What Information Do You Need to Quote a Road Freight Shipment?

A road freight price is not one number pulled from one table. It is a zone lookup, a chargeable-weight calculation, a bracket lookup, an indexed fuel surcharge and a list of options — and each of those steps reads a different field of the request. That is why "two pallets to Lyon, how much?" is not a quotable request: it answers one of five questions.

Here is the complete list, with the pricing mechanism each field feeds. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, uses exactly these inputs in its quote simulator.

Fields 9 and 11 are optional because they can be derived or defaulted: loading meters can be computed from dimensions and stackability, and an undeclared value falls back to the carrier's legal liability. Everything else has to be asked, because nothing in the grid can guess it. More on collecting these without an email thread in our quoting automation resources.

Every weight_zone, pallet and mpl_bracket grid starts with the same operation: turn an address into a zone. Carriers publish that mapping as postcode ranges — often two digits for domestic France or Spain, four digits for the Netherlands and Belgium, five digits for Germany, and full outward codes in the United Kingdom.

Three things break when you quote from a city name:

• Cities straddle zones. A large metropolitan area frequently spans several postcode districts, and carriers routinely put the dense centre and the industrial periphery in different zones.
• Homonyms exist. Dozens of European towns share a name across regions and countries. The postcode is the only unambiguous key.
• Surcharge postcodes are invisible from the city name. Islands, mountain valleys, city-centre low-emission zones and off-network areas are published as postcode lists with a fixed extra charge or a longer transit time.

The country code matters as much as the digits. The same five digits exist in several countries, and a cross-border movement changes the grid entirely — different zone table, sometimes a different currency, sometimes a different carrier. Cargavo, the TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, stores each grid's zone map as postcode ranges per country for that reason, and prices in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN according to the grid.

What to ask beyond the postcode

Two more address facts change the price without changing the zone: the type of site and the vehicle it can take. A dock, a yard with a forklift, a shop on a pedestrian street and a construction site are four different jobs. A site that cannot receive a 13.6 m trailer forces a rigid vehicle or a transhipment, and neither is in the base rate.

When no grid covers the postcode pair at all, the request should not be discarded — it should be captured and priced manually, which is the subject of our guide on quoting a lane with no rate grid.

Gross weight alone is not enough, because road freight is sold by the space a shipment occupies as much as by its mass. The engine computes a chargeable weight as the highest of three candidates: the gross weight, the volumetric weight (volume × the grid's configured ratio, commonly 333 kg per cubic metre for groupage) and the loading-meter floor (LDM × the grid's kilograms per loading meter, commonly 1,850 kg).

Loading meters come from the footprint, not the volume: one loading meter is one metre of truck floor across a standard 2.40 m width. A 1.20 × 0.80 m pallet occupies 0.96 m², therefore 0.96 / 2.40 = 0.40 LDM. If the pallets can be stacked two high, the footprint halves. If they cannot, it does not — and that single yes/no answer is worth more than most brokers expect.

Worked example: one checkbox, €141 of buy price

Take four pallets of 1.20 × 0.80 × 1.20 m at 400 kg each: gross weight 1,600 kg, volume 4.61 m³, volumetric weight 1,534 kg at 333 kg per m³. The carrier grid is a weight_zone grid for zone 2 with an LDM floor of 1,850 kg per loading meter.

Stackable: footprint 2 × 0.96 m² = 1.92 m², so 0.80 LDM, LDM floor 1,480 kg, below the gross weight. Chargeable weight 1,600 kg → 16 × 19.50 = 312.00 EUR.

Non-stackable: footprint 3.84 m², so 1.60 LDM, LDM floor 1.60 × 1,850 = 2,960 kg. Chargeable weight 2,960 kg → 29.6 × 16.80 = 497.28 EUR. The paying-for rule then tests the next bracket: 3,000 kg × 15.10 / 100 = 453.00 EUR, which is cheaper, so the engine bills 453.00 EUR.

At an 18 % margin applied as p/(1−m), the two sell prices are 380.49 EUR and 552.44 EUR. A missing checkbox is a 171.95 EUR gap on a single pallet-sized shipment. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, runs this comparison server-side on every quote; the mechanics of LDM brackets are detailed in our linear-meter pricing guide, and you can check a shipment quickly with the loading meter calculator.

"General cargo" is an acceptable answer only until it is not. Three attributes of the goods change the price or the feasibility of the movement, and none of them can be inferred from weight and dimensions.

ADR and dangerous goods

If the goods are regulated, the request needs the UN number, the ADR class, the packing group and the net quantity per package — because those decide which of three regimes applies: full ADR (surcharge, trained driver, placarding), limited quantities (LQ, lighter constraints), or excepted quantities. Many groupage networks exclude certain classes outright. Undeclared ADR is the one omission that can end with a refused load, a return leg and a customer who blames you.

