Two carriers can quote the same pallet hundreds of dollars apart, and the reason is almost never that one of them is overcharging. They are pricing different jobs. LTL freight has more moving parts than any other kind of shipping a small business buys, and most of them are decided before the truck moves.
What does it cost to ship a pallet?
Commonly quoted ranges for a standard 48×40 pallet:
| Distance | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Local, same metro | $150 – $300 |
| Regional, a few hundred miles | $400 – $800 |
| Cross-country | Four figures |
Those are the shape of the market, not a quote. What decides where you land inside a band is mostly not the distance.
Why do two quotes differ by hundreds of dollars?
Four reasons, in rough order of how much damage they do.
Base rates are negotiated, not published. Unlike parcel pricing, LTL rates are individually agreed between carrier and customer. Two carriers can start from genuinely different numbers before a single detail of your shipment is applied.
They classed your freight differently. See below — this is the big one.
They assumed different access. One priced a loading dock at both ends. The other saw a residential address and added a liftgate and a residential fee. The pallet is identical; the job is not.
One of them included accessorials and the other did not. A quote without them looks cheaper and arrives as an invoice that is not.
What is freight class, and why does it decide your price?
The NMFC system sorts freight into eighteen classes from 50 to 500, worked out from four things: density, how well it stows, how it has to be handled, and how likely it is to be damaged or stolen.
- Class 50–85 — dense, sturdy, stackable. Bricks, machine parts, canned goods. Cheapest per pound.
- Class 100–175 — the middle. Boxed goods, furniture parts, appliances.
- Class 250–500 — light, bulky or fragile. Ping-pong tables, lampshades, anything mostly air. Expensive for the same footprint.
Density is the part people get wrong, and it is just weight divided by cubic feet. A pallet stacked tightly to four feet is a different class from the same goods stacked loosely to six, which is why how you build the pallet changes the price.
Declaring the wrong class is the most common reason an invoice beats the quote. Carriers re-weigh and re-measure, and a correction comes with a fee on top of the difference.
Which extras catch people out?
Every one of these is a separate line, and none appears unless you ask:
- Liftgate, at pickup or delivery or both — needed whenever there is no dock.
- Residential or limited-access address. Schools, farms, construction sites and self-storage all count, not just houses.
- Inside delivery, if the pallet has to go past the kerb or threshold.
- Appointment or notification, if someone must be called before arrival.
- Re-weigh and re-class, when the shipment does not match the paperwork.
Individually small, collectively the difference between a $250 quote and a $450 invoice. The same pattern as every other courier quote: the base number is the easy part and the multipliers are where the money is.
When does a courier beat an LTL carrier?
LTL is cheap because your pallet shares a trailer. But it reaches that trailer through terminals — picked up locally, taken to a hub, sorted, moved, sorted, delivered. Four or more handlings, and each one is transit time and a chance of damage.
A freight courier running a box truck takes the pallet point to point. One handling, no terminals. On a single pallet moving a few hundred miles that is frequently comparable on price and materially faster, and it is the comparison most small businesses never make because the quote tools only ever price LTL.
Worth pricing both when: it is one or two pallets, the run is under about 500 miles, the delivery date actually matters, or the freight is fragile enough that four handlings is the real risk.
What to have ready before you ask for a quote
Give every carrier the identical information and the spread between quotes collapses to the thing you actually want to compare — their rate.
- Dimensions and weight, measured and weighed rather than estimated.
- Freight class, or the density figure so they can work it out.
- What it is, and what it is worth.
- Dock or no dock, at both ends. Say it explicitly.
- Address type — commercial, residential, or limited-access.
- Whether the date is fixed, and whether anyone needs calling first.
If the deadline is hours rather than days, LTL is the wrong product entirely — that is a dedicated hot shot run, priced on a driver’s day and the empty return rather than on freight class.
If you are shipping regularly rather than once, the same information written down as a standing profile stops you rebuilding it every time. And if what you are moving is a single large item rather than a palletised load, that is priced completely differently.
