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A 13.6 m curtainsider takes 33 euro pallets. A 40 ft container takes 25, a 20 ft container 11, and a 7.2 m rigid 18. On 1200 × 1000 mm industrial pallets those figures become 26, 21, 10 and 14.
Those are the answers to the question as usually asked. The question that decides what the freight actually costs you is the one underneath it: how many of your units fit on the pallet, and whether the load runs out of floor space or out of weight.
A unit here is whatever you palletise — a carton, a shrink pack, a drum, a bale of sacks. The tool does not care what is in it, only what it measures and what it weighs.
What you palletise
Pallet and vehicle
Including the pallet itself. 1800 mm is the usual limit for double stacking in a curtainsider.
This calculator works out the answer in your browser, so it needs JavaScript switched on. If you would rather not, send us the figures and we will run it for you — the answer comes back the same day.
Pallets per vehicle for standard footprints follow the loading patterns freight forwarders actually use, which is why a 40 ft container holds 25 euro pallets rather than the 20 a plain division suggests. Layer patterns are calculated from the dimensions you give and assume no overhang. A unit is whatever you palletise — a carton, a shrink pack, a drum, a bale. Treat both as planning figures: the quotation states the configuration we will ship.
Want this as a PDF? The answer above is yours either way. The PDF is the working written out — the figures you entered, the result, and the assumptions behind it — for a colleague or a purchase requisition.
Where the pallet figures come from
A 13.6 m curtainsider has roughly 13,620 mm of usable length and 2,480 mm of usable width. Euro pallets loaded with the 1200 mm side running along the trailer give eleven rows of three: 33 pallets, with about 400 mm to spare at the tail.
You will sometimes see 34 quoted. Turn the pallets so the 800 mm side runs along the trailer and you get seventeen rows of two — which is 34 pallets in exactly 13,600 mm, with nothing left over. It works on paper. It does not work on a loading bay, because the last pallet has to be pushed into a space the same width as itself. Every forwarder we ship with quotes 33.
Containers are different again, and this is where most calculators go wrong. A 40 ft container is 2,352 mm wide inside. Two euro pallets side by side at 800 mm each leave 752 mm of waste; one at 1200 mm plus one at 800 mm leaves 352 mm. Divide the deck naively and you get 20 pallets. Forwarders load 25, using interlocked patterns that alternate the orientation down the container. Our calculator uses the loading the industry actually achieves for standard footprints, and falls back to arithmetic only for sizes that have no established pattern.
| Vehicle | Internal length | Euro 1200 × 800 | Industrial 1200 × 1000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curtainsider 13.6 m | 13,620 mm | 33 | 26 |
| Rigid 7.2 m | 7,200 mm | 18 | 14 |
| 40 ft container | 12,032 mm | 25 | 21 |
| 40 ft high cube | 12,032 mm | 25 | 21 |
| 20 ft container | 5,898 mm | 11 | 10 |
All figures are single-tier, floor-loaded. Double stacking doubles them where the load will take the weight and the height allows — see below.
Units onto the pallet
This is the part worth spending five minutes on, because it is where the money is.
A plain division — pallet length ÷ unit length, times pallet width ÷ unit width — is what most online calculators do, and it undercounts. Real palletising uses block and pinwheel patterns: units turned ninety degrees in one part of the layer so that a strip which would otherwise be wasted gets filled.
Take a 350 × 250 mm unit on a euro pallet. Straight rows give three along by three across — nine per layer, with 150 mm of deck left bare at one end.
Split the layer instead. Fill the first 700 mm of the pallet with two rows of three the same way up: six units. Turn the remaining 500 mm strip through ninety degrees and it takes two by two: four more. Ten per layer, and the deck is 91% covered instead of 82%.
At 200 mm high that is 80 units per pallet against 72, and across a full 33-pallet trailer 2,640 against 2,376 — an eleventh of the load, for nothing but a different pattern on the palletiser.
The calculator above tries the split patterns as well as the straight ones and reports the best it finds. It assumes no overhang — units stay within the 1200 × 800 mm footprint. Overhang is common in domestic distribution and a liability in export: an overhanging unit is the first thing damaged in a container and the first thing a forwarder points at when a claim is refused.
Footprint utilisation
The percentage the calculator reports is how much of the pallet deck your units actually cover. Below about 85% you are paying to ship air.
The fix is almost never a different pallet. It is a unit dimension changed by ten or twenty millimetres so that a whole extra row fits — the sort of change that costs nothing on the next production run and pays for itself within one order. It is worth taking to whoever makes your packaging before you accept the freight bill as fixed.
If the load is sacks, film or pallets, send us the dimensions and we will tell you what we can do on our side: a different roll length, a different pack quantity, a pallet built to a stated height.
Floor or weight — which fills first
A 13.6 m trailer has 33 pallet positions and about 24 tonnes of payload. That works out at 727 kg per pallet before weight becomes the binding constraint.
- Bin liners, stretch film, empty packaging never get near it. These loads fill on floor space and volume, which is why they are quoted by the pallet and why double stacking matters so much.
- Filled units, anything wet, anything with glass or metal in it hit the payload first. A load that fills 24 tonnes across 26 pallets leaves seven positions empty, and nothing about the packaging will change that.
The calculator flags which one you have hit. If it is weight, adding layers makes the pallet illegal rather than the load cheaper — see the safe working load note below.
Safe working load
An EPAL pallet carries 1500 kg as a safe working load in transit. Static load on a flat floor is much higher, around 3,000–4,000 kg, and racked load is much lower, around 1,000 kg, because the pallet is then supported only at its ends.
Those three numbers get confused constantly, usually in the direction that sounds convenient. If your pallets go into racking at the far end, 1,000 kg is the figure that matters, and it is often the one that decides how many layers you can build — not the trailer height.
Double stacking
Two pallets on top of each other halve the freight per pallet, and the arithmetic is worth checking rather than assuming.
A standard curtainsider has about 2,700 mm of internal height. Two pallets at 1,200 mm loaded height fit comfortably; two at 1,400 mm do not. The load below also has to carry the one above, which for a pallet of empty packaging is fine and for a pallet of filled units usually is not.
Set the maximum loaded height in the calculator to what your goods will actually stand at, and it will tell you the layers. If the answer is close, tell us — we build to a stated height on request, and losing one layer to gain a second tier is normally the cheaper trade.
What we do with this
Every quotation we send states the pallet configuration: items per unit, units per pallet, pallets per trailer, gross weight and loaded height. It is on the quotation because those figures decide the delivered price, and because a delivered price you cannot check is a price you have to take on trust.
If the calculator disagrees with a quotation you are holding — ours or anyone else’s — send it to us. Either the quotation is using a pattern we have not allowed for, or somebody is shipping air at your expense.