If you're not shipping enough to fill a container, your belongings will travel as part of a consolidated (LCL) shipment. Here's what that actually looks like and what it means for your goods.
A lift van is a wooden crate — typically around 47" × 45" × 84" (approximately 2.8 cubic meters exterior) — used to transport LCL (Less than Container Load) shipments. Your packed boxes and furniture are loaded into one or more lift vans at origin, which are then consolidated with other customers' shipments into a single shipping container for ocean transit. At destination, the container is devanned, your lift vans are separated out, and your goods are delivered.
| Dimension | Inches | Centimeters |
|---|---|---|
| Width | 47" | 119 cm |
| Depth | 45" | 114 cm |
| Height | 84" | 213 cm |
| Volume (exterior) | approx. 103 cu ft / 2.9 m³ — interior usable space varies by manufacturer | |
A typical studio or 1-bedroom apartment fills 2–4 lift vans. A furnished 2-bedroom fills 4–8 lift vans. These are rough guides — irregular or oversized items can force a partly empty extra van, which you still pay for in full.
LCL is more economical for smaller shipments because you pay only for the space your goods occupy, not an entire container. The trade-off: your goods are handled more times (loaded into van, loaded into container, unloaded from container, unloaded from van), which increases the opportunity for handling damage compared to an FCL shipment that's loaded once and unloaded once. As a general rule:
Pallets are flat wooden platforms used to move grouped items by forklift. For international residential moves, goods on pallets are typically stretch-wrapped rather than enclosed in a crate. This is less protective than a lift van for fragile items but can work for sturdy items or for air freight (where lift vans are less common). Most residential international LCL shipments use lift vans rather than open pallets for better protection of fragile goods.
When your shipment travels on pallets, the volume you're charged for is not the volume your boxes and furniture actually occupy. It's the footprint of the pallet multiplied by the height of the tallest item on that pallet. Every inch of empty air around your boxes/furniture still counts as billable space.
For example: if you have a pallet that's 48" × 40" and your tallest item is a 60" wardrobe box, you're being charged for 48" × 40" × 60" of space — regardless of whether the rest of that column is empty. A half-empty pallet is still billed as a full pallet column.
Whether your shipment travels on pallets or in lift vans, wasted space is unavoidable. Irregularly shaped furniture, the geometry of packing, and oversized items that force a partly empty extra van or pallet column all push your billed volume above your actual goods volume. It's standard practice to add 30% to your estimated shipment volume when budgeting for any LCL move. If you think you have 10 cubic meters of goods, budget for 13. Ask your mover directly: "How do you calculate billable volume?"
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