How Much Does LTL Freight Cost? (2026 Real-Quote Data)

If you search for what LTL freight costs, most answers are rate cards or calculators built on assumptions. This one is built on 1,486 real quotes. We collected live carrier quotes for 298 different lanes touching all 50 states and Washington, DC, from a 2 lb shipment to a 8,800 lb load, and recorded the five cheapest offers on each. Below is what that data shows about how much LTL freight costs, and what actually moves the price. Want your own number? Get an LTL freight quote for your shipment.

The short answer

A typical lane in our data is a shipment of about 350 lb moving about 1,119 miles, and the median cheapest quote across all lanes was $466. But the typical number hides the real story. Price per mile falls steeply as distance grows, light shipments cost far more per pound than heavy ones, and the carrier you pick can change the price of the same load by 28% at the median lane and by more than 100% at the extreme. To estimate your own lane, try the freight cost calculator.

LTL cost by distance

Distance is the first thing most shippers ask about, and the data confirms the basic shape: the longer the haul, the less you pay per mile. Pickup, terminal handling and delivery are largely fixed costs on every LTL shipment, so a long haul spreads them across more miles.

* Only 9 lanes in our data were shorter than 100 miles, too few to generalize from. One of them shows why the per-mile number breaks down on short hauls: a 2 lb shipment across 2.2 miles (North Little Rock, AR to Little Rock, AR) was quoted between $414 and $606. That is almost certainly a minimum charge rather than a per-mile price, which we come back to below.

Beyond about 1,000 miles the pattern is consistent: 81% of the 1,000+ mile lanes had a cheapest quote at or under $0.50 per mile. The cheapest in our data was Woonsocket, RI to San Diego, CA (2,981 miles, 140 lb), where the five cheapest quotes ran $415 to $486, or about $0.14 to $0.16 per mile.

Distance is not destiny: two long hauls, a 4.4x price gap

Distance alone does not set the price. Bennington, VT to Eureka, CA is almost the same length as Woonsocket, RI to San Diego, CA (3,086 vs 2,981 miles) and a similar weight (175 lb vs 140 lb). Its cheapest quote was $1,843, against $415 for the other lane, about 4.4 times as much. Our data cannot separate which factors drive the gap, such as how remote the pickup or delivery point is or how much freight moves along that corridor, only that where a shipment starts and ends can matter as much as how far it goes.

LTL cost by weight

Weight works almost in the opposite direction. The total price rises with weight, but much more slowly than the weight itself, so heavier shipments cost far less per pound. The median cheapest quote for a load up to 100 lb worked out to about $9.47 per pound. For loads over 1,000 lb it was about $0.34 per pound.

Price per 100 lb (a hundredweight, or cwt) is how LTL carriers commonly express rates, which is why we show it here. The table mixes distances, so read it as a pattern, not a rate card. The next table holds distance roughly constant.

A typical cheapest quote by weight and distance

Look at the middle column, the 500 to 1,499 mile hauls, where we have the most data. A shipment of 150 lb or less had a median cheapest quote of $435, which is more than a 151–500 lb shipment at $350. That is the price floor at work: very light loads are not cheaper than somewhat heavier ones. You do not start paying noticeably more until you pass about 500 lb ($454) and then 1,000 lb ($673). Cells with few lanes (marked with n) are indicative only.

Why small shipments cost more than you expect

The weight table points to something shippers run into constantly: a price floor. Across all 298 lanes, the single lowest cheapest quote was $235, for a 512 lb shipment from Hull, GA to Yazoo City, MS (512 miles). For shipments of 100 lb or less, the lowest cheapest quote was $248 and the median was $448.

In other words, a very light shipment is not priced like a small version of a heavy one. Carriers charge a minimum per shipment to cover pickup, handling at the terminal and delivery, so below a certain weight the quote stops falling. We cannot see any single carrier’s minimum charge in this data, but the pattern is exactly what a minimum charge produces.

What this means in practice: if you ship light items often, combining them into fewer, heavier shipments will usually cost less than shipping each one separately. If you are unsure whether freight or a parcel service fits a small load, our guide to what LTL freight is explains where the line sits.

How much carrier choice matters

For each lane we recorded the five cheapest quotes. On the median lane, the fifth-cheapest was 28% more expensive than the cheapest for the exact same freight. On 70% of lanes the gap was 20% or more, and on 15% it was 50% or more. Each search returned dozens of carrier options, so these gaps only cover the cheap end of the list.

