Guides

Longer pieces on the rules behind the calculators: where the numbers come from, and the situations where they break.

RegulationsYour truck is under 40 tonnes and still illegalThe total tells you nothing about the split. Spanish limits are not the European ones, and the driving axle has a minimum as well as a maximum.Read the guide →DocumentsYou signed “received in good order” and just lost €19,000In Europe a carrier's liability is worked out per kilo, not on what the goods are worth. In the United States it is the actual loss. And the signature decides who wins the argument.Read the guide →LoadingIt fits inside the container. It will not go through the door.Container tables give internal height. Cargo goes in through the door, which is around 100 mm lower. The gap has stranded a lot of machinery on a lot of quays.Read the guide →DocumentsIf you run cabotage in Spain, your paper control document expires on 5 OctoberSpain's administrative control document goes digital on 5 October 2026. It applies to cabotage, so it catches foreign hauliers who never see the Spanish trade press.Read the guide →LoadingThe strap over your load is not holding itA strap thrown over the load holds nothing by itself. It presses down; friction does the work. Once you see that, the number on the label stops meaning what you thought.Read the guide →CostsThe NMFC changed in July 2025. Here is what actually movedOnly freight over 35 lb/ft³ changed class on the density scale. The expensive part of the reform is somewhere else entirely.Read the guide →CostsThe day your pallet stops paying for volume and starts paying for floorA non-stackable pallet blocks the floor and the air above it, and is billed for both. The same item goes from 360 to 700 kg without gaining a gram.Read the guide →CostsThey hand back all 33 pallets and six are no longer currencyThey give back the same number of pallets, not the same pallets. Four defects take one out of the pool, and the person counting on the dock is you.Read the guide →

Why these guides and not others

The most-searched topics in this trade — "volumetric weight", "how to calculate CBM" — have been written a thousand times, mostly copied from one another. Adding the thousand-and-first copy helps nobody.

The filter here is different: a mistake that costs money and that almost nobody explains. That a container's door is lower than its interior, so the piece stays on the dock. That a 2,500 daN strap contributes 315, so anyone counting straps off the label is short by a factor of eight. That a lorry legal on gross weight can be illegal on an axle. These are things you find out after they have happened.

Where the numbers come from

Every guide cites its source and prefers the original document to a summary: the text of the directive, the official order, the carrier's own data sheet, the standard itself. Where a figure is trade practice rather than a rule, it says so. And where a formula has been checked against a published worked example, it says that too — because a formula copied off a blog can be wrong for years.

The standards and documents that come up most: Directive 96/53/EC and Spain's Order PJC/780/2025 for weights and dimensions; EN 12195-1:2010 and EN 12195-2 for cargo securing; the NMFTA's Docket 2025-1 for US classification; Hapag-Lloyd and OOCL data sheets for container dimensions; and the integrators' published tariffs for volumetric divisors.

If you find something wrong

Every page carries the date it was last reviewed. If a figure has gone out of date or there is an error, telling us is a favour: it gets corrected and the change gets stated, rather than rewritten in silence.