Choosing between less-than-truckload (LTL) and full-truckload (FTL) shipping is one of the most common decisions in freight — and getting it right saves real money. The best choice depends on your shipment size, budget, and timeline.
What is LTL shipping?
LTL is for shipments that do not fill an entire trailer — typically 1 to 6 pallets. Your freight shares trailer space with other shippers, and you pay only for the space you use. It is cost-effective for smaller loads but involves more handling and stops.
What is FTL shipping?
FTL means your freight fills (or is dedicated to) an entire truck. It is ideal for large shipments, high-value goods, or freight that needs to move quickly with minimal handling. Because the truck goes directly from origin to destination, transit is faster and the risk of damage is lower.
How to choose
- Shipment size: under about 6 pallets, LTL usually wins on cost; more than that, compare against FTL.
- Speed: FTL is faster with fewer stops.
- Fragility: less handling in FTL means less damage risk.
- Budget: LTL lets you pay only for the space you use.
A hybrid approach
Many shippers use both, consolidating LTL freight into FTL for the long haul and breaking it back down for final delivery. A logistics partner can model the options and pick the most economical route for each lane.
Long Road Warehouse coordinates LTL, FTL, and everything in between across the Pacific Northwest. Request a quote for your next shipment.
How LTL freight shipping actually works
Your pallets do not travel in one truck from origin to destination. An LTL carrier collects them locally, brings them into a service centre, breaks the load down, reloads your pallet onto a line-haul trailer with freight going the same direction, moves it to another service centre, and finally puts it on a local delivery truck. Between four and six handlings is normal.
That hub-and-spoke design is exactly why LTL is cheap and exactly why it damages freight. Every handling is a forklift, and a pallet that is not built to survive six of them will arrive looking like it survived six of them.
What decides an LTL rate
- Freight class — the NMFC class from 50 to 500, driven mainly by density, plus stowability, handling and liability. Class 50 is dense and cheap; class 400 is light, bulky and expensive. Our freight class calculator converts dimensions and weight into the density figure the class comes from, and the NMFC guide explains the rest.
- Weight — priced in bands, with a break where the next band is cheaper in total. Shipping 480 lb sometimes costs more than declaring 500.
- Dimensions and pallet count — how much trailer floor you occupy, which is what linear-foot rules actually charge for.
- Lane — origin and destination service centres, and whether the destination is a place the carrier already goes.
- Accessorials — liftgate, residential, inside delivery, limited access, appointment, notify-before-delivery. Each is a separate charge and each one you forget to declare becomes a surprise.
Why the invoice does not match the quote
This is the single most common complaint about LTL, and the cause is almost never the carrier inventing charges. The quote is built from what you told them. The invoice is built from what their dock measured.
Carriers run dimensioners at their service centres: a pallet passes through, gets photographed, weighed and measured in seconds, and any disagreement with the bill of lading generates a reweigh or a reclass. The adjustment arrives weeks later as a balance-due invoice, and by then the shipment has been delivered and the leverage is gone.
The defence is entirely upstream. Measure the pallet as it will actually ship — including the pallet, including the wrap, including the item hanging over the edge. Weigh it rather than estimating. Declare the accessorials the delivery genuinely needs. A bill of lading that matches the pallet does not get adjusted.
Building a pallet that survives the network
- Stack to the pallet footprint, not over it. Overhang is the first thing a forklift destroys.
- Heavy on the bottom, light on top, with the load interlocked rather than stacked in columns where it can shear.
- Wrap down onto the pallet itself, several turns at the base, so the load and the pallet are one object.
- Corner boards on anything that can crush — see dunnage for what goes inside the carton.
- One label per side, and the old labels removed. A pallet with two live labels goes to whichever one the scanner reads first.
That work happens on our dock in Kent as part of outbound LTL, which is the reason our pallets are rarely the ones that get adjusted.
LTL, truckload or parcel: picking by arithmetic
Under about 150 lb per piece and a handful of cartons, parcel is usually cheaper and faster. From one to roughly six pallets, LTL wins. Above about ten pallets, full truckload almost always wins and is more predictable as well, because a dedicated trailer has no terminal handlings at all.
Between six and ten it depends on the freight rather than the count. Fragile, high-value, awkwardly shaped or badly classed shipments often price better on a dedicated trailer even at a low pallet count, because LTL is punishing exactly those characteristics through class. Run both quotes; the gap is frequently the opposite of what the pallet count suggests. The comparison earlier on this page works the numbers.
Transit times, and why an LTL estimate is an estimate
An LTL carrier publishes standard transit days between service centres and treats them as a service target, not a guarantee. A pallet that misses a line-haul cut-off waits for the next one, which is a day. Guaranteed delivery is available as a paid service on most carriers, and it is worth buying on the shipments where a missed date costs more than the premium — a retail appointment, a trade show, a production line.
Shipping LTL out of Seattle and Tacoma
The Puget Sound is well served by every national LTL carrier, and the I-5 corridor gives good transit south to Portland and California and east over the passes. The awkward part of this region is not the line-haul, it is the delivery end: a great deal of Northwest freight goes to addresses with no dock, and liftgate is not an optional extra there. Book it on the bill of lading rather than discovering it at the kerb — a redelivery costs several times what the accessorial would have.
Freight leaving our Kent dock is palletised, wrapped, weighed, measured, classed and labelled before the carrier arrives, and the BOL is written to match. See LTL delivery, or ask for a quote against a real shipment.
