Accessorial charges can quietly add 30–50% to your shipping costs

Shipping quotes and your TMS can mislead.

Accessorial fees often appear after delivery — and they quietly add up. Even the best ops teams miss them. Here’s why it’s worth reviewing these charges regularly.

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What are accessorial charges?

Examples might include: Fuel surcharges. Delivery area surcharges. Residential adjustments.

Some of these fees can show up after delivery — and they’re not always easy to spot on the invoice.

That means the $9 shipment your team budgeted for might have actually cost $14.

Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of shipments, and it starts to quietly throw off your accounting — or make certain customers or SKUs look profitable when they’re not.

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Why are they so easy to miss?

• They’re added after delivery. Carriers apply many of these fees post-shipment — not at the quoting stage.
• They’re buried in invoice line items. Unless you’re pulling detailed reports, they often go unnoticed.
• They fluctuate. Fuel surcharges alone can spike month-to-month depending on market rates.
• Your TMS might not flag them. Many systems log the quote, not the final billed amount.
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How to catch them (and stop overpaying)

If you want to catch these fees before they mess with your P&L, you’ll need to get a system in place. Here’s how:

• Pull weekly invoice detail reports. Not just summaries — you need line-item level detail.
• Reconcile billed amounts with shipment quotes. If your TMS said $9 and you were billed $14, find out why.
• Create a running accessorial log. List out every fee type per package and track it over time — delivery area surcharge, fuel, residential, additional handling, and more.
• Compare charges against your carrier agreement. Many accessorials have negotiated rates. If your invoice shows a mismatch, dispute it.
• Look for repeat offenders. If certain zip codes or package types consistently trigger unexpected fees, you may need to adjust how you ship to those locations.
• Set alerts inside your TMS or accounting system. Flag any shipment with >20% in accessorials vs. base charge.
• Check dimensional weight vs. actual weight. You may be getting hit with DIM weight charges on packages that “look cheap” by weight alone.
• Benchmark across time periods. Look at fees per package last month vs. this month. Did anything spike?

Or — skip all that manual tracking.

We audit every package, every invoice, and compare each accessorial charge back to your contracted rate. And it never costs you anything to have us do it — you only pay a percentage when we recover real money.

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Wrap-Up:

If your shipping budget looks off, or your margins feel tighter than they should…

Accessorial charges are a good place to start digging.

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