Enter both addresses and the cargo, then press Get the delivered estimate. Nothing is stored and no account is needed.
- 120,000 lb · 12.5 ft wide · 14.5 ft high · 85 ft long, loading provided at both ends.
- Houston, TX to Buffalo, NY — two addresses, nothing else.
- Eight axles, a multi-axle trailer and an interstate route class, all worked out from that.
What comes back
A delivered figure with a range around it, a rating on EVERY charge saying what kind of evidence stands behind it, a line for every component including the ones we refuse to price, and a confidence score itemised into the specific facts that took points off it.
- An accuracy rating on every charge. Cited, indexed, benchmark or not priced — with the evidence one hover away and the full argument behind “read more”.
- A cited fee carries no range, because a statute states it. A benchmark always carries one, because the market does not have a point value.
- Detention and layover are disclosed and NOT added, because the hours are set by whoever keeps the truck waiting.
- Named refusals. A superload line haul, a lift above 160,000 lb, a tarp above 14 ft wide — each says what to do instead, and none of them carries a number.
What this estimate never includes (9)
- Broker margin, and any margin at all. Quoting your margin for you is not our business, and there is no code path in this tool that adds one. Every number here is a cost.
- A binding rate of any kind. The line haul, pilot cars and accessorials here are a market BAND assembled from published indexes, filed tariffs and operator rate sheets. It is a defensible starting number with a stated basis, not a price anybody has offered you. A rate you enter yourself replaces it, because your negotiated number is real and a band is not.
- Superload line haul, cranes over 200,000 lb, and utility line lifts. Each of these is refused rather than estimated, and for the same reason: the published evidence stops there. Superloads are priced job by job after an engineering review. The crane refusal MOVED OUT from 160,000 lb once seven further operator rate cards put the operated hour in print to 350 tons — between 160,000 and 200,000 lb we now quote the machine and crew as a floor and say plainly that assembly and multi-trailer mobilisation are not in it, because that half is still published by nobody after a three-angle search. Utility clearance is refused outright: an operator documents $90,000 of over-height assistance on a 100-mile project and $200,000 on a 1,000-mile move, billed unitemised, and no utility publishes a rate. A refusal that names the floor and the next step beats a number we cannot defend.
- Detention, layover, escort wait time and cancellation. All four are real, all four are published, and none of them is in the total — the HOURS cannot be predicted. They are disclosed as risk lines instead, with the published rate on each, because four hours at a slow receiver on a 13-axle rig is $2,420 and that belongs on the page rather than in a footnote.
- Permits from a second issuing authority. A toll road, a bridge authority or a city can require its own permit inside a state we do price. Where we know of one, that state’s notes name it.
- The engineering-analysis fee in thirteen of the twenty-one encoded states. Eight states are now priced from their own published schedules, in SIX different architectures — Missouri by trip distance ($425 / $625 / $925), Texas flat ($500, or $100 with no bridges on the route), South Carolina by weight ($100 / $200 / $350), Maryland per structure ($8–$20), Indiana $10 a bridge, Wisconsin $10 per district review, Illinois $40 an hour, and Washington, whose complete published fee list contains none at all. The remaining thirteen keep the original wide band until their schedules are read, and the widest state on your lane governs the line — so a narrow band is never claimed on the strength of the states we did read.
- Which crane your SITE needs, as opposed to which your weight implies. A crane is not rated to the load’s weight: capacity is quoted at a radius and falls off steeply as the boom reaches out, the rigging is part of the load, and picks are planned at 75–85% of chart capacity. The 2–3× weight-to-capacity rule this tool sizes on is OURS — eight operator rate cards, a county bid tabulation and four government schedules later, no association, manufacturer or agency publishes one. It is now the largest single uncertainty in the loading line, and three questions collapse it faster than any further rate research: how far the crane can set up from the item, whether the ground is paved or soft, and whether anything is overhead.
- Tolls. Tolls vary by the routing the state assigns, and the routing is not settled until the permit is issued.
- Tarping unless you ask for it. Most oversize machinery, structural steel and vessels ship untarped — tarping an oversize load is frequently impossible and aerodynamically dangerous — and the filed tariff we price it from makes it shipper-requested. Ask for it and it is priced by width and height, up to the 14 ft / 12 ft point where that tariff itself stops quoting.
What stands behind the number, and what is left out
Every line says which of these it is. A cited fee and a market band are never added into one undifferentiated figure.
State permit fees are cited to the statute or fee schedule they came from, and carry no range. Fuel is indexed to the EIA weekly diesel price. Line haul, pilot cars and accessorials are a benchmark band from published market data, always shown as a range, and replaced outright by any rates YOU enter. Permits are cited across 32 states.
