What drives shipping container delivery costs

Why one flat figure is always wrong

Consider two deliveries. A 20ft onto a level hardstand twenty minutes from the depot, straight off a tilt-tray, done in half an hour. And a 40ft into a rear laneway in an inner suburb, lifted over a fence by a crane truck, with a traffic control plan and a two-hour window.

Those are not the same job. Any business quoting them at the same price is either overcharging the first customer to subsidise the second, or under-quoting the second and adding to it later. Both are worse than telling you the truth.

Why we do not publish a delivery figure

We could put a number on this page. It would read well and it would be wrong for most of the addresses we deliver to, which is the same thing as being useless. What actually sets the cartage is how far your address is from the depot holding your unit, and what the truck finds when it gets there.

• Close to the depot holding your unit: the shortest run we do, and a standard tilt-tray where the access allows one
• A few hours out: still a day run, but the truck is on the road longer and the quote reflects it
• Long haul, interstate or well inland: often a shared or backloaded run, so flexibility on the date genuinely helps
• Remote, or anywhere with awkward access: quoted per run against the address, because nothing about it is standard

Ring us with a postcode and the size you want and you get the delivered number, not a band to guess inside.

The six things that move it

1. Distance from the depot holding your unit. Not distance from an office. The container comes off the nearest depot that has your size in your grade, and occasionally that is not the depot nearest you.

2. Which truck the site needs. This is the biggest single swing. A standard tilt-tray is the cheapest way to put a container on the ground: it reverses in, tips the bed and slides the unit off, and it needs roughly twenty metres of straight run to do it. A crane truck lifts the container over an obstacle instead. It costs more per job and it gets into places a tilt-tray never will.

3. 20ft against 40ft. Bigger vehicle, longer run-in, sometimes a different licence class. Expect meaningfully more over the same distance.

4. Access at your end. Gate width, length of the straight run, wires and branches overhead, and whether the ground carries a loaded truck after rain. Three photographs — the gate, the approach, the spot — resolve nearly all of it.

5. Dedicated run or backload. A container going out on a truck already heading your way costs less than one that is not. Flexibility on the date is worth real money, and it is worth more the further out you are.

6. Return trips. On hire, collection is a second delivery. It should be quoted at the start, not at the end.

What to ask before you agree to anything

• Is that price ex depot or delivered to my address?
• Which vehicle is it coming on, and what does that vehicle need from my site?
• What happens to the price if the truck arrives and cannot place it?
• If I am hiring, what does collection cost?

Straight answers to those four questions are worth more than a discount off the sticker.

How we do it

The container price and the delivery price are quoted together, against your actual address, before anything is booked. There is one total to say yes or no to, and if it does not stack up for you, it does not stack up. Full detail on the delivery page, and every container figure is on the prices page with the date it was set.