Freight Forwarder Cost Calculator

For a full container load (FCL), the calculator looks up a flat rate keyed to container size — roughly $1,500 for a 20-foot container, $2,500 for a 40-foot, and $2,800 for a 40-foot high-cube — because you're paying for the whole container regardless of how full it is. For less-than-container-load (LCL) shipments, there's no dedicated container to price, so the calculator instead multiplies your cargo volume in cubic meters by a flat $80-per-CBM rate, since LCL cost scales with the space your cargo actually occupies.

The forwarder fees are a fixed bundle of five line items: $75 documentation, $50 bill of lading, $150 customs brokerage, $50 delivery order, and $35 for the ISF "10+2" import security filing, summing to $360. These are modeled as flat administrative charges that don't scale with container size or cargo volume in this calculator, though real forwarder fee schedules do vary by provider and trade lane.

A chassis is the wheeled frame a shipping container sits on for over-the-road transport, and it's only relevant when you have a dedicated container to move — which is the FCL case, where the calculator adds a flat $75 chassis fee. LCL cargo is deconsolidated at a warehouse and delivered by regular trucking rather than moving as a full container on a chassis, so that line item is zero for LCL and destination terminal handling instead scales with volume at $15 per CBM.

Cost per CBM divides your total estimated cost by cargo volume in cubic meters, giving a common unit to compare shipments that would otherwise look very different — a full 40-foot container costs far more in absolute dollars than a small LCL shipment, but cost per CBM normalizes for the amount of cargo actually being moved. It's most useful for deciding whether your cargo volume has grown large enough that booking a full container would actually be cheaper per unit than paying LCL rates.