Freight Bid Sheet Builder

Paste a shipper's lane RFP or mini-bid, apply your cost and margin assumptions, and get per-lane pricing, a portfolio roll-up, do-not-bid flags, a headhaul/backhaul balance by state, and a CSV that drops straight into the shipper's bid template. Prices a whole bid at once — for a single load, use the Freight Quote Builder & Max Buy Rate Calculator.

Pricing Assumptions
Gross margin target as a % of linehaul revenue.
PLACEHOLDER — tune to current market before launch. Zero-margin passthrough on both sides.
Buffer applied to carrier cost.
Floor on sell linehaul — the mechanism that makes short-haul RPM rise to cover fixed cost.
PLACEHOLDER — tune to current market before launch.
PLACEHOLDER — tune to current market before launch.
PLACEHOLDER — tune to current market before launch.
Lane List Columns, in this order: origin ZIP, destination ZIP, equipment (V/R/F), annual loads, incumbent rate (optional — leave blank for a fresh RFP with no incumbent), miles (required unless using the Google lookup below). Column position is all that matters — a header row is fine and gets skipped automatically, but its wording is never read, so your own shipper's labels don't need to match this example. Excel paste (tab-separated) works. ZIPs missing a leading zero (e.g. 6010) are repaired to 06010 automatically. Up to 25 lanes per submission.
Leave unchecked and supply a miles column for unlimited use. Capped at 6 submissions per hour per connection when using Google.
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How the Math Works

Each lane's carrier cost is miles × your RPM basis × (1 + contingency) — what you expect to pay the truck, before fuel. The fuel surcharge is a straight $/mile passthrough on both the cost and the sell side, so it never affects margin. Your sell linehaul is computed with margin on revenue, not markup on cost (carrier cost ÷ (1 − margin)) — the industry-standard way to hit a true target margin percentage. A minimum linehaul charge floors short lanes so fixed costs stay covered even when the RPM math alone would price too low.

Flags: Short Haul marks lanes under 250 miles, where per-mile economics break down. Floor Applied means the minimum charge kicked in — your margin on that lane will run above target, which is expected. Do Not Bid means the incumbent's rate sits below your cost floor — you cannot win it profitably as priced. Margin Squeeze means you can beat the incumbent, just not at your full target margin, and shows the best margin still achievable.

Manual-miles mode has no limit. Supply a miles column and price as many bids as you want. The optional Google road-mile lookup is convenient for unknown lanes but shares a site-wide daily quota with every other tool that uses it, so it's capped at 6 submissions per hour per connection — leave miles blank only for the lanes you actually need looked up to make the most of that allowance. Separately, every submission on this page — manual or Google — is capped at 30 per hour per connection as a general safeguard against automated abuse; a real person pricing a bid, tweaking assumptions, and re-running it will never come close to that number.

Related freight tools: Price a single load with the Margin & Gross Profit Calculator or the Lane Rate-Per-Mile Analyzer. Check your fuel surcharge assumption with the Fuel Surcharge Calculator, or your carrier cost basis with the Cost Per Mile (CPM) Calculator. Need a customer-facing quote for one of these lanes instead of the full bid? Use the Freight Quote Builder & Max Buy Rate Calculator.

This tool was created by Ben Crittenden, a Project Management Professional (PMP) with experience in web development and systems administration.