The 2027 selling season is already underway. Service businesses are renewing annual contracts that will run through next year, and contractors are bidding projects with 2027 completion dates. Delivery operations are negotiating rate sheets their customers will hold them to for four quarters. Every one of those quotes requires naming prices now for work performed later, and the estimator can name almost every input, from set labor rates to materials quoted by suppliers. Fuel is the input that refuses to be named.
The standard responses to that gap are all versions of guessing. Pad the fuel line and risk losing the bid to someone hungrier, or price it at today's market and hope next year cooperates. Whichever way, the business ends up promising its customers a fixed price while carrying an unfixed cost, which means the real margin on 2027 work will not be known until 2027 reveals it. Nobody would knowingly sign up for that on any other input.
Fix your cost before you fix your price
The orderly sequence is available: cap the fuel, then quote the work. FuelAnchor is a fuel supply company. You request a quote for the gallons your fleet burns, and it returns a locked maximum price per gallon for a term of 1, 3, 6, or 12 months. You prepay the gallons and fill with a FuelAnchor card at the stations you choose. Below your locked maximum you pay the pump price. Above it, your rate holds, and the excess is FuelAnchor's cost rather than a leak in your contract margins.
With that in place, the fuel line of a 2027 bid becomes an input like the others: expected gallons at a per gallon cost with a written worst case. The margin you quote is a margin you can actually defend, because the one input that used to float has a ceiling that lasts as long as the commitments built on it. A 12 month agreement can sit under an annual contract book; a shorter agreement can sit under a single project's window.
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What this does not require you to believe
No view about 2027 fuel prices is needed, and this post offers none, because none exists worth having. Prices next year may be kind or cruel, and nobody quoting you certainty about which is doing you a favor. The point of locking is exactly that your contract book should not care. If the market stays mild, you pay pump prices below your ceiling and your bids simply win or lose on their merits. If it turns, the promises you made to customers stay profitable anyway, which is the outcome the padding-and-hoping method was always reaching for and never guaranteed.
The sequencing advice is simply to run the fuel quote while the customer quotes are still drafts. Your bid file already contains the gallons estimates; your fuel records confirm them. Request a quote with those volumes and your operating area, and price your 2027 work knowing the only unnameable number finally has a name with your signature under it.
🔒 Your information is never shared.
This form saves your progress automatically as you go.