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ShipMargin

Shipping cost calculator

Build a shipping quote from the ground up: chargeable weight, base rate, fuel and accessorial surcharges, and cross-border duty and tax, itemised line by line.

Free · no sign-up Runs in your browser Updated
The parcel
cm
cm
cm
kg
Rate

USPS publishes its full tariff, so we can price it for you. For every other carrier, paste the rate you were quoted — we do not invent prices.

Divisor 5000

Rate type
$
$
Surcharges

These are where quotes and invoices diverge.

%

Resets weekly against a diesel index. Take the current figure from your invoice or the carrier's surcharge page.

$
$
$
Total shipping cost
$59.38

On 5 kg chargeable weight

Chargeable weight
5 kg
Billed on volume
Cost per kilo shipped
$14.84
Freight before surcharges
$47.50
Surcharges
$11.88
What you are paying for
  • Freight (5 kg × $9.5)−$47.5080%
  • Fuel surcharge (25%)−$11.8820%

This tool takes your rate as an input rather than inventing one. Every site that shows you a precise shipping price is showing either its own negotiated rate — which you cannot buy — or a number with no source behind it. Paste in the rate your carrier quoted, or your contract rate, and we will do the part that actually goes wrong: chargeable weight, surcharge stacking and landed cost.

Questions people ask about this

Why does this ask for my rate instead of showing prices?

Because a rate we made up would be worse than useless. Carrier pricing depends on your account, your volume, your zone and a fuel surcharge that resets weekly. What we can be exactly right about is the chargeable weight your rate gets multiplied by, and the surcharges that get added afterwards — which is where most quotes go wrong.

Why is my invoice higher than the quote I was given?

Almost always one of four things: the carrier remeasured and billed dimensional weight, a residential or remote-area surcharge applied, the fuel surcharge moved between quote and billing, or an address correction was needed. This calculator lets you model all four.

How much is the fuel surcharge?

It changes weekly against a published diesel or jet-fuel index, and it has recently run in the mid-twenties as a percentage for ground parcel services. Because it moves, we ask you for the current figure from your invoice or the carrier's surcharge page rather than baking in a number that goes stale.

Related calculators

Chargeable weightThe greater of actual and volumetric, with the carrier's rounding applied.Compare carriersOne parcel, every carrier's billing rules, side by side.Landed costGoods, freight, duty, tax and fees, resolved to a cost per unit.Delivery dateAn arrival date that accounts for cut-offs, holidays and customs.

Where these numbers come from

Rates and rules change, and a calculator running on stale data is worse than no calculator. Every figure below carries the date we last checked it and a confidence level, so you can judge how much weight to put on it.

Source Publisher Effective Confidence
Dimensional weight divisors by carrier FedEx and UPS daily rates use 139 for inches and pounds, 5000 for centimetres and kilograms. UPS retail counter rates use 166. DHL Express uses 5000. Compiled from carrier documentation and multiple independent operators; FedEx blocked our automated read on 2026-08-17. ShipMargin (compiled) — Corroborated
UPS fuel surcharge tables Fuel surcharges reset weekly against a published diesel-price bracket table. Any calculator that hardcodes a percentage is stale within days, which is why ours takes the current fuel price as an input. UPS — Primary source

Page last reviewed . Spotted something out of date? Tell us — corrections are published with the date they were made.