Container labor cost calculator
Work out what a devan costs your own warehouse, from crew size, pace, wage and burden, and what to charge for it.
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How this calculator works
This is a cost calculator: what it costs you to put a crew on a container, built up from your own wage, burden and pace. It answers a different question from the container unloading cost calculator, which shows the market price range a shipper is likely to see. Use both: if your cost plus a sensible margin lands above the market range, the problem is productivity or cost, not your price.
Time
Floor-loaded: work crew-hours = cartons ÷ cartons per person-hour
Floor-loaded: elapsed hours = work crew-hours ÷ crew size + setup hours
Palletized: elapsed hours = pallets ÷ pallets per hour + setup hours
Crew-hours (paid) = elapsed hours × crew size
Setup and close-out are added to elapsed time and paid for the whole crew, because that is what happens on the dock: nobody starts unloading until the seal is checked and the dock plate is down.
Cost
Crew labor = crew-hours × base wage × (1 + burden %)
Supervision = crew labor × supervision %
Equipment = elapsed hours × equipment $ per hour
Total cost = crew labor + supervision + equipment
Suggested price = total cost ÷ (1 − target margin %)
The suggested price uses margin, not markup. If you want the difference explained, or want to add materials and passthrough costs to a full quote, use the 3PL quote margin calculator.
- Every pre-filled rate (150 cartons per person-hour, 20 pallets per forklift-hour, $20 base wage, 30% burden, 10% supervision, $15 per hour equipment, 30 minutes setup) is a placeholder to show how the math works. None of them is a published benchmark. Replace each with your own numbers.
- Productivity is linear: twice the crew finishes in half the time. In practice a container face only has room for a few people, so adding a fifth or sixth person to a 20ft rarely halves the time.
- Container size does not change the math. It is there so you can label the job and sanity-check the counts you enter against what fits.
What this calculator does not cover
- Pallets, wrap and labels. Materials are a separate cost line. Add them in the margin calculator.
- Waiting time. A container that shows up three hours late with the crew already clocked in costs real money. That idle time is not in this estimate.
- Overtime and after-hours premiums. If the job runs on overtime, raise the wage to the overtime rate.
- Overhead, per-diem and chassis. Building, management and software costs are not here, and neither are the container-side meters covered in what it costs to unload a container.
The hard part is not the arithmetic but keeping crew plans and quotes in sync. In Rapid Ai 10x, Adriana prices incoming container requests from your rate card and prepares the quote for a person to approve, and once it is accepted Luis turns it into a job and plans the labor against it. See how Adriana and Luis work together.
Common questions
Divide the carton count by cartons per person-hour to get work hours, add setup time for the whole crew, then multiply crew-hours by your loaded rate (wage × (1 + burden)). Add supervision and equipment time for the total.
Burden is what you pay on top of the wage: payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits and paid time off. It varies by state, insurer and benefits package, so the 30% default is only a placeholder. Use the figure from your own payroll.
This tool estimates your cost from your own crew and wages. The container unloading cost calculator shows the market price range a shipper is likely to be quoted. Comparing the two tells you whether your cost leaves room for margin.
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