TAC Index Air Freight Rate Index

TAC Index Limited - headquartered in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, with offices in the USA, UK, Thailand and France - bills itself as the source of “the fastest, highest quality, timestamped air cargo data,” and the timestamp obsession is the tell. Every print in every series carries an explicit moment of quotation, because the entire point of the product is letting two counterparties cite one exact figure inside an index-linked agreement (ILA) instead of gesturing at “the market.”

The brand wraps six product lines, not one feed. Pricing sits in the BAI Freight Index, BAI Spot Index and TAC Freight Index; TAC Space adds capacity and supply-side measures; OnAir and TAC Consultancy complete the lineup. Against that roster the company claims more than 100 indices spanning hundreds of global trade lanes, usage by roughly 90 percent of top global airlines, and more than 25 global partners.

Every observation keeps the same skeleton - a named index, a trade lane, a rate value in USD per kilogram, a timestamp - which is what makes the family usable as one dataset rather than a hundred unrelated feeds. It sits inside the wider air freight logistics data hub of 24 pooled datasets, where government tonnage statistics dominate and priced benchmarks are rare. Get a sample of this dataset to see live lanes laid against your own routes.

Four columns, one row per index per trade lane per period:

index_name         trade_lane          rate_value_usd_kg    timestamp
BAI Spot Index     <origin>-<dest>     4.850                2026-08-21T09:30:00Z
BAI Freight Index  <origin>-<dest>     3.975                2026-08-21T09:30:00Z
TAC Freight Index  <origin>-<dest>     2.640                2026-08-21T09:30:00Z

The index names above are the publisher’s real product families; the lane tokens and figures are placeholders that show row shape, not quotations - the trade-lane list and live values arrive with your sample. Spot prints are delivered daily; slower-cadence families publish on their own stated periods. Granularity stays constant either way: one observation, one index, one lane, one timestamp.

The working dictionary is four fields wide, and every one of them earns its place:

Additional fields on request. Three things the publisher asserts but does not publish openly - methodology detail (transaction inputs, weighting), the historic depth of each series, and exact per-family cadence - plus the supply-side capacity columns from the TAC Space line, get pinned down against your sample before you commit. Nothing in this dictionary is padded: no filler identifiers, no columns you would drop on day one.

• Geo: Global - hundreds of trade lanes, with the publisher headquartered in Hong Kong and offices across the USA, UK, Thailand and France
• Temporal: Ongoing index series with spot prints delivered daily; historic depth confirmed per series with your sample
• Granularity: One observation per index per trade lane per period, each carrying its own timestamp

That footprint is the niche: official statistics count tonnes moved, while this family prices the lane itself, which is why the two are usually stacked rather than swapped.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the lane set, pick the cadence, pick the landing zone - the same four-field rows arrive whichever way you take them. The sample comes first, so the lane list, the history depth and the cadence per index family are settled facts before any commitment.

• Investors and quant researchers treat the 100+ lane benchmarks as core inputs for freight-rate exposure analysis - a priced series where most of the slice offers only volume counts.
• Competitive intelligence and product teams watch spot-rate moves on specific lanes as a read on shifting carrier dynamics. The competitive intel product teams use cases page shows how lane-level signals feed positioning work.
• Data scientists feed the timestamped series into pricing models; the data scientists use cases page covers how priced benchmarks slot next to public tonnage data.
• Procurement and contract teams anchor escalation clauses to a named, timestamped series - the ILA use case the publisher designed for.

Builders wiring feeds into internal tooling will find the delivery-side details in the developers builders use cases page.

• WorldACD Air Cargo Market Data - weekly weight and rate series aggregated from more than 100 airlines and forwarders; a different cut of the same market at a slower cadence.
• Eurostat AVIA_GOOA - 17,791,958 observations of freight and mail tonnage at roughly 1,130 coded airports from 1993 through 2026-Q2; the volume counterweight to priced lanes.
• BTS T-100 Air Carrier Statistics - monthly US carrier-reported traffic back to 1990, with the combined segment table holding 14,083,343 records.

Two glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary before you buy anything: what an air-freight-rate-index actually is, and how air-cargo-market-data differs from it.