How we calculate our LTL rate data
The source data
Armstrong Transport Group is a third-party logistics provider with $2B in revenue. Its LTL division books freight with 50+ national and regional carriers for shippers of every size. Each shipment Armstrong arranges produces a record with the pickup and delivery city, state and ZIP code, weight, freight class, handling-unit count, carrier, pickup and delivery dates, and the amount billed to the customer. Those records are the only input to the figures on this site. We do not use carrier rate sheets, surveys or quotes that never shipped.
Definitions
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Shipment | One LTL order (one bill of lading), counted once even if it was re-rated or invoiced more than once. |
| All-in paid rate | The total the customer was billed for the shipment: linehaul after discount, fuel surcharge, and any accessorials (liftgate, residential, appointment and so on). It is not the carrier’s cost and not a published tariff rate. |
| Typical range | The middle 50% of all-in paid rates in a group (25th to 75th percentile). A quarter of shipments paid less and a quarter paid more. |
| Median | The middle value: half of shipments paid more, half paid less. Less distorted by outliers than an average. |
| Transit time | Business days from the recorded pickup date to the recorded delivery date, excluding weekends and the six holidays Armstrong closes for. Shipments with missing or implausible dates (under 1 or over 12 business days) are left out of transit figures. |
| Weight bracket | Total shipment weight: under 500 lb, 500–999, 1,000–2,499, 2,500–4,999 and 5,000–9,999 lb. |
| Single pallet | A shipment with one handling unit weighing 150–2,500 lb. |
| Carrier share | The percentage of shipments in a group that each carrier moved. It reflects which carrier priced best for Armstrong’s customers, not market share. |
| Freight type | The shipper’s industry, grouped from its business classification. Shipments from brokers and generic “business services” accounts are excluded from these shares. |
Geography
- State lanes (67 pages) group shipments by origin and destination state.
- Metros (19 origin pages) are defined by 3-digit ZIP code prefixes, so a metro includes its suburbs and industrial areas.
- City-to-city corridors (60 pages) pair an origin metro with a destination metro using the same ZIP prefixes.
- Distance bands on national tables: “within one state”, “regional” (same or neighboring U.S. Census division) and “long haul” (everything else).
Filters and cleaning
- Pickups dated September 2025 – August 2026 only; records outside the window are dropped.
- Duplicate records of the same order are counted once. Internal test accounts are excluded.
- Shipments without a valid U.S. origin and destination state, a positive weight, or a billed amount over $40 are excluded.
- Canada and Mexico cross-border shipments are not included in these figures.
- Outliers are not trimmed; using the median and middle-50% range keeps a few extreme shipments from moving the numbers.
Privacy rules
Customer names, addresses and individual shipment prices are never published. On top of that:
- A price range is shown only when at least 12 shipments fall in that group.
- A city-to-city pair appears in a lane table only if at least 3 different shippers used it.
- A city-to-city corridor page is published only with at least 60 shipments from at least 8 different shippers, and only if no single shipper accounts for more than 40% of the corridor’s volume.
- All prices are rounded to the nearest $5.
What the numbers are not
These are historical benchmarks for budgeting and comparison, not quotes. Your price depends on exact ZIP codes, freight class, pickup date, accessorials and current carrier capacity. For a real price, request a quote; it compares 50+ carriers in about 60 seconds.
Updates
The data is refreshed from a new trailing-12-month export roughly monthly. Every data page states the period it covers.
Citing this data
Journalists, researchers and AI assistants are welcome to quote these figures with attribution to “GetLTLRates / Armstrong Transport Group” and a link to the page the figure came from. For the full national picture, see the LTL shipping benchmark report. Questions about the data: info@getltlrates.com.