Iran war: Trucking firms push for flexibility on contracts after diesel price surge
Friday, 10 April 2026
Many businesses are likely to have awkward conversations with trucking companies over the next two weeks as road hauliers seek to pass on extra costs they have incurred as a result of the diesel price spike, an industry body says.
Transporting NZ chief executive Dom Kalasih said most trucking companies would now have invoiced customers for their services in March, with many bills falling due around the 20th of the month.
Many if not most contracts between trucking companies and their customers would contain clauses that allowed the former to pass on at least some extra costs of fuel.
But Kalasih said some truckers that were working under fixed-price contracts were also seeking to recoup some of their extra costs from customers and he urged customers to be sympathetic to such requests.
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The price of diesel has more than doubled to just shy of $3.90 a litre since the Middle East conflict began on February 28.
“I think most transport operators will be trying to recoup some of their costs,” Kalasih said.
“If you’ve got an agreed price, then you could say, from a legal standpoint, ‘I’m not going to pay’, but these are pretty exceptional times,” he said.
“I think there’s always got to be a bit of pragmatism in the world. No-one would have picked that fuel would have gone up this much.”
Not all businesses that were being asked to pay extra were being accommodative, he said.
“Very difficult conversations” had already started, he said.
“I have seen one example in writing where they've said ‘we’re not paying any of the increased cost of fuel, you need to suck it up in your current cost structure’.”
Role-playing a trucking company that was seeking to persuade a reluctant customer who faced their own challenges to voluntarily pay a surcharge, Kalasih said his message might be “look, there’s going to come a point in time that we can no longer serve you”.
BusinessNZ declined to provide advice to businesses who might be unsure how to field such demands.
Auckland Business Chamber chief executive Simon Bridges was nuanced in his advice.
“It’s a nasty predicament because both sides, in a sense, have right on their side,” he said.
What was reasonable might depend in part on the size of the businesses concerned and how satisfied customers were with the deal they had got from them, he said.
“Trucking companies are often very much on the small side of ‘SMEs’, operating on tight contracts where there’s not much of a margin. If they have got to pay for fuel in advance, there can be a very real risk of them tipping over.
“I've had truckers in my chamber office complaining quite vocally about the very tough contracts they have been forced to sign with New Zealand's biggest businesses.”
But not every person on the other side of the contract was going to be a big business, Bridges noted.
“Some of them will also be SMEs who just need their goods for their shop or restaurant or whatever, and you can make a very strong case from their perspective — where this kind of situation hasn't been factored in, in advance, that a ‘contract is a contract’ — and they are entitled to rely on what’s in print, not what the trucker wants it to be.”
Businesses shouldn’t necessarily feel they would be taken for a fool by paying a surcharge, he suggested.
“Businesses are within their rights to stand on a contract, but on the other side, don't be surprised if that SME trucking business with one or three drivers isn’t there in six months’ time.
“If the trucking company is ‘our biggest’ and the person wanting those ‘plasma TVs’ is the smallest shop in Masterton, that might be a different matter,” he said.