Container Comparison

The two selectors cover the whole fleet: 10, 20, 40, 45, 48 and 53 ft dry boxes, the high cubes, and the special types — reefer, open top, flat rack, tank and double door. For each pair the tool lists external and internal dimensions, tare, max gross, payload, cubic capacity, EUR pallet count and TEU value, and draws both boxes to one scale — the fastest way to grasp that a 45 ft high cube is not “a bit bigger” than a 20 ft but seven metres longer and a foot taller.

Read the highlighted rows first: identical values render plain, differences get a background. Comparing a 40 ft standard with a 40 ft high cube, for instance, lights up exactly three rows — external height, internal height, volume — which is the entire difference between the two most common containers on earth. The classic pairings have full written verdicts too: 20 ft vs 40 ft (weight carrier vs volume carrier) and high cube vs standard (what the extra foot buys).

Two containers at a time answers one question; the table below answers all of them at once — every ISO and domestic size with ISO code, external and internal dimensions, capacity, payload and pallet count in one place. Most spec pages on the web cover one size per page and metric or imperial, never both; between this table (metres) and the companion below it (feet), every number exists in both unit systems on a single URL.

Full unit-by-unit tables live on the dimensions in feet and dimensions in meters pages; the printable all-sizes reference is the master chart.

For load planning, two numbers matter more than any dimension: cubic metres and pallet positions. Here they are for the whole range, floor-loaded single tier.

Note the high cube row: one extra foot of height adds 8.7 m³ but zero pallet positions — the gain is stacking height, not floor