Pallet or cartons: which
ships cheaper interstate?

Here's a conversation we have weekly: a client asks to send 40 cartons to Melbourne, we ask if they can palletise them, and the answer changes their freight bill by about a third.

Loose cartons on interstate linehaul get charged by kilo — from A$0.92/kg on our rate card. It's a fair rate, but cartons stack badly, get handled individually at every depot, and each handling is a chance for damage. A wrapped pallet is one unit: forklift in, forklift out, scanned twice.

Where the line is

A standard pallet rate Sydney–Melbourne starts around A$85 and covers up to 1,200kg on a 1.2×1.2m footprint. Say your 40 cartons weigh 15kg each — that's 600kg loose, at best-case carton rates around A$550. Palletised, it's one pallet: A$85 plus the pallet itself and half an hour of wrapping.

The break-even is roughly eight to ten cartons on most lanes. Below that, loose wins because palletising is overhead. Above it, the pallet wins on price alone — before you count the lower damage rate.

When loose cartons still make sense

Small runs under ten cartons. Stock that can't stack — odd shapes, crushable goods. And pickups from places with no forklift, where a pallet becomes an obstacle instead of a saving. Tell us the situation at both ends and we'll quote it the way it actually makes sense, not the way the rate card prefers.

If you're sending volume regularly, the bigger play is holding stock in our warehouse and calling it out pallet by pallet — but that's a different article.