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Public freight and warehouse indexes for a logistics dashboard

By Noam Turecki · 28 October 2026

Three public series can sit beside your own freight and warehouse numbers on a logistics dashboard: the Logistics Managers' Index (LMI), the weekly U.S. diesel price from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Census manufacturers' inventory report.

None of them is a figure for your firm. The LMI summarizes a survey of supply chain professionals, the EIA price is a U.S. price, and the Census report counts manufacturers' inventories. Each comes with its own date and refresh rate, and none tells you why your own cost moved.

To build the side of the screen that holds your own numbers, see logistics dashboards. Plymouth AI Lab builds supply chain analytics and logistics dashboards that show on-time delivery, order cycle time, pick accuracy, cost per shipment and carrier performance on one screen, from the data in your warehouse management system (WMS), transportation management system (TMS), accounting tool and spreadsheets.

The Logistics Managers' Index: storage and freight pressure

The LMI gives you warehousing and transportation readings to set beside the storage and freight numbers you already keep. The report used here is the September 2026 Logistics Managers' Index, released on 6 October 2026.

It's a survey: the September results summarize the responses of supply chain professionals collected in September 2026. The LMI site lists one report for each month, with July, August and September 2026 among them.

Component readings sit on a diffusion index. Anything above 50.0 means logistics is expanding, and anything below 50.0 means it's shrinking. The September 2026 report gives these three component readings for a warehouse or freight screen:

• Warehousing Capacity, September 2026: 39.3. Down 14.2, in contraction.
• Warehousing Prices, September 2026: 73.5. Still expanding.
• Transportation Prices, September 2026: 92.7. Up 2.7, the fastest rate of expansion since June.

Aggregate Logistics Costs combine Inventory Costs, Warehousing Prices and Transportation Costs on a scale from 0 to 300, where 150 is the breakeven level. In September 2026 that aggregate read 246.1, up 2.5, its highest reading since April 2022.

Show the aggregate against the 150 breakeven and the 0 to 300 scale, so the screen shows how far from it the number sits.

In September 2026, split by firm size, Warehousing Capacity read 36.0 for smaller firms, those with 0 to 999 employees. Larger firms, those with 1,000 employees or more, reported 44.1.

If you show the split, keep the employee cutoffs on the screen, so a reader can see who sits in which group.

EIA weekly diesel: the fuel line

EIA's diesel price is the fuel line, with one U.S. price for each week. The Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) page publishes a U.S. on-highway diesel price table in dollars per gallon.

Here are the three latest weekly points for the U.S.:

Over those three weeks the U.S. price went from 6.179 to 6.352 dollars per gallon. Each price includes all taxes.

That table came out on 27 October 2026. The next one is due 3 November 2026, seven days later, so the line gets a new point each week.

Census inventories: manufacturers' stock, released monthly

The Census report gives you manufacturers' inventory levels once a month. It's the Monthly Full Report on Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories, & Orders, published on 2 October 2026 and covering August 2026. Two figures from it fit a dashboard, each dated to August 2026:

• Manufacturers' inventories, August 2026: $972.4 billion. Up $5.1 billion, or 0.5 percent, and up for eleven consecutive months.
• Inventories-to-shipments ratio, August 2026: 1.48. Up from 1.47 in July.

These figures count manufacturers' inventories only; they don't measure warehouse space or your own stock. Print August 2026 beside each one, so a reader doesn't take it for today's level.

Date each series and keep its limits next to it on the screen

Label each series with its date and its limits, then read any move in it only as context.

1. Pair your cost per shipment with the diesel line and your storage use with the LMI warehouse readings. Leave the Census figures unpaired, as a backdrop on manufacturers' stock.
2. Take your own numbers from the data you already keep. Your cost per shipment and storage use come from your WMS, TMS or accounting tool.
3. Show an "as of" date on every number, yours included. A dashboard number should show when it was last updated. An LMI reading needs two dates: the month the responses were collected and the day the report came out.
4. Print each series' limit beside its figure, and check it on its own refresh rate. Next to the LMI, note that it's a survey. Next to diesel, note that the price includes all taxes, and next to the Census figures, that they cover manufacturers' inventories only. The EIA table lists one price per week, the Census report is monthly, and the LMI site lists one report for each month.

When an outside series and your own number move together, that alone doesn't tell you why your own cost moved. Treat the outside line as context for your own.

To start, pick one outside series and one of your own numbers, such as the EIA diesel line beside your cost per shipment, and put both on one page with their "as of" dates. Then look at both again when the next EIA table comes out, due 3 November 2026.

Sources

• the-lmi.com/september-2026-logistic…
• eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel
• census.gov/manufacturing/m3/current…

Related service: Supply chain analytics and logistics dashboards, built from your own data

This post was researched and drafted by AI agents, then checked by a separate AI fact-checker and reviewer before publishing. Every source is linked above.