Ask a supply chain director what they spend on load securement and you’ll usually get one number: the dunnage line item. Airbags, cardboard, bars, 2x4s. Whatever shows up on the purchasing report.
That number is real. It’s also incomplete by roughly half.
The true cost of load securement has four components, and most operations are only tracking one of them. The other three are hiding in labor budgets, claims reports, and disposal invoices, often under different cost centers, owned by different departments, and never added together.
Here’s how to find them.
The Four-Part Cost of Load Securement
- Dunnage Materials
This is the number everyone knows. Industry average for facilities using traditional void-fill methods runs from $29 to $33 per trailer load. At 40 loads per day, that’s roughly $430,000 per year in materials alone for a single mid-size facility.
What most operations don’t realize is that this number is a floor, not a ceiling. It doesn’t account for over-ordering to buffer against burst bags, emergency restocking when supply runs short, or the cost of storing bulk dunnage inventory on dock space that could be doing something else.
To find your real number: pull 12 months of dunnage purchases by facility. Divide by total outbound loads. That’s your true cost per load and it’s almost always higher than the catalog price suggests.
- Labor
This is where the real money hides.
Traditional dunnage takes time to stage, to install, and to remove at the receiving end. One case we tracked down to the minute:
- 5 airbags x 1.5 minutes each = 7.5 minutes
- 13 pieces of cardboard x 30 seconds each = 6.5 minutes
- Sticky feet holders and 2x4s = 6 minutes
- Total: 20 minutes of dunnage handling per load
At $20 per hour average dock labor, that’s $6.67 in labor per load just for dunnage handling. Across 40 loads per day, that’s $266 per day and $97,000 per year for one facility, just to install and remove material that exists to compensate for a void problem.
At the receiving end, the math is the same. Every inbound load arriving with airbags, bars, and cardboard requires someone to cut, deflate, break down, and dispose before the freight can move. That time belongs to someone’s shift, and it doesn’t show up on the dunnage invoice.
To find your number: time a representative sample of loads through full dunnage install and removal. Multiply by your average dock wage and annual load volume.
- Disposal
Dunnage doesn’t disappear. Burst airbags, cardboard, broken 2x4s. All of it has to go somewhere, and receiving facilities bear the cost of that disposal.
One major club wholesaler depot tracked their inbound dunnage disposal cost at $83,333 per month, nearly $1 million annually, just to process and dispose of the material arriving with their inbound loads. That cost was invisible to every shipper sending product into that depot. It wasn’t their line item. But it was absolutely affecting their vendor relationship.
If you’re a shipper, ask your top retail and DC partners what they spend on dunnage disposal. The answer may change how you think about what you’re sending them.
- Damage, Claims, and Rework
This is the most variable cost and the hardest to track. Not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it’s scattered. Claims live in one system, rework labor in another, rejected loads in a third.
Industry pattern: facilities with uncontrolled void space in their loads run damage and rejection rates between 2% and 10% depending on lane, product type, and load density. At 800 loads per month, even a 2% rate means 16 loads per month generating claims, rework, re-orders, and administrative overhead.
One facility we worked with tracked their damage rate drop from 2% to 0.05% per month, a reduction of roughly $24,000 per month in damages and credits at their volume. That number wasn’t in their dunnage budget. It was buried in their claims report.
To find your number: pull 12 months of cargo claims by facility, add rework and rejection labor, and look for correlation with your highest-volume outbound lanes. The pattern is almost always there.
Putting It Together: The Load Securement Audit
Add your four numbers together:
| Cost Category | How to Find It |
| Dunnage materials | 12-month purchasing divided by total loads |
| Dunnage labor | Timed observation x wage x annual volume |
| Disposal | Accounts payable, waste vendor invoices |
| Damage and claims | Claims system plus rework logs |
For a single mid-size facility running 40 loads per day, the combined total across all four categories, based on real facility data, routinely lands between $347,000 and $430,000 per year. Across a 12-facility network, that scales to $4.1 million annually.
That’s not a small operational inefficiency. That’s a budget line that deserves a dedicated solution.
What Changes When You Eliminate the Void
The math moves fast when you address the root cause instead of the symptom.
Dunnage costs drop immediately. Not by optimizing what you buy, but by eliminating the need for it. Labor follows. A load secured without consumables doesn’t need 20 minutes of dunnage handling at origin or destination. Disposal costs at your receiving partners go to zero on those loads. And damage rates, across multiple facilities and industries, show a consistent pattern: systematic load securement drops tipping and shift rates by 90% or more within months of implementation.
The number you calculated above is the number that changes.
Want to run this calculation for your facility? We partner with each site during rollout to track cost-savings data specific to your load volume, lane mix, and current dunnage spend. Request a cost analysis