Declared value and ad valorem insurance

Without a declared value, the carrier's liability defaults to the CMR Convention limit of 8.33 SDR per kilogram of gross weight (Article 23). On the 1,600 kg shipment above that is 13,328 SDR — a figure that has nothing to do with what the goods are worth. Ad valorem cover replaces it, and it is priced as a rate on the declared value with a minimum premium.

Temperature and handling

A temperature range turns a general grid into a specialist one; there is no surcharge that converts a dry-van tariff into a reefer tariff. The same applies to non-palletised, over-length or unwrapped goods, which change the handling unit count and sometimes the vehicle.

In Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, ADR, insurance and other accessorials are configured as options on the grid, so the customer's declaration produces a priced line rather than a note in a comment box.

The base rate in a carrier grid assumes the easy case: a professional site, a dock or a forklift, standard opening hours, a driver who arrives, drops and leaves. Every departure from that assumption is a chargeable option, and the customer is the only person who knows which ones apply.

• Tail lift, per end. Ask separately for pickup and delivery. A tail lift at both ends is two charges, and the driver needs to know before the vehicle is allocated — not every trailer has one.
• Ground-level delivery without equipment. A pallet truck cannot cross gravel, a kerb or a slope. This is where "we have a tail lift" turns into a failed delivery.
• Vehicle restriction. Narrow access, a height barrier or a city restriction forces a rigid vehicle or a small van, which is a different tariff, not a surcharge.
• Booking-in and timed delivery. Retail distribution centres impose delivery slots; missing one costs a redelivery. A "before 12:00" or "between 08:00 and 10:00" request is an option with a price.
• Opening hours and closures. Sites closing at 16:00, a lunch break, or a Friday-only reception window all constrain the plan.
• Waiting time. Grids include a free allowance — often 30 to 60 minutes — after which waiting is billed by the started period. Two hours of expected loading is quotable in advance.
• Pallet exchange. Whether empty pallets come back is an operational commitment, not a detail.

These fields are also what makes a quote defensible. When a customer challenges a surcharge, pointing at the declaration they made in the request ends the discussion in one message. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, keeps the request, the quote reference Q-YYYY-NNNN and the resulting shipment S-YYYY-NNNN as one record with the messaging thread attached.

Note the scope: Cargavo prices these constraints from the grids you configure. It does not query carrier systems by API or EDI to confirm a delivery slot, and it is not a load board or a tendering marketplace.

Every field in the checklist exists because a carrier has a procedure for what to do when it is wrong. That procedure is applied silently, at the depot, and surfaces four weeks later as a line on a statement. The table below maps the common omissions to the correction they trigger.

Two consequences follow. The first is financial: a re-invoice arrives after the customer has been invoiced, so the correction lands in the broker's margin unless the quote explicitly reserved the right to re-rate on declared data. The second is commercial: re-invoicing a customer for a field you never asked about is a difficult conversation, and repeating it is how accounts are lost.

The structural fix is not more diligence at the desk. It is a request form that will not submit without the fields, so the omission is caught before the price is sent rather than after the freight has moved. Free-text email requests cannot do this, which is the core argument of our comparison of email quote requests versus an online tool.

The reason brokers send clarification emails is not that customers are careless. It is that free text does not enforce anything: an email can say "3 pallets, about a tonne, Barcelona area" and still feel complete to the person who wrote it. A form can refuse to be sent.

A well-built road freight request form does four things:

• Makes the price-critical fields mandatory. Postcodes, gross weight, unit count, dimensions, stackability, ADR yes/no and the two access questions. Seven required answers, not twelve — the rest can default.
• Defaults the rest intelligently. Standard pallet dimensions pre-filled, stackable defaulted to "no" (the conservative assumption), declared value blank with the CMR fallback stated in plain language.
• Validates the impossible. A 12,000 kg shipment on one 1.20 × 0.80 m pallet, a height above the trailer's internal clearance, or a delivery date in the past should be caught at entry.
• Keeps a free-text box for context, not for data. "Ask for Marc at reception" belongs there. "Around a tonne" does not.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, ships this form twice: once inside the broker's own quoting screen, and once in the customer portal branded with the broker's name, where the shipper fills it in and gets a sell price computed from the broker's grids — never seeing the buy rate or the margin. When no grid covers the lane, the same form still submits as a manual quote request rather than a dead end.

Both entry points feed the same record: a quote numbered Q-YYYY-NNNN that becomes a shipment numbered S-YYYY-NNNN on acceptance, in English, French, Spanish or German. Plans start at 49 EUR per month with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required — see the pricing page for what each plan includes, or browse the rest of the quoting automation guides.