Heavier loads show the biggest dollar gaps, which makes sense: a percentage difference on a 5,000 lb shipment is a lot of money. The lesson is simple. A single quote tells you very little about what a shipment should cost, and the only reliable way to find the low end is to compare carriers on your exact lane.

Which carrier is cheapest? It depends on the lane

No carrier won everywhere. 26 different carriers were the cheapest on at least one lane, and even the two most frequent winners, AAA Cooper Transportation and Central Transport, were cheapest on only 16% and 15% of lanes. Some carriers show up often without winning: TForce Freight appeared in the cheapest five on 165 lanes but was cheapest on 20.

That does not make a frequent runner-up a worse carrier. We are comparing price only, and price is one of several things that matter, including transit time, claims handling and pickup reliability. The point is that the cheapest carrier changes from lane to lane, so a favorite carrier is rarely the cheapest choice every time. (FedEx Freight is shown as one carrier here; its Economy and Priority services are grouped.)

Cheapest vs. fastest

Speed and price are not strictly linked. The cheapest quote was also the fastest (or tied for fastest) among the five on 125 of 296 lanes (42%). On the other 171, the fastest option cost a median of 14% more than the cheapest. On 91 lanes (31%), the cheapest option was also the slowest of the five.

So paying more does not always buy a faster delivery, and the cheapest quote is not always the slowest. If your delivery date is flexible, look at the whole list rather than just the top or bottom of it.

Quotes by state

Every lane in this study comes from one of our state rate pages, where you can see the individual quotes, carriers and transit times. The table below links to each one.

See all of them on our LTL rates by state page. A few of the newest state pages (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire) did not record shipment weight, so they count toward the carrier and speed comparisons but not the weight analysis, and the six Hawaii lanes are left out of the per-mile figures because they include an ocean leg.

How to get a lower LTL rate

• Compare several carriers on every shipment. The median gap between the cheapest and fifth-cheapest quote was 28%, and 26 different carriers won at least one lane.
• Do not assume last time’s winner wins again. The cheapest carrier changes by lane, weight and date.
• Consolidate light shipments. Loads up to 100 lb cost about $9.47 per pound at the median, against about $0.34 per pound over 1,000 lb.
• Get the weight and freight class right. An incorrect class or weight can trigger a re-class fee after pickup. Use our freight class calculator and density calculator, or read the freight class guide. To see how much class changes the price, read our freight class price study.
• Decide whether speed is worth it. The fastest option cost a median of 14% more when it was not also the cheapest.
• Check for accessorial charges. Liftgate, residential and limited-access services add to the base rate. See our guide to LTL accessorial charges.
• Packing for freight? If your load is on a pallet, our pallet shipping guide covers sizes, weights and packing.

How we gathered this data

The numbers in this article come from our own quote platform. Here is exactly what they are, and what they are not.

• Source. Live LTL quotes pulled from the Transportli platform for the lanes featured on our state rate pages: 298 distinct lanes, 1,486 quotes, 37 carriers, across 51 state pages (all 50 states and Washington, DC). The quotes were collected between September and October 2026 and the data was last refreshed on November 11, 2026.
• The five cheapest quotes per lane. Each search returned dozens of carrier options. We recorded the five cheapest, so the figures describe the low end of the market, not the full range.
• Lanes are illustrative, not random. Our team chose lanes to show a mix of short and long hauls, light and heavy loads, and different regions. This is a sample of real quotes, not a statistical survey of the whole market.
• Quotes were collected on different dates. Fuel surcharges and carrier capacity change over time, so quotes from different lanes are not perfectly comparable with each other. Treat this as a snapshot, not a price index.
• Distance and price per mile. Distances are road distances between the origin and destination ZIP codes, taken from the state pages where shown and otherwise from OpenStreetMap-based routing, and price per mile is the quoted price divided by that distance. 276 lanes have both weight and distance recorded; the others are used only for the comparisons that need one or neither.
• What we did not control. Freight class, dimensions and accessorial services vary by shipment and are not adjusted for. Weights range from 2 lb to 8,800 lb.
• Medians, not averages. We use medians throughout so a handful of extreme lanes do not distort the picture.

Your own quote will differ, because it depends on your freight, your lanes and the day you ship. Use these numbers to understand how pricing behaves, then get a live quote for your exact shipment.

Frequently asked questions

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