Put the same two pallets in front of three national LTL carriers and three different numbers come back, along with three different day counts. They are not quoting different trucks. They are quoting different networks: how near their terminals sit to each end of your lane, how many nights the freight spends in between, and which of the things you will ask for at the dock has a charge attached to it. Those three differences are most of the spread.
Terminal reach, night count and the extras menu decide which name ends up on the bill of lading.
Scope before anything else. Parcel labels are sold straight from this site with no account; a pallet, a crate or a partial trailer goes through a freight review where a person prices it and replies with options. No trucks, terminals or docks belong to us. Every carrier statement quoted below was read on that carrier's own site on 2026-07-28, and nothing on this page reproduces anybody's rate sheet.
An LTL price begins with the pickup terminal and ends with the delivery terminal, and the miles at either end are the expensive ones. A carrier with a service center forty minutes from your dock puts a city driver on your pallet and has it on a dock the same afternoon. A carrier whose nearest facility is four hours away either sends a truck that far, or hands the pickup to a partner and charges for it.
Carriers separate the points they serve with their own equipment from the points they reach through another company. Freight in the second group crosses an extra dock, and the day count and the damage exposure both rise with the number of times a forklift picks it up.
Old Dominion's locator takes a Zip/Postal Code, a Complete Address or a 3-letter Code and returns the service center behind it, per odfl.com, read 2026-07-28. Run your shipper ZIP and your consignee ZIP through it separately before you assume a carrier is strong on the lane.
Estes writes that its "expanding network of 300+ service centers can reliably handle heavy volume" on estes-express.com, read 2026-07-28. Counts like that are the cheapest signal available for how likely a carrier is to be direct on a route nobody talks about.
| Carrier | Published network claim | Where it was read |
|---|---|---|
| Estes | 300+ service centersPublishes a transit time calculator for shippers | estes-express.com 2026-07-28 |
| Old Dominion | Service center locator by ZIP, address or 3-letter codeNotes that the U.S. Virgin Islands ships out of Puerto Rico | odfl.com 2026-07-28 |
| AAA Cooper | Service map showing direct service from 1 to 7+ days in transitReaches Canada and Mexico through an affiliate carrier program | aaacooper.com 2026-07-28 |
Three carriers, three ways of describing the same thing. None of them publish a lane-by-lane price, which is the point: the network claim tells you who is likely to be competitive, and only a quote settles it.
LTL transit is counted in business days from the day after pickup, and the count comes from routing rather than distance. AAA Cooper publishes a service advisory map showing direct service availability from 1 to 7+ days in transit, read on aaacooper.com on 2026-07-28. Estes gives shippers a transit time calculator on estes-express.com, read the same day. Between two carriers on one lane, a two-day gap is ordinary and it is usually one extra breakbulk.
A Thursday pickup on a three-day lane arrives Tuesday. If the receiving dock only takes freight before noon, that is a Wednesday, and the pallet has spent five nights somewhere for a three-day quote.
Standard LTL transit is what the network normally does, not a commitment about your pallet. Carriers sell separate timed products when a date has to hold, and those are priced and booked differently from the standard tariff.
When two quotes differ by a day and a small amount of money, the cheaper one often parks the freight at an intermediate terminal. That is fine for building materials and poor for anything with a promised install date.
Accessorials are the second half of an LTL bill and the half people meet late. Estes defines them plainly: it "can provide a number of services beyond standard LTL freight shipping at the request of the shipper, consignee, or third party", and the charges for those services are the accessorials, per estes-express.com, read 2026-07-28. Its published list names white glove delivery, hazmat transport, protection from freezing, storage and liftgate, with the detail held in a rules tariff document rather than on the page. Amounts are not printed here because no amount on this page comes from a quote we ran.
A residential or non-commercial delivery, a location with no dock and therefore a liftgate, an appointment call before arrival, and limited access at a site like a school or a construction lot. Each is a separate line, and each is priced differently from one carrier to the next.
A liftgate arranged when the driver is already at the curb costs more than a liftgate booked with the pickup, and sometimes it costs a redelivery on top. The cheapest correction is the one made before the bill of lading prints.
Frozen protection, storage after a failed delivery, hazardous materials handling and reconsignment all live in the tariff document, not in the sales page. If your shipment needs one of them, the tariff is where the carrier's actual wording sits.
A comparison is only worth something when both quotes describe the same shipment. Five checks catch nearly everything that turns a good number into a bad invoice.
Pallet footprint, stacked height and total weight have to match on both quotes, and so does the class. A carrier that inspects and reclasses will bill the class it finds, not the class you typed.
Ask which service center handles pickup and which handles delivery. A four-hour drive on either end is a schedule risk before it is a price risk.
Every condition at both ends belongs on the quote in writing: dock or no dock, business or residence, appointment or open receiving, forklift on site or nothing at all.
Transit days mean nothing without the day the truck actually comes. A quote taken Friday afternoon for a Monday pickup is three days older than it looks.
If either ZIP falls outside the carrier's own footprint, ask who covers it and what that adds. The answer is usually a partner carrier and a day.
Get an LTL shipment priced by a person How LTL pricing works
A trucking company that moves shipments too large for a parcel network and too small to need a whole trailer, by combining freight from several shippers in one trailer and running it through its own terminals.
Because the freight sleeps in different places. One carrier may run your origin and destination as a single line-haul, while the other routes through two breakbulk terminals or hands the last leg to a partner, and every stop adds a night.
Only if the shipment matches what was quoted. A reweigh, a class correction after inspection, or a liftgate nobody mentioned at booking are all added after the fact, and they land on the carrier whose menu prices them highest.
Each carrier publishes a locator. Old Dominion, for instance, lets you search its service centers by Zip/Postal Code, Complete Address or 3-letter Code, per odfl.com, read 2026-07-28. Check both ends of the lane, not just yours.
You can ask for it. Parcel labels are sold on the site directly; anything on a pallet goes to our freight review, where a person prices the shipment and writes back with the carrier options for your lane.