Freight calculators

The single most confusing thing about freight quoting is that the same box has a different chargeable weight depending on how it travels:

• Sea LCL bills per revenue tonne — whichever is greater of one cubic metre or 1,000 kg. Most consumer goods are lighter than that, so LCL bills on volume.
• Air freight uses the IATA ratio of 1:6000, which is 167 kg per cubic metre.
• Express couriers use 1:5000, which is 200 kg per cubic metre — about 20% harsher than air freight on the same box.
• European road groupage commonly applies 1:3, or 333 kg per cubic metre.

This is why a forwarder can undercut an integrator on a bulky pallet and lose to them on a dense one, and why comparing two quotes without checking which basis each used tells you very little.

Divide a Euro pallet's cube by a carton's cube and you get a number the warehouse cannot achieve. Cartons tile a rectangle imperfectly: a 40 × 30 cm carton on a 120 × 80 cm deck leaves strips that only fit rotated cartons, or nothing at all.

Our pallet and container tools fill the main block in one orientation, then pack the leftover strips in the rotated orientation, and take the better of the two starting orientations. The two strips are disjoint by construction, so the count is always physically achievable — a floor, never an overestimate. It is what a good loader does by eye, made repeatable.

The other thing volume division misses is which constraint binds first. For most consumer goods a container fills before it reaches its payload limit. For tiles, liquids or machinery — anything above roughly 400 kg per cubic metre — the weight limit arrives first, and road weight limits at the destination can be lower than the container's own.

NMFTA Docket 2025-1 replaced the legacy tier structure with a 13-tier density scale from 19 July 2025 and reclassified more than 2,000 commodity codes. A calculator still running the old chart will give you the wrong class on some shipments, and a wrong class is the most common reason an LTL invoice does not match its quote.

Density is only one of the four NMFC factors, though. Stowability, handling difficulty and liability can all move a class regardless of how dense the pallet is, and carriers reweigh and remeasure as a matter of routine. Measure the pallet as loaded, including overhang and the pallet itself, and treat the result as your opening position rather than a settled fact.