Tender Rejection Rates: What OTRI Means for Your Pay

A tender rejection rate is the share of contracted loads that carriers turn down. Large shippers negotiate a rate per mile with a carrier in advance, then send an electronic 'tender' — a load offer at that agreed price — each time they need freight moved. The carrier can accept or reject it. The rejection rate is simply rejections divided by tenders offered, expressed as a percentage. A 15% rejection rate means 15 of every 100 contracted loads were refused. It matters because it is a direct read on whether carriers have better-paying options: a carrier only walks away from contracted freight when it believes it can do better on the spot market.

OTRI stands for Outbound Tender Rejection Index. It is published by FreightWaves SONAR, a freight data platform, and it is the number the industry means when it talks about 'the tender rejection rate'. SONAR also publishes OTVI (Outbound Tender Volume Index) and STRI (its spot truckload rate index) alongside several hundred other freight indices. The OTRI is expressed as a percentage of tenders rejected and is reported nationally, by market, by lane and by equipment type.

No. SONAR is a paid product; its published subscription tiers start at $9.99 per month for the mobile app and rise from there, so there is no free public OTRI reading you can pull up the way you can pull up a diesel price from the EIA. That has a practical consequence for anything you read online, including this page: unless a figure is dated and attributed to a specific reading, you cannot check it. Freight trade press does quote the weekly national number in coverage, which is the usual free route to a rough current level. Treat any undated OTRI figure in an article as a worked example rather than today's market.

It depends entirely on which side of the load you are on, and 'good' is not a fixed number. For a carrier, higher is better: a high rejection rate means capacity is scarce, contracted rates are lagging the market, and you have room to push on price. For a shipper, low is better, because it means the trucks they budgeted for are actually showing up. The commonly used reading is that the low single digits indicate a loose, shipper-favourable market; the high single digits indicate a balanced one; low double digits indicate carrier pricing power; and readings in the high teens and above indicate genuinely tight capacity. Those bands are an interpretive convention used across the industry, not a measurement, and your own market can sit well away from the national figure.

OTVI, the Outbound Tender Volume Index, counts how much contracted freight is being offered. OTRI, the Outbound Tender Rejection Index, measures what share of that freight carriers refuse. Volume tells you how much demand exists; rejection tells you whether the truck supply can absorb it at the contracted price. The two together are more useful than either alone. Volume rising while rejections stay flat suggests capacity is comfortably keeping up. Volume flat while rejections climb suggests trucks are leaving the market or being pulled onto better-paying freight. Both indices come from FreightWaves SONAR.

Almost always because the contracted rate no longer clears their cost plus an acceptable margin, or because a better load is available for the same truck-hours. Contract rates are typically negotiated annually or semi-annually, so a rate agreed during a soft market can sit below the going spot rate months later. Other common reasons are non-price: the load does not fit the truck's planned route and would strand it in a weak outbound market, the appointment window is unworkable, the facility is known for long unpaid detention, or the equipment simply is not available that day. Rejection is not always a pricing statement, which is one reason the index is a signal rather than a verdict.

The shipper works down its routing guide. The load is tendered to the next contracted carrier on the list for that lane, then the next. Each step down the guide usually costs the shipper more, because backup carriers are priced above the primary. If the whole routing guide fails, the load goes to the spot market through a broker or a load board, where it is priced at whatever the market will bear that day. That escalation is the mechanism that connects rejections to rates: every rejected tender pushes a load toward a more expensive way of moving it, and enough of them force the shipper to reprice the contract instead.

It can, and the risk is real enough to plan around. Shippers track acceptance by carrier, and a carrier that rejects heavily in a tight market is a candidate for removal from the routing guide when the market loosens and the shipper has options again. The practical approach is to be explicit rather than silent: if a lane no longer works at the contracted rate, say so and ask to reprice it, rather than quietly rejecting tenders until the relationship erodes. Rejecting because the rate is genuinely below your cost is defensible; rejecting opportunistically while claiming to be a committed contract carrier is what gets remembered.

It is the same measurement from the other side. Acceptance rate plus rejection rate equals 100%, so a 15% rejection rate is an 85% acceptance rate. Shippers and 3PLs generally speak in acceptance terms because it is the number they are trying to protect, and it often appears in carrier scorecards as a performance metric. Carriers and freight analysts generally speak in rejection terms because the movement in the index is easier to see at the low end of the scale. If someone quotes you an acceptance figure, subtract it from 100 to compare it with any OTRI number.

It is one of the reasons spot rates rise, but it is not a mechanical guarantee. The causal chain runs like this: carriers reject contracted loads, those loads fall out of the routing guide onto the spot market, and the extra spot demand meets a truck supply that was already tight enough to trigger the rejections in the first place. That pushes spot prices up. What breaks the chain is new capacity — carriers entering or re-entering the market, or existing fleets adding trucks — and a fall in freight volume. Watch the rejection rate alongside volume and the load-to-truck ratio rather than treating any single index as a forecast.

They measure tightness in two different populations. The load-to-truck ratio comes from the spot market — it is postings on a load board divided by trucks posted against them, so it describes the freight that is already outside contract. The rejection rate describes contracted freight and tells you how much new volume is about to be pushed into that spot pool. In practice they tend to move together, and a divergence is informative: rejections climbing while the load-to-truck ratio stays flat can mean carriers are declining specific lanes rather than the market broadly tightening.

Yes, and they are usually the more volatile readings. Temperature-controlled capacity is structurally scarcer than dry van because reefer trailers cost more, need more maintenance, and burn fuel for the refrigeration unit on top of the tractor's own consumption, so fewer carriers hold that equipment. It is also strongly seasonal: produce harvests pull large numbers of reefers into specific regions for weeks at a time and strip them out of everywhere else. Flatbed follows construction, energy and industrial activity, which gives it its own seasonal shape tied to building season and weather. SONAR reports rejection rates by equipment type, and the equipment reading for your trailer is far more relevant to your pricing than the all-equipment national headline.

A mix, weighted by how much rate volatility your operation can absorb. A high rejection rate means spot is generally outpaying contract, so a spot-heavy book captures that premium immediately — and gives it all back first when the market turns. Contract freight pays less at the top of the cycle and protects you at the bottom. The more durable move in a tight market is to use the market data as leverage on the contracts you already hold rather than abandoning them: bring the current index reading and your own cost per mile to the conversation and ask for a reprice. Keeping part of your capacity uncommitted so you can take spot loads on your strongest lanes is the usual compromise, and the right split depends on your fixed costs, not on a rule of thumb.

The full historical OTRI series lives inside FreightWaves SONAR, which is a paid platform, so there is no free archive to point you at. This is worth knowing before you repeat a historical claim you read somewhere: statements like 'the highest rejection rate since a given year' generally cannot be checked by the reader, and we do not make them on this page for that reason. If you need the history for a contract negotiation, a SONAR subscription or a freight broker who holds one is the practical route. For freely checkable market context, the EIA publishes weekly diesel prices and DAT publishes national spot rate trendlines.