The freight class chart: eighteen classes, and what the chart leaves out

A freight class chart is a list of the eighteen classes used in less than truckload shipping, usually printed alongside example commodities or density bands. It is the most shared document in the trade and one of the most misread, because it shows the ladder without saying how a given shipment is placed on it.

The eighteen classes

From lowest to highest: 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 77.5, 85, 92.5, 100, 110, 125, 150, 175, 200, 250, 300, 400 and 500. Lower classes are for freight that is dense, compact and hard to damage. Higher classes are for freight that is light for its size, fragile or awkward. The same weight costs more to move the higher it sits.

What the example columns mean

Charts often show sample commodities next to each class: bricks near the bottom, furniture or light goods near the top. These are illustrations of where such goods tend to fall, not assignments. The class of your product comes from its item in the classification tariff, and two products that look alike can sit in different items.

Density columns, and why they are a check rather than the tariff

Many charts print a density band for each class. Those bands come from the density scale in the tariff, and the tariff is revised. A chart copied from another site, or saved years ago, can carry thresholds that no longer apply to your commodity, and quoting from a stale chart is how a class ends up wrong on a bill of lading. The one density table on this site sits in the freight class calculator, labelled as the NMFTA’s published density guidelines with their own caveat, and it is there as a check on your measurement, never as the class your item carries.

This is not a technicality. The density approach has been extended to more commodities over time, and a product that once had a fixed class can now be classed by its density, or the reverse. A chart that was correct when it was printed tells you how the tariff looked then. It cannot tell you how the carrier will read your shipment today, and the carrier will use today’s tariff.

What the chart leaves out

Stowability, handling and liability, the three characteristics other than density that the classification weighs. Commodities with a fixed class regardless of density. Items classed by a scale specific to that item. And the effect of packing: a chart cannot know that your pallet is built tall with void space on top. The fuller picture is in the article on what a freight class is.

Reading your own shipment against it

Start from the commodity, not the chart. Find its item in the classification, which tells you whether the class is fixed or density based. If it is density based, measure the shipment as it will be tendered, including the pallet, and weigh it. Only then does the chart become useful, as a check on where the result lands.

The class 50 to 70 end, and the 300 to 500 end

Mistakes cluster at both ends. At the bottom, shippers of dense goods underestimate how much a badly built pallet costs them in density. At the top, light bulky goods are declared lower than they are, and the re-class arrives with the invoice. The middle of the ladder is where most freight sits, and where small packing changes move it one rung up or down.

One rung sounds small. On a regular lane, repeated every week, it is not, and it is the kind of difference that only shows up when someone compares invoices over a quarter rather than one at a time. Keeping the measured dimensions and billed class of each shipment on file is what makes that comparison possible.

Where to go next

The measurements that matter are explained on the class and dimensions page, and what a calculator can and cannot tell you is in the calculator article.