No margin is added, ever. A component we cannot price is named and left out, never counted as $0 — and 9 things are excluded outright, each with the reason, beside the estimate.
Nothing, and no account. The permit corpus is compiled in, the diesel reading is memoised in-process and the only network call in the feature is the free, keyless, public-domain US Census geocoder — so the tool answers with the database unreachable and calls nothing billable.
Three steps, and the form is two of them
Two addresses
Full US street addresses, resolved by the US Census geocoder — free, keyless and public domain, and it refuses an address it cannot place rather than matching a different town.
The cargo, in your own units
Weight and the three dimensions. Switching between imperial and metric converts what you have already typed and never clears it. Axle count, trailer class and route class are derived from that rather than asked for.
Read the basis, not just the total
Every charge carries its rating and its evidence, the confidence score itemises what took points off it, and the lines we refuse to price are shown with a reason instead of a number.
Two things a delivered-cost estimate usually hides
The mileage band is measured, not asserted
Two addresses give a lane total, and a lane total is fit to price line haul and unfit to price a permit — several states charge on the miles travelled inside the state, and a straight-line split invents whole states. So the lane is routed over the federal primary-road network and split against state lines, and the error was measured over 80 real lanes rather than assumed.
The bands below are the p95 figures rounded up. Give us the per-state miles you filed and both go to zero.
- Lane total band, routed
- ±10 %
- Per-state band, routed
- ±15 %
- Band on your filed miles
- ±0 %
A refusal beats a number we cannot defend
A cited fee carries no range because a statute states it. A benchmark always carries one because the market has no point value. And where the published evidence stops, the line says so and carries no figure at all — with what would produce a real one.
Detention and layover are the clearest case: both are real, both are published, and neither is in the total, because the hours belong to whoever keeps the truck waiting.
- Band on a cited fee
- 0 %
- Band on an indexed fee
- ±5 %
- Margin added to any of it
- $0.00
Questions
What does the rating on each charge mean?
Four ratings, and every line carries one. CITED — A figure that binds every carrier — a statute or a public agency’s fee schedule. It is what you will pay, from whoever hauls it, and it carries no range because there is nothing to estimate. INDEXED — A live published index, with the date of the reading. Exact on that date; the band is how far the index can move before you move the load. BENCHMARK — Real observed market data, with its sample and its date. Always a range — a point value would claim a precision the market does not have. NOT PRICED — We will not put a number on this. The line says why, and what would produce a real one.
How accurate is the mileage from just two addresses?
Two addresses are routed in-process over the US Census TIGER/Line federal primary-road network and intersected with full-resolution state polygons. Measured against a reference router over 80 real lanes, on the 66 that pass the guards: lane totals came out at a mean 2.1%, p95 8.9%; per-state legs of 25 miles or more at a p95 of 14.4%. The bands the quote shows — ±10% on the lane and ±15% on a state — are those p95 figures rounded up, not a hoped-for number. Legs under 25 miles are much worse and are named in the quote rather than hidden inside the band. Enter your filed per-state miles instead and the band goes to 0%, because those are the miles the state bills.
What is the confidence score, and why is mine not 100?
It starts at 100 and is docked for each specific fact that weakens the estimate — mileage that was routed rather than filed, a line that is a market band rather than a cited fee, a mileage row that could not be used — and every deduction is itemised with the points it cost. 85 and above is high, 60 and above is medium. The band drawn around the figure follows from it: ±4% at high, ±8% at medium and ±18% below that.
Is any margin added, and what happens if I enter my own rates?
No margin is added, ever — there is no code path in this tool that adds one, and every number here is a cost. Anything you enter in the rates panel REPLACES our band outright for that line, and the line then says the basis is yours rather than ours. Nothing you enter can move a cited permit fee: those come from a statute or a published fee schedule and are subtotalled separately from money derived from your rates.
Why is there a charge with no number on it?
Because we will not guess it. Detention, layover, escort wait time and cancellation are real and published, but the HOURS are set by whoever keeps the truck waiting, so they are disclosed as risk lines with their published rate and left out of the total rather than estimated into it. A superload line haul, utility line lifts and a few other components are refused outright because the published evidence stops there — each refusal says what would produce a real number. 9 things are excluded in all, each with its reason, listed beside the estimate.
Is this a quote I can hold someone to?
No. It is a delivered-cost estimate with a stated basis on every line — a defensible starting number, not a price anybody has offered you. The permit fees inside it are cited and do bind whoever hauls the load, but the move itself is priced by a carrier, and the route, the escorts and the timing are decided by each state's own permitting office on the day.