What liquidation freight really costs in 2026

• 16,107 LTL (less-than-truckload) quotes, generated between 29 April and 25 August 2026, from 201 origin ZIPs. Median $1,047, average $1,316.
• 6,998 full-truckload quotes over the same window, from 364 origins. Median $5,751, average $5,271; 6,986 of the 6,998 are single-truck quotes.
• 355 parcel quotes, all from a single day (29 April), median $15. Too thin to conclude anything from, included only so the counts add up.
• Every quote runs to one saved delivery address: a residential, liftgate delivery in the Boise, Idaho metro. Quotes are computed per buyer account and per destination, so these figures describe one buyer’s lanes, and this archive cannot show destination variation at all. That is the study’s one big gap, stated up front.

One window note: the archive’s newest quote is dated 25 August 2026. Nothing here reflects September or October fuel prices or carrier capacity, and the figures below are a snapshot of that April-to-August window, re-verified row by row on 14 October 2026.

LTL quotes banded by great-circle lane miles, origin ZIP centroid to destination, measured 14 October 2026 over all 16,107 LTL quotes. The middle half runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile:

Measured 14 October 2026. Distance is great-circle origin-to-destination between ZIP centroids, so true routed miles run longer. Destination liftgate and residential adders are inside every figure.

Distance moves the price, but less than buyers expect: the over-2,000-miles median sits slightly below the 1,500-to-2,000 band, and the widest middle half spans $956 to $2,074 inside one band. The reason is the missing input: shipment weight and pallet count are never exposed before the quote, and they move the price as much as distance does. Read the bands as the shape of freight pricing, not a rate for your lane.

Every LTL quote carries the freight class the engine priced it at. Measured 14 October 2026, classes with 30 or more quotes:

Measured 14 October 2026 over 16,107 LTL quotes. Classes 50 and 60 exist in the archive (12 and 8 quotes) and are excluded under the 30-quote floor. Class runs 50 (densest) to 400 (bulkiest); liquidation pallets price mostly at 92.5 to 300.

The medians do not climb cleanly with class, class 250 prices below class 300 at the median, and class 70’s $386 reflects the seller-negotiated flat lanes that dominate it, because class, weight and lane arrive together. What the table does show is where liquidation pallets live: 15,435 of the 16,107 LTL quotes (95.8%) price at classes 85 through 300.

The quote decomposes exactly, re-verified on 100% of the 23,105 LTL and truckload rows on 14 October 2026. The buyer-facing total is the carrier cost plus the platform markup; the carrier cost is the base price plus fixed destination accessorials; the base is the carrier’s line haul plus the fuel surcharge plus miscellaneous fixed charges; and the markup is a percentage of the base, not of the carrier cost. Knowing the stack matters more than knowing the average:

• The carrier’s line haul: the base transportation charge for the lane.
• The fuel surcharge, a percentage of line haul. It was nonzero on 13,821 of the 16,107 LTL quotes, and its median share of line haul moved by month: 36.6% in April, 33.6% in July, 37.6% in August 2026, a tier table drifting with diesel prices.
• Fixed destination accessorials where they apply: liftgate service on 15,623 of the 16,107 LTL quotes, most often $50 (13,519 quotes, $30 on another 1,439), and residential delivery on 15,150, most often $50 (13,533 quotes, $30 on 1,414).
• The platform markup, a percentage of the base. The most common rate is 7.0%, covering 14,378 of the 23,105 quotes (62.2%), but observed rates run 0% to 13% and follow the lane, the seller’s contract and the account: 13.0% on 3,120 quotes, 6.0% on 1,442, 5.0% on 1,298, 11.5% on 1,240, and 0% on 367.

A separate regime sits beside this one: 2,286 of the LTL quotes carry no fuel surcharge at all, concentrated on five dedicated carrier accounts (QVC 1,439 quotes, Yusen 363, WRP 251, AMZUS 201, HUB 32). These are seller-negotiated flat lanes, the same regime a listing signals when it advertises fixed-price shipping: when a listing says fixed price, the number on the listing is the number, and none of the stack above applies.

• Every quote delivers to one address in the Boise, Idaho metro, so destination variation cannot be shown. A delivery to a dense urban terminal or a rural limited-access site prices differently, and this archive holds neither.
• Weight and pallet count are never exposed before the quote, so no formula here prices your exact shipment. Fitting line haul against distance per freight class explains at most about 28% of the variance; the same origin and class still vary by plus or minus 32%.
• The window closed on 25 August 2026. Fuel tiers drift with diesel prices and seasonal capacity, and September and October 2026 are simply not in this data.
• These are checkout quotes, not paid invoices. A quote is what the engine would have charged that buyer on that day; accessorials beyond liftgate and residential, appointment fees, limited-access charges, inside delivery, are not in these figures.
• The quotes come from one marketplace’s shipping engine. Buyer-arranged freight and other platforms’ programs price on their own terms.
• These figures are a snapshot re-measured on 14 October 2026. If the quote archive grows, the medians move.

The free freight estimator turns this same archive into a class-and-distance lookup, the median and middle half for the cell your lot falls in, with the dated denominator shown, and never a point quote. The pallet shipping costs guide walks the four-step method for getting a real quote before you bid, the free pallet calculator folds freight into your landed cost per unit, and the sample feed shows live lots to run the math on. The original 23,105-quote study remains as the September snapshot of the same archive.