What freight class is your freight? Evan Transportation’s got you covered.
There’s more to freight shipping than meets the eye. You can choose to manage your own fleet of trucks, or to go with a trucking service. If you go with a trucking service, you can choose between full-truckload shipping and less-than truckload shipping, also known as LTL shipping. TL shipping does not require you to classify your freight, but LTL shipping does. Here’s a brief guide on how to determine freight class and what Evan Transportation can do for you.
LTL Freight Class
Deciding your LTL freight class is important because it directly translates to what your tariff will be. How expensive will it be to ship your goods? If you do not categorize it correctly, someone down the line will reclassify it, which results in delays and higher costs. Therefore, it pays to do it right the first time.
Factors That Determine Freight Class
Four factors that determine freight class are:
- Liability: The liability is how much risk comes with shipping your products. For example, perishable, fragile, or combustible items have a higher risk of damage during transport than a hardy, humble object will. The greater the liability, the higher the shipping cost.
- Stowability: Your products should have proper packaging and have a load-bearing side so that they can be in a stack. They are harder to stow on the truck bed if they have protruding parts, are an odd shape, or are extremely heavy.
- Density: Some commodities’ shipping costs depend on their density, which is cubic feet divided by pounds. Lower-density freight is more expensive to ship.
- Handling: LTL shipments have more stops than TL shipments; after all, LTL is more like a bus while TL is like an Uber. If your goods need special handling, provided that they are fragile in some way, the handling cost will rise.
Freight Class Chart
Once you know what your freight shipping needs are, you can use a freight class chart to look up your product type (e.g., alcohol, paper products, refrigerators, car parts) and see what class number your freight would have.
Determining Freight Class
How do you determine freight class? All you need to do is to measure the cubic feet, weight, and density of your total shipment, with the packaging, and round up the total size by one inch.
For All Your Trucking Needs
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Tags: determine freight class, freight class calculator, LTL shipping