Per-Stop vs. Activity-Based Charges in a FedEx ISP Contract

Strip a FedEx Ground ISP contract down to its engine and you find two basic ways of getting paid: per stop — a rate for each address you service — and activity-based — rates for each unit of work performed, packages being the obvious one. Nearly every fixed revenue line on your settlement is one or the other, and the balance between them determines which kinds of weeks pay well for your operation. Understanding the split is the foundation for reading everything else on the statement.

Per-stop charges

A stop is an address serviced, regardless of how many packages change hands there. Per-stop compensation therefore rewards density: ten packages delivered to one apartment building earn one stop charge; ten packages spread across ten rural driveways earn ten. Density is also roughly how your costsbehave — a driver's day is mostly driving between stops, not handing over boxes — which is why cost-per-stop is such a useful operating metric, and why two routes with identical package counts can have completely different economics.

Activity-based charges

Activity-based charges pay per unit of work: packages handled, pickups performed, and similar countable events, each at its own Schedule C rate. E-commerce volume typically settles under its own activity-based rates as well, which is why it's broken out separately on the statement. Where per-stop compensation tracks the shape of your territory, activity-based compensation tracks throughput — it's the part of your revenue that scales when volume surges and shrinks when it doesn't.

Why the balance matters

Your contract's particular mix of stop-based and activity-based rates decides how your revenue responds to different weeks:

• A packages-heavy week (peak season, a big retail promotion) moves activity-based revenue much more than stop revenue — the same addresses simply receive more boxes.
• A stops-heavy shift (new residential construction, territory growth) moves both, but stop-based revenue is where sparse-to-dense changes show up most cleanly.
• Revenue per package and revenue per stop move in opposite directions as density changes. If packages per stop rise, revenue per package falls even with every rate unchanged — not a problem, just arithmetic. Knowing this saves you from chasing phantom rate issues.

This is also the right lens for contract offers: two proposed rate structures can look equivalent at today's volume and density while behaving very differently if your territory grows, densifies, or sheds a big shipper. The fixed-versus-variable question that dominates MESO evaluation is largely a question about this balance.

What to check on your own numbers

• Know your split. From a recent settlement, total the stop-based dollars and the activity-based dollars for the week. That ratio is your operation's revenue signature.
• Watch packages per stop. It's the single number that connects the two charge families, and its trend explains many "why did revenue per package change?" mysteries before they become support calls.
• Check effective rates per charge type — dollars ÷ units per line against your Schedule C, matched by CSA code — rather than judging the week by the total.

Watching the split without the spreadsheet

Route Impact computes this automatically from each uploaded settlement: the week's revenue mix by charge family, packages per stop, and effective rates per line checked against the Schedule C on file — with anything unusual flagged for your review, never asserted as an error. If you'd rather run it by hand, the checks above fit in a spreadsheet; the value of automating them is that they happen on every settlement, including the weeks you're too busy to look.