The short answer
If your shipment fits on one to six pallets and weighs under roughly 15,000 pounds, it is a less-than-truckload shipment and it will move on a shared trailer. If it fills most of a 53-foot trailer, is fragile, is high value, or has a delivery time you cannot miss, you want full truckload and a dedicated trailer. The number of pallets is the first filter, but it is not the deciding one. What actually decides it is how many times you can afford your freight to be touched, and how much variance you can absorb in the delivery date. This guide walks the real line between the two modes, and what to do when neither one fits.
What LTL actually is
Less-than-truckload means your freight shares a trailer with other shippers’ freight. The carrier runs a hub-and-spoke terminal network: a local truck picks your pallets up, brings them to a terminal, they are unloaded and sorted, they move on a line-haul trailer to another terminal, and they are sorted again before a local truck delivers them.
That structure is why LTL is cheap. You pay for the space you use instead of the whole trailer, and the carrier fills the rest of the trailer with other people’s freight. It is also why LTL behaves the way it does. Every terminal in the chain is a place where your pallets are handled, re-stacked, and occasionally set down next to something heavier than they are.
Pricing is driven by freight class, which is set by the National Motor Freight Traffic Association and is built around density, stowability, handling and liability. The direction of travel at NMFTA has been toward density as the dominant factor, which matters if you ship anything light and bulky. A pallet of foam and a pallet of machine parts occupying the same footprint do not cost the same to move, and the classification system is what encodes that.
What full truckload actually is
Full truckload means one shipper, one trailer, one trip. The trailer is loaded at your dock and opened at the consignee’s dock, and in between nobody touches it. A 53-foot dry van will take up to 26 standard pallets floor-loaded in two rows, and the legal weight ceiling for the cargo on a standard tractor-trailer lands in the mid-40,000-pound range depending on the tractor, the trailer and the axle configuration.
You do not have to fill the trailer to buy it. Plenty of full truckload shipments are half-empty, and the shipper bought the whole trailer anyway, because the value of the load being untouched and the delivery date being firm was worth more than the empty space.
Where the line sits
The common rule is that anything over six pallets or 15,000 pounds should be priced as truckload. That rule is a starting point, not an answer, because LTL and FTL pricing curves cross at different places depending on lane, season and freight class. On a dense lane in a soft market, twelve pallets can still be cheaper as LTL. On a thin lane in a tight market, five pallets of a high class can price out above a truck.
The honest way to run the decision is to price both and then apply three questions the price does not answer:
- How many handlings can this product survive? LTL means at least four touches, often more. If the answer is one, LTL is the wrong mode regardless of the quote.
- What does a two-day slip cost? LTL transit times are estimates, not commitments, unless you have bought a guaranteed service. Truckload arrival is a scheduled event.
- What is the freight worth? LTL carrier liability is limited by freight class and is expressed per pound, not as replacement value. On a light, expensive shipment, the gap between what the carrier owes you and what the product costs can be very large.
What LTL costs you beyond the rate
The line-haul rate is the visible number. The invisible ones are accessorials and variance. Liftgate, residential delivery, inside delivery, limited access, reconsignment and detention are all separately billed, and a quote that did not include them is not the price you will pay. If you regularly ship to sites without a dock, the accessorial stack can move an LTL shipment past a truckload rate without anyone noticing, because the two numbers never appear on the same page.
Variance is the other cost, and it is the one that shows up in your operation rather than on the invoice. A production line that stops because a pallet sat an extra night at a terminal has just spent more than the difference between the two modes. That trade is the whole reason expedited freight exists as a category, and we have written separately about what expedited freight is and when it makes sense.
When neither one is the answer
There is a third case, and it is more common than the two-mode framing suggests. You have a partial load, it has to be there on a specific day, and it cannot be handled four times. LTL gives you the price but not the certainty. Full truckload gives you the certainty but you are paying for a lot of empty deck.
That is the gap expedited and dedicated service fills. A cargo van, Sprinter or straight truck takes the freight direct, one shipment on the vehicle, no terminals in the middle, with a delivery window measured in hours. For time-critical partials it is frequently cheaper than a full truckload and dramatically more reliable than LTL. Where the load is genuinely urgent, team drivers extend the same idea across long distances without a rest break in the middle.
How to decide in ninety seconds
Run it in this order. First, count the pallets and weigh the shipment, because that tells you whether truckload is even on the table. Second, ask whether the delivery date is a target or a commitment. If it is a commitment, LTL only qualifies if you buy a guaranteed service, and that premium needs to be in the comparison. Third, check the freight class and compare carrier liability per pound against the value of what is on the pallet. Fourth, count the handlings the product can take. Fifth, and only fifth, look at the two quotes.
Shippers who run the questions in that order end up switching modes less often, and get surprised by an invoice less often, than shippers who start with price. Price is the easiest input to gather and the least informative one on its own.
FAQ
Is LTL or FTL more expensive? Per shipment, LTL is almost always cheaper, because you are buying part of a trailer instead of all of it. Per pound, full truckload is usually cheaper once you get past roughly six to twelve pallets, and the exact crossover moves with lane, season and freight class. Price both on the actual lane rather than assuming.
How many pallets are considered FTL? A 53-foot dry van holds up to 26 standard 48×40 pallets floor-loaded, or roughly 52 if they are double-stacked and the product allows it. In practice most shippers move to truckload pricing somewhere between six and twelve pallets, well before the trailer is physically full.
What size shipment qualifies as LTL? Generally one to six pallets and under about 15,000 pounds. Below roughly 150 pounds you are usually into parcel territory instead, and the economics change again.
Is FedEx Freight LTL or FTL? FedEx Freight is an LTL carrier. Like the other national LTL networks it also sells priority and guaranteed tiers, which buy you a firmer delivery commitment on the same terminal network, not a dedicated trailer.
Talk to someone who moves both
If you are looking at a partial load with a date attached and neither mode fits cleanly, that is the call worth making before you book. SunTransExpress runs expedited cargo vans, Sprinters and straight trucks across the continental United States, and we will tell you when a standard LTL shipment is the right answer even though it is not the one we are selling.
Call +1 (941) 337-52-33 with the pickup, the destination, the pallet count and the date you actually need it there.