Fleet Toll Costs: What You Can & Can’t Control

Summary: Commercial fleets can use automated tools to more quickly catch toll bill discrepancies, mismatches, and frauds. This increases visibility and operational efficiencies while saving hours for staff. Additionally, modern tolling apps can submit claims, predict future tolls, and more accurately estimate on upcoming charges. 

In the pursuit of optimized fleet efficiency and catching every wasted dollar or underutilized resource, fleets may be missing a small but compounding culprit: tolling discrepancies.

Whether it is silently bleeding small, incremental charges that add up every quarter, wasted time spent trying to reconcile records or file disputes, or processing fees weeks too late to recover, tolling problems are an issue that may be quietly destroying your margins.

For commercial fleets, toll costs are highly variable (depending on geographic location) but are currently a rapidly growing expense. In fact, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) recently reported that tolls increased 13.2% in 2025, the largest percentage increase of any major operating cost line item for trucking that year. Tolling deserves a deeper look for small but important ways to reduce waste and fraud.

What Causes High Toll Costs?

• Violation fees on transponder misreads: When toll charges are delayed or missed, they can compound into violation fees that dwarf the original toll cost.
• Duplicate charges that nobody catches: When a transaction posts through both a transponder read and a plate-image capture, the fleet pays twice unless someone matches the two records.
• Cash and pay-by-plate premiums: Video and pay-by-plate rates run above transponder rates on most tolling authorities, so any vehicle without working toll protection coverage in a given lane pays a surcharge on every pass.
• Uncontested legitimate disputes: Some tolling authorities resolve disputes only through a local office or a phone-tree portal. Commercial fleets may find themselves writing off a valid dispute because pursuing it costs more than the actual charge itself.
• Unintentional misuse: Drivers at times unintentionally play a role in tolling discrepancies by sharing a transponder with another driver without communicating it back to corporate, creating a mismatch between transponder ID and assigned truck location. This can result in charge leakage and overcharges.
• Fraud or Theft: EZ Pass transponder theft is an escalating form of financial fraud, where transponders are stolen from parked trucks. If not quickly reported and addressed, a thief can rack up thousands of dollars in charges, as in a recent case in Pennsylvania which resulted in $11,000 in fraudulent charges.
• Manual Chaos: Many fleets do not have a single person or office assigned to managing tolls. Understanding the various rules, different agencies, and all the factors that go into pricing (whether it's congestion rate, time of day, or the agency you're driving through) is complex. Manually reconciling your records and fees costs your team time, and time is money.

How Can Fleets Lower Tolling Costs?

In a recent webinar hosted by Platform Science, tolling experts from Fleetworthy (formerly Bestpass) covered practical ways commercial fleets can address many of the factors driving up tolling expenses. The good news for fleets is that modern tolling tools can automate the time-consuming task of manually combing through charges, and automatically compare them with real-world fleet ELD data for every truck, identifying discrepancies, mismatches, or red flags.

By adding an app like Fleetworthy’s Toll Genius (available through the Virtual Vehicle Marketplace) into their fleet management environment, commercial fleets can align real-world GPS, ELD, and transponder data from their trucks with the charges they are receiving from tolling authorities. And by communicating directly with the fleet’s ELD provider like Platform Science, data is quickly matched up and any mismatches identified quickly.

This process maximizes savings and visibility, giving fleets an added layer of protection, especially against fraud. It frees up fleet employees from the tedious tasks of searching through data, making it easier to bill back more quickly and submit disputes automatically. Reports can also be processed faster than the regular 5 to 7 business days it takes for authorities to report, giving you better real-time insights into fleet operations and allowing you to catch any potential fraud or theft issues before they escalate.

In addition, a new Fleetworthy tool, Toll360 (releasing soon) will use AI to accurately predict upcoming tolls based on vehicle location, eliminating the 24- to 48-hour wait it usually takes for agencies to post to your account. This is helpful in situations where a fleet needs to bill back customers or wants their toll data even faster. Toll360 pilot customers have experienced an average overcharge reduction of $10 to $12 per month per truck which adds up to more than $5,000 per month for a 500 truck fleet. Fleets saved an average 30 to 40 hours a month from not having to reconcile tolls manually, with a 95% toll prediction accuracy rate.

By stopping charge leakage and catching discrepancies, fleets can tighten up their tolling costs and ensure they are paying only for the tolls they used, when they used them. In an industry where every cent counts, improving your tolling accuracy can make the difference in staying competitive.

Watch the full webinar now: “You Can’t Control Toll Rates; You Can Control Fraud” >>

Toll Genius by Fleetworthy is an add-on app that integrates seamlessly into the Platform Science environment. Toll Genius combines Bestpass toll data with Platform Science GPS and telematics to deliver accurate, GPS-verified toll intelligence. Learn more now >>

Platform Science delivers a modern fleet management and telematics platform with easy-to-use applications and round-the-clock customer service to give its partners the support they need and their drivers the tools they deserve. From embedded OEM hardware options and dedicated support teams to integrated partner applications and a seamless driver interface, we have what you need to fuel your fleet’s success.

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