By Cailley LaPara, Will Kubzansky and Lorelei Smillie The pumpkins Joe Miller sells to nearby stores cost 25% more this fall, and that’s before a per-mile delivery fee, the first he’s ever had to implement at his family-owned vegetable farm in Platteville, Colorado. Some long-standing customers walked away over the new prices, but Miller can’t help it: Diesel is squeezing every corner of his work.

Last year he was paying roughly $3 per gallon for the fuel, which he uses to power all his equipment, including tractors and trucks. Now it’s $6. That works out to an extra $6,000 a week in diesel costs alone, not to mention all the other things inflation has pushed higher in recent years. Miller, 63, says he’s just about ready to throw in the towel, but he loves working alongside his four daughters and their families, and he’s proud never to have taken government support. “The family wants to carry on, and we have been doing this 40-plus years,” he says. But if things stay the way they are, “next year every single cost we have will go up.”

Earlier this year, in the weeks following the start of the US and Israel’s war with Iran, the average price of diesel in the US passed $5 a gallon for only the second time in history, and it’s just kept climbing. Each week seems to bring some new, pricey milestone: the first time the average national diesel price eclipsed the previous June 2022 record (Sept. 3), its first time at $6 (Sept. 10), passing the $6.50 mark (Sept. 19). The war in the Middle East and its disruption to global oil flows is mostly to blame, with the crisis worsening since July after Russia, typically the world’s second-largest exporter of diesel, banned overseas shipments to meet its own supply needs after months of punishing attacks on its refineries from Ukrainian drones.

Although less than 3% of the US’s passenger cars run on diesel, distillate (most of which is diesel) accounts for roughly 22% of total energy consumption in the transportation sector. That’s because it powers much of the US’s freight system, primarily tractor-trailers that crisscross the country. Those massive diesel trucks are used to deliver groceries to supermarkets, bulk goods to warehouses and just about everything in between, and the prices of those products generally go up when it costs more to move them around.

That spreads the impact of high diesel prices across all swaths of the economy, leading to elevated costs for everyday items like fruits and vegetables, tighter profit margins for small businesses and fuel bills that some truckers increasingly can’t stomach.

“Everyone is getting squeezed, whether you’re growing lettuce or trucking freight or manufacturing something,” says Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, a central platform and marketplace for the North American trucking industry. The US is the world’s biggest diesel consumer, according to 2024 data from the US Energy Information Administration, the most recent reading available. But the high prices are driving up costs all around the world, including in parts of Europe where more passenger cars run on the fuel.

Elevated inflation contributed to the Federal Reserve’s decision to hike interest rates in September (and the expectation that another is coming). As the midterms draw closer, that becomes a critical risk for the Republican Party. Donald Trump stormed to reelection in 2024 promising lower prices throughout the economy; while the White House has pulled almost every lever it has to lower prices, save for the most drastic — a ban on shipments of US-made diesel to foreign countries that’s being examined now — prices are still near their highest ever. (Even if Trump does implement export restrictions, some in the industry say any resulting drop in domestic diesel prices could be offset by higher gasoline prices, which would hardly be a political win.)“Politically, gasoline matters more, but economically, diesel matters more,” says Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, a labor market think tank.

“You never notice the surplus,” he adds, but “you will always notice the shortage. It’s going to lock up a lot of economic activity if it keeps going.”

Gavin Finefield, who sells pottery out of his home in Illinois, is one small-business owner feeling the effects. The cost of shipping a bowl to a customer in New York has risen from $12.50 to about $13.20 over the past year. He says he worries the increase, which he passes on to customers, is starting to hit demand: His income is down 9% this year, a drop he partially attributes to the higher shipping costs. “To say it is frustrating is not the right word,” Finefield says.

Today’s economy, as he sees it, is “not able to support the small-business owner.”A thousand miles east, Amanda Merrow is feeling similarly pinched. The co-founder of Amber Waves Farm, which grows more than 60 crops including vegetables and grains in Amagansett, New York, has also been forced to raise prices.

Fuel costs are even worse here, on the far tip of Long Island, because truckers usually can get a payload only in one direction, increasing the rates the farm pays for shipping. “It’s not like we are so excited to raise prices. There is no internal benefit that our farm sees from raising prices; organic food is already expensive,” she says. Farmers spent $1.4 billion more on diesel during this year’s planting season, according to a study published by the US Congress Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic members.

Unless they’re driving tractors or semi trucks, most Americans are feeling the effects of diesel secondhand. But there’s also a small group of consumers — diesel car and pickup truck drivers — who take the hit every time they fuel up. Jake Rowley is one of them. In normal times he loves his 2018 Ram 2500 diesel pickup, which he uses to tow equipment for his son’s marching band in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, or sometimes dirt bikes or an ATV.

“I’m from the Midwest. I’ve driven a pickup since I was in high school — the big three-quarter-ton diesel was always the dream,” Rowley says. But the prolonged price crunch has forced him to change his behavior. He’s driving the truck as little as he can, moving slower and coasting more, and using his wife’s minivan whenever possible. Even then he’s paying $200 more a month to refuel his pickup. Prices soared to previously unseen highs in 2022 as markets grappled with the loss of Russian supply, but this time feels worse, Rowley says: “That was pretty short-lived. This one I don’t think is going to be nearly as short-lived.”

The longer a price shock goes on, the more likely consumers are to make drastic changes to their behavior, says Lucas Davis, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “As it becomes months and months, maybe you’re going to sell your diesel car,” he says. “You may have to quit your job if it’s too far away, start taking public transportation.”

Some big retailers have weathered the high prices so far, even in grocery, which is usually one of the categories most impacted by shipping costs. Target Corp., for instance, cut some food prices earlier this year and has announced thousands of other lowered prices across the store in the months since. A spokesperson for the company didn’t say what was behind the cuts, but Amarnath of Employ America says companies like Target have been able to eat higher transportation costs thanks in part to tariff refunds following the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down duties imposed by Trump.

“There were nice disinflationary tailwinds from tariffs being lifted,” he says. “I think that tune is going to change pretty sharply now.”National trucking company J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. warned in September that additional fuel costs of at least $10 million would help bring down earnings by 5% to 10% for the third quarter.

But the pain of record diesel prices is being felt even more keenly among smaller fleets, which make up the majority of businesses in the sector. In Ontario, California, where diesel prices are among the highest in the country, Tim Pollock has had a hard time hiring smaller trucking companies to haul loads for his freight brokerage firm. “They can’t afford to fill up their tanks,” he says.

Carriers typically get paid upon delivery, but with prices so high, it’s becoming harder for truckers to fuel up before a job, says Sean Smith, vice president for financial technology at Truckstop, a freight management platform. “When fuel costs $250, you can find $250 in your sock drawer to be able to make the payment at the pump,” he says. “But when fuel is $800, it becomes a lot more difficult to be able to string that together.”He adds: “The industry is not built for this.”