Hub and spoke is the network model most LTL carriers use to move freight. Instead of driving your shipment straight from pickup to delivery, the carrier routes it through one or more central hubs, where it gets combined with other shipments heading the same direction.
For a distributor shipping LTL across multiple locations, hub and spoke isn't just how your freight moves. It's also where a real chunk of your freight costs quietly come from, in ways that don't show up until the invoice does.
Picture a wheel. The hub sits in the middle. The spokes run out to individual terminals, each one covering its own local area. This structure, sometimes called a network topology in the broader supply chain management field, is the foundation of most LTL carrier and parcel networks.
Freight picked up at a spoke terminal doesn't go straight to its destination. It travels to the hub first, gets combined with freight from other spoke terminals heading the same general direction, then gets sent back out to a spoke terminal near its final destination.
Carriers use this setup because it's cheaper for them to run. A handful of fuller, longer trailers between hubs costs less than a tangle of half-empty trailers running point-to-point between every possible pair of cities. That's part of why LTL rates are as low as they are, and it's also the reason your freight rarely travels in a straight line.
| Hub and Spoke | Point-to-Point | |
|---|---|---|
| Route | Freight passes through one or more central hubs | Freight travels directly from origin to destination |
| Cost | Lower, since trailers run fuller between hubs | Higher per shipment, since trailers often run partly empty |
| Transit time | Longer, due to extra stops and handling | Shorter, with no detour through a hub |
| Handling | Unloaded and reloaded at each hub | Loaded once, unloaded once |
| Best for | Smaller, regular shipments across many lanes | Full or nearly full trailers, or time-sensitive freight |
A shipment moving through a hub and spoke network follows a specific path:
For a shipment moving a long distance, this can happen more than once, through more than one hub.
Every hub is a chance for something to change about your shipment, and not always in a way you'll notice until the bill arrives.
Each time freight gets unloaded at a hub, someone who has never seen your product before handles it. Dock crews commonly reweigh and remeasure freight as part of normal hub operations. If what they find doesn't match what was declared on the bill of lading, they adjust the freight class and rebill accordingly.
This is the same reclass mechanism that can happen on a single LTL shipment, but hub and spoke is where it actually plays out. The extra handling fee on your invoice usually isn't a random charge. It's the direct result of your freight getting touched, reweighed, and re-sorted at a facility you never see.
Say a distributor ships two pallets from Ohio to Texas, routed through a hub in Kentucky. At the hub, the dock crew reweighs both pallets. One comes in lighter than declared and gets reclassed down. The other is bulkier than declared and gets reclassed up. The distributor sees both adjustments on the same invoice, for two pallets that shipped together on the same day.
Hub and spoke isn't a bad system. It's just not a free one, and a few tradeoffs come with it.
None of these are reasons to avoid LTL shipping. They're reasons to know what you're actually paying for when a shipment takes longer or costs more than expected.
Hub and spoke earns its keep when you're shipping smaller loads across a lot of different lanes. Sharing space with other shippers, through a network of hubs, is what makes that affordable in the first place.
It matters less once you're regularly filling most of a trailer with your own freight. At that point, a direct, point-to-point move, or a full truckload, skips the hub entirely and usually gets there faster.
You can't take the hubs out of the network. A few things still cut down on how often they cost you money you didn't expect.
Hub and spoke is a network model where freight travels through one or more central hubs instead of going directly from origin to destination. Carriers use it to combine shipments from multiple customers into fuller trailers between hubs, which lowers their cost to move each individual shipment.
It lets them combine smaller shipments from many different customers into full trailers running between hubs, instead of sending mostly empty trailers directly between every possible origin and destination. That's a big part of why LTL rates stay as low as they do.
Usually, yes. Each hub adds a stop where freight has to be unloaded, sorted, and reloaded onto its next trailer, and it has to arrive in time to catch that connection. A direct, point-to-point move skips all of that.
Reweighing at a hub is routine, not a sign anything went wrong. Dock crews check weight and dimensions as freight moves through, and if what they find doesn't match what was declared, they'll adjust the freight class and the charge that goes with it.
Hub and spoke routes freight through a central hub where it's combined with other shipments, while point-to-point sends it directly from origin to destination. Hub and spoke usually costs less for smaller shipments, but point-to-point is faster since there's no detour through a hub.
Nearly all of them do, since it's what makes LTL pricing work in the first place. The number of hubs a shipment passes through, and how well-run those specific hubs are, varies a lot between carriers and even between different lanes for the same carrier.
Maybe a shipment took longer than it should have, or a hub handling fee showed up on an invoice with no real explanation attached. Either way, that's the kind of gap a dedicated freight partner exists to close. GLI works this way for mid-market manufacturers and distributors shipping LTL across multiple locations. It tracks freight through the hubs it actually passes through, and flags the reclasses and delays before they turn into a pattern nobody can explain.
Ready to see how GLI handles hub and spoke shipping for a business like yours? Get a free freight analysis. No commitment, no pressure. Just a clear look at where you stand and what's possible.