What a shipping container costs in Australia — and what moves the number

Five inputs, in the order they matter

Every container quote in this country is built from the same short list. Learn the list and you can work out roughly where a price should land before anyone rings you back.

1. Condition. Whether the unit is new, a sound used unit, or one being sold on its faults.
2. Size and configuration. Length, height, and whether it has anything other than a plain pair of doors on one end.
3. Where the unit already is. Which depot it is standing in relative to you.
4. Cartage. How it gets from that depot onto your ground, and what the site demands of the truck.
5. The market that week. Box availability moves, and it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

The first two you control. The third we can often work around, because stock sits at Cornubia and at depots through Gympie, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville, Cairns, Grafton, Darwin and Fremantle. The fifth is weather, and you ride it.

Condition is the biggest single lever

People assume length sets the price. It contributes, but condition swings the number harder. A one-trip unit that has made a single loaded voyage, still wearing factory paint, sits at the top. A sound used unit certified fit to carry freight sits in the middle and is what most buyers should be looking at. A retired unit sold on its faults sits well below both.

What separates them is remaining life, not steel. The cheapest grade is cheap precisely because somebody has decided it has finished the job it was built for. That is fine for a scrap store, a bund, a shell you intend to cut up, or gear that already lives out in the weather. It is not fine for anything that has to stay dry — units sold as-is are not sold watertight, and a pinhole in a roof will drip onto the same square metre of floor for years before anyone notices. Anything sold as cargo-worthy or new leaves the yard having been checked wind and watertight. The grades page sets out where each condition sits and what it is safe for.

If money is tight, the better trade is almost always to drop a size rather than drop a grade. A smaller unit that stays dry is worth more to you than a bigger one that does not.

Size, and the price per cubic metre trap

Bigger boxes cost more in absolute terms and less per cubic metre. That is because the expensive components — doors, castings, handling, yard space, paperwork — do not scale with length. So on paper the biggest unit always looks like the smartest buy.

Two things spoil that logic. The first is that volume you cannot use is not worth paying for; with a single door end on a long unit, whatever sits at the far end can only be reached by clearing the front. The second is that the bigger the unit, the fewer sites take it and the fewer trucks can place it, which shows up in cartage and again on the day you want to sell it. Current pricing size by size sits on the 10ft, 20ft and 40ft pages.

Height is the cheap upgrade people miss. A high cube buys you another 300 mm inside, for a small premium and no change to the ground footprint. If you are ever going to line, rack or fit out the unit, that 300 mm is the difference between a workable ceiling and a low one.

Configuration costs more than most people expect. A side opening unit carries a great deal more door hardware, more framing and far more manufacturing complexity than a plain box, and the price reflects it. Same for double-door units and for dangerous goods containers, which are built to a different standard entirely.

Where the unit is standing

A container is a large object and moving it is a real exercise, so the depot it happens to be sitting in when you order matters to the total. Two identical units, same grade, same size, can land at different totals purely because one was three hundred kilometres closer to your gate.

This is the whole reason we hold stock in more than one place. If you are in Far North Queensland, a unit already sitting at Cairns beats an identical one at Cornubia every time. If you are in the Northern Territory, Darwin is the sensible source. In the west it is Fremantle. When you ring, say where the container is going before you say what you want, because that decides which yard we are pricing from.

It is also why the answer is sometimes "we can do better next week". Stock rotates, and a unit already heading to a depot near you changes the maths.

Cartage — what drives it, without a number attached

We do not publish cartage figures, and any supplier who does is quoting an average that will not be your job. Cartage is quoted with the container once we know the address and the site. What is worth understanding is what pushes it up and down, because several of those things are within your control.

• Distance from the sourcing depot. The largest factor, and the reason the depot network exists.
• Which truck the site demands. A tilt-tray is the cheapest way to put a container on the ground. A side loader or a crane truck costs more to run and is sometimes the only option. Access decides this, not preference.
• Whether it can ride on a shared run. A unit that fits alongside other work heading the same direction is a different proposition to a truck sent out for you alone.
• Time on site. A placement that takes fifteen minutes and one that takes ninety are not the same job. Clear the route and mark the spot.
• Return trips. The genuinely expensive outcome is a truck that arrives, cannot place, and leaves loaded. That is avoidable with three photographs and a phone call.
• Road conditions. Unsealed access, wet-season closures, one-lane causeways and low bridges all change the plan.

The delivery page covers what each truck needs. Give us the address, the access and what the ground is like, and the cartage comes back as a firm figure alongside the container price rather than as a surprise later.

What the market does to the price

Container prices in Australia move, sometimes noticeably, and the drivers sit well offshore.

New box prices track steel and the cost of building them, then ride here on ships whose rates rise and fall with demand. Used box availability depends on trade imbalance: this country imports far more in containers than it exports in them, so boxes accumulate here and shipping lines eventually sell them off rather than repositioning them empty. When sea freight rates spike, lines would rather ship those empties back to fill them, and local supply tightens. The exchange rate sits underneath the lot.

Practically, quotes have a shelf life, and the unit you were shown last month may not be there this month. If the price suits and the unit suits, that is the moment.

What should be in the quote

A quote you can actually compare has all of these in it. If one is missing, ask.

• The grade, stated plainly, not a marketing word invented to sit between two grades.
• The size, height and door configuration.
• Whether the figure is ex GST or including it.
• Cartage to your actual address, and which truck is coming.
• What happens if the truck cannot place on the day.
• Whether photographs of the specific unit are available — ours are, on request and before delivery.

Where quotes differ wildly, grade is nearly always the reason. The next most common is that one has cartage in it and the other has not.

The false economies

Three ways people spend more by trying to spend less.

Buying below the grade the job needs. Replacing damp-ruined stock, tools or documents costs more than the gap between two grades ever did.

Skipping the ground preparation. Four pads under the corner castings is an afternoon's work. A container that settles out of square stops closing properly, and re-levelling a loaded unit is not a job you do with a shovel.

Buying long when the site is short. If the unit has to be craned in because a shorter one would have driven in, the saving on the box goes on the lift.

Buying, or hiring, or neither yet

If the need finishes on a known date — a build, a season, a relocation, a renovation — hire keeps the money out of the asset and hands the disposal problem back to us. If the need has no end date, buying wins on any timeline long enough to matter.

Either way the fastest route to a real number is a phone call with three facts ready: what is going in it, where it is going, and what the access looks like. Ring 1300 467 776, or send the details through the contact page and you will hear back from a person within one business day.