucking cost?
- Distance and destination
- How far the truck travels and whether it can pick up another load on the return trip.
- Load size and weight
- How much grain needs moving and how much the truck can legally carry.
- Timing and access
- When the grain needs to move, road restrictions, access to your bins, and possible loading or unloading delays.
- Fuel and truck availability
- Fuel prices and the availability of trucks can affect the rate you’re quoted.
How does freight affect your grain price?
Giddyupp uses an estimated freight cost to show what a buyer’s bid could be worth with the grain picked up at your farm.
Your actual trucking cost may be different.
If you know a local trucker or neighbour who can haul your grain for less, you may be able to improve the amount you receive.
What have grain hauls cost in the past?
Giddyupp has records of 132 grain hauls from September 2013 to January 2018.
Those records help explain how trucking rates change with distance, but they aren’t today’s freight quotes.
See historical rates and how we calculated them
Each of the 132 hauls on record carries the rate that was charged. 112 of them map cleanly to two points, so we can show how distance and cost relate from evidence rather than instinct. It’s close to a straight line: the correlation between rate and distance is 0.944. Across those hauls, trucking ran about CAD $9 per tonne under 50 miles, $18 around 100 to 150 miles, and $35 to $46 per tonne past 300 miles. The median works out to $0.143 per tonne per straight-line mile. That’s an average of the hauls, not a rate to multiply by: short hauls cost far more per mile than long ones.
| Distance (straight line) | Median paid | Range paid | Hauls |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 to 50 miles | $9.18/MT | $7.00 to $12.00 | 19 |
| 50 to 100 miles | $16.00/MT | $11.20 to $19.00 | 22 |
| 100 to 150 miles | $18.00/MT | $15.00 to $26.00 | 15 |
| 150 to 200 miles | $22.00/MT | $20.00 to $28.00 | 19 |
| 200 to 250 miles | $26.00/MT | $20.00 to $35.00 | 9 |
| 250 to 300 miles | $26.00/MT | $21.00 to $35.75 | 10 |
| 300 to 360 miles | $35.00/MT | $30.00 to $45.00 | 13 |
Treat the series as what it is: a dated record, not this week’s quote. Diesel, driver wages and equipment costs have all moved since 2018, and every figure above sat inside a market that no longer exists. What hasn’t changed is the shape: distance sets the base, and the load, the season and the lane move a haul off that line.
Nobody publishes a current benchmark to check it against. Quorum Corporation, the federal grain monitor, keeps a short-haul trucking index in its Grain Monitoring Program. That index has printed no value since its 1999 to 2000 base year. Alberta’s custom rates survey for grain hauling published its last edition on 2018 data. No Canadian trucking association publishes rate benchmarks at all, for competition-law reasons that are unlikely to change. What circulates instead is a $7-to-$10-a-tonne Super-B ladder quoted without a date, which traces back to a farm-forum thread from 2013.
Have a better freight rate?
If you can get a lower hauling rate, tell us where the grain is going and what the trucker would charge.
We’ll review the information before using it to calculate your grain price.
More detail
How the load, road bans and the return trip move a rate
A Super-B grain trailer set hauls 44.0 tonnes in Alberta and Saskatchewan at full legal weight. That’s the number we work our freight on. Light grain is the exception. Oats and the other bushel-light crops cube out before they weigh out. A trailer fills up at around 42.0 tonnes, and the rate per tonne rises to match. During spring road bans the working payload drops to about 36.0 tonnes. Mixing those three up is a two-to-four-dollar-a-tonne error, and it lands on the farmer.
A truck costs what it costs to run, full or not. Grain that books in whole loads ships cheaper per tonne than grain that leaves a trailer half empty. Below a full load a carrier can apply dead freight and charge you for the empty space. If your bin doesn’t divide into whole loads, say so early.
Road bans run roughly March through May. A Super-B that legally hauled 44 tonnes in February hauls about 36 under a typical ban. That’s eight fewer tonnes a trip, so each remaining tonne carries roughly 18 percent more truck. Some municipal roads close to heavy trucks entirely. If your window can land before the bans or after them, that timing is worth real money.
Direction matters too. A lane where trucks already deliver feed or fertilizer inbound has cheap capacity coming out. A lane where every truck returns empty charges you for both directions. That’s why the lane, not the mileage alone, sets the price.
The federal fuel tax
Diesel moves and freight follows with a lag; most carriers reset fuel surcharges weekly. The federal fuel excise tax has been suspended since April 20, 2026, and it did not come back on September 8. Finance Canada extended the suspension to January 31, 2027. This harvest hauls without it. It returns in two steps. Half rate, 2 cents a litre of diesel or about 2.1 with GST on top, starts February 1, 2027. The full 4 cents, about 4.2, starts April 1, 2027. A surcharge step the week after either date is the tax, not the market. The full story is in our explainer on the fuel tax suspension.
Questions farmers ask
There's no published current benchmark, so the honest answer is a measured range. We have 132 recorded hauls from September 2013 to January 2018, and 112 of them have a mapped distance. Across those, trucking ran about CAD $9 per tonne under 50 miles, $18 around 100 to 150 miles, and $35 to $46 per tonne past 300 miles. The median works out to $0.143 per tonne per straight-line mile. That's an average across hauls, not a rate to multiply by: a short haul costs about three times as much per mile as a long one. Rates today sit higher than that 2013 to 2018 series. Fuel, payload rules and lane direction move any given quote.
Loading, tarping, weighing, waiting and unloading cost the same on a 20 mile trip as on a 300 mile one. On a short haul there are almost no miles to spread that over. Measured across those hauls, cost per tonne-mile runs about 32 cents under 50 miles and about 10 cents past 300 miles. It stops falling somewhere around 250 miles. That’s why you can’t multiply out a single per-mile figure. It’s an average of hauls at every distance, and the short ones pull it well above what a long haul costs.
Because nobody publishes them. Quorum Corporation’s short-haul trucking index has printed no value since its 1999-2000 base year. Alberta’s custom rates survey for grain hauling last covered 2018. No Canadian trucking association publishes rate benchmarks. The $7 to $10 per tonne Super-B figures that circulate online trace back to a 2013 forum thread. Giddyupp is building a current series from what farmers and carriers pay, and publishes the method.
No. It was due back that day, but on September 2, 2026 Finance Canada extended the suspension to January 31, 2027. Diesel then carries half the excise, 2 cents per litre, from February 1 to March 31, 2027. The full 4 cents applies from April 1, 2027. With GST on the excise, the steps at the pump are about 2.1 and then 4.2 cents per litre. This harvest hauls without it.
Our method and sources
Giddyupp records the real freight on hauls we touch, and our price pages ask every farmer who knows their lane what hauling costs from their place. Those reports build the current series the industry doesn’t have. When it’s thick enough to publish, it’ll appear here, dated, with its method. Until then the grain desk quotes trucking lane by lane, off rate cards and the real hauls on record. That’s netted into every price we show you. Where we have no rates for an area yet, the price says so rather than quietly guessing. To ask what your lane runs, ask us.
Sources: grain haul records, 2013 to 2018, computed August 31, 2026 · Quorum Corporation Grain Monitoring Program annual report, Table 4A-1 · Alberta custom rates survey, grain harvesting operations, 2018 edition · Department of Finance Canada, temporary suspension of the federal fuel excise tax from April 20, 2026, extended on September 2, 2026 to January 31, 2027. Prices in this guide are CAD per metric tonne.
Correction, September 19, 2026: this page said the federal fuel tax came back on September 8, 2026. It did not: Finance Canada extended the suspension to January 31, 2027.