What is chargeable weight in road freight?

Chargeable weight is the weight a carrier bills: the higher of the shipment’s real weight and a weight worked out from the space it takes. Light, bulky freight pays for its space; dense freight pays for its weight. In European road groupage the space weight is found one of two ways:

• By volume, for goods that can be stacked: m³ × a factor, usually 333 kg per m³ (a 1:3000 ratio). The 7 published carrier rules in Trailer fit use 250 to 333 kg per m³.
• By floor, for pallets that cannot be stacked: loading meters × a factor, 1,650 to 2,000 kg per loading meter in the same rules.

Ten Euro pallets of 300 kg weigh 3,000 kg. Stackable and 1 m tall, the generic convention bills 3,197 kg. Not stackable and 1.2 m tall, they take the floor of 4.0 loading meters and the bill is 7,000 kg, more than twice the real weight. Whether a pallet counts as stackable is itself a carrier rule, often a height limit, and one reason two quotes for the same pallets differ. Whether it physically stacks in the trailer is another: two high only up to about 135 cm.

Air freight uses the same idea with a lighter factor, commonly 1:6000 (about 167 kg per m³), so air and road chargeable weights for one shipment are not comparable.

Trailer fit gives the chargeable weight under each published rule side by side. The full story, with seven carriers: Loading meters, and why your invoice says a different number.

Sources

• Road factors: the published carrier rules in Trailer fit, each linked on the tool page.
• Air ratio: DHL Global Forwarding, Calculating chargeable weights. Read 2026-11-06.
• Worked example: the Trailer fit engine, generic 2.4 m convention.