What does it cost to ship a pallet from Toronto to London?

Toronto to London is one of the most-travelled freight lanes in Southern Ontario — a straight run down Highway 401 connecting the GTA’s warehouses and manufacturers with London’s industrial and institutional base. Pallets move along it every business day. What any one pallet costs, though, isn’t a number that can be printed on a page, because the honest price depends on a handful of details only you know. What this page can do is show you exactly which details move the number, so the quote you request comes back firm the first time.

Why there’s no posted rate for this lane

A pallet is not a standard unit of freight — it’s a footprint that can hold anything from a hundred pounds of foam to a tonne of machined steel. Two pallets leaving the same Toronto dock for the same London address can need different vehicles, different loading equipment, and different service levels, and each of those carries a different cost. That’s the reason reputable carriers quote per shipment rather than publishing a rate card, a logic we unpack fully in why freight doesn’t have flat rates. The rest of this page is the lane-specific version: the factors, in roughly the order they matter.

Service level is the biggest fork in the price

The first question isn’t about the pallet — it’s about the deadline.

Next-day LTL is the economical default for this lane. Your pallet shares the truck with other freight moving the same direction, which spreads the cost of the run across every shipper on board. If London-tomorrow serves the business, next-day LTL service is usually the value play for a single skid.

Same-day direct puts your pallet on its own dedicated vehicle, straight from your dock to the London address with no other stops. You’re buying the whole run, so it costs more — and it’s exactly right when the pallet is holding up a job site, a production line, or a customer commitment that can’t wait for tomorrow.

The gap between those two options is typically the largest single swing in what you’ll pay on this lane. Everything below adjusts the price; the service level frames it.

The pallet itself: weight, dimensions, and count

After service level, the freight’s own numbers do the most work:

• Weight decides the vehicle. A light skid can ride in a high-roof van on a direct run; heavier freight needs a box truck; and beyond straight-truck payloads, the shipment moves by semi through transportation partners.
• Dimensions decide how much of the vehicle your pallet occupies — a tall or oversized skid takes space other freight can’t use, which matters most on shared LTL runs.
• Count changes the economics in your favour per pallet: two or three skids to the same London address cost more than one, but rarely multiples more, because the lane cost is shared across your own freight.

Accurate numbers here aren’t bureaucracy — they’re what keeps the quoted price and the invoiced price identical. Our guide on getting an accurate freight quote explains how carriers use each figure.

Loading conditions at both ends

A pallet quote assumes the freight can get on and off the truck, and how that happens is priced in:

• Dock or forklift at both ends — the simplest case, dock-to-dock, nothing extra required.
• No dock or forklift at either end — the run needs a truck with a hydraulic tailgate to ground the pallet at street level. Flag it at booking, because it determines which vehicle is assigned.
• Site conditions — a receiving location with tight access, limited hours, or a busy shared dock adds time to the stop, and time on site is part of the cost of the run.

Delivery details like these are lane-agnostic — they’d apply to a pallet crossing Mississauga just as much as one bound for London — and they’re covered in depth in our practical guide to shipping a skid.

Distance and timing round it out

London is a genuine highway run from the GTA — well inside Sonic Transport’s direct coverage of Southern Ontario, but far enough that the kilometres, fuel, and driver hours are a real component of the price in a way a cross-town delivery’s aren’t. How that scaling works is its own topic; see how distance drives courier pricing.

Timing matters at the margins. Freight booked with a day’s notice gives dispatch room to route it efficiently; a pallet that has to leave within the hour narrows the options to whatever vehicle can move now. Flexibility on the pickup window is one of the few levers that can nudge the price down without changing the freight.

How to get a firm number

Gather four things — loaded dimensions, weight, the loading situation at each end, and the arrival deadline — and the quote stops being an estimate. That’s the whole list; what carriers need for a freight quote covers the reasoning behind each item.

Sonic Transport runs the Toronto–London lane as part of our everyday coverage of the GTA, Golden Horseshoe, and Southern Ontario, with pallets making up the bulk of what we move. Send the four details through our quote form and a real person — not a calculator — will price the run and tell you honestly whether same-day direct or next-day LTL is the smarter buy for your pallet.