Calculate Loading Meters

The loading meter (also known as loading metre or LDM) is a standard unit of measurement in road transport. It is commonly used as a tool for pricing a shipment, or as a way to estimate if a shipment can fit in a certain trailer type.

Calculating LDM for a single piece of non-stackable cargo placed on the floor is quite simple:

Length × Width / 2.4

As you can see, the LDM is the area of the cargo (Length × Width) divided by a constant (2.4). The constant is meant to represent the typical width of a trailer. Dividing the area by the trailer width gives us an estimate of how much of the length of a trailer the cargo will use. This only applies to cargo placed on the floor of the trailer, as we are interested in how much floor space of the trailer a piece of cargo is using.

Calculating LDM of euro pallets

As an example, a Euro pallet has the bottom area 1.2×0.8m = 0.96m2, which gives us an LDM of 0.4m.

This can be used to calculate how many pallets will fit in a certain trailer type.

If we take the Box Trailer (EU) as an example, all we need is the length (13.62m), which lets us quickly calculate how many pallets will fit in the trailer:

13.62m / 0.4m ≈ 34 pallets.

Calculating LDM using software

We can do the same thing using Cargo-Planner, to verify our calculation. Here I’ve added cargo with the shape 120×80×200cm, set it as non-stackable and given it an unknown quantity, to let program calculate how many will fit in the trailer.

Cargo-Planner fills the trailer with as many cargoes as possible, and also automatically sums the Loading meters of the cargo in the trailer.

Although LDM is an industry standard, it’s not the most precise unit of measurement, as it’s hard to apply on stackable cargo, and does not take into account the maximum dimensions of a piece of cargo compared to the trailer. If we take a custom pallet as an example, with the dimensions 150×70×200cm, this will give us an LDM of ~0.44m. According to the principal we used earlier a total of 31 pallets should fit in a Box Trailer. But since we have a pallet shape that doesn’t fit very well in the trailer, we will have more wasted space, and the actual number that can fit is 28 pallets.

A software for load planning like Cargo-Planner will give you a faster and more precise calculation of how many pieces of cargo can fit in a trailer, as well as additional metrics like loading meters, chargable weight, cubic meters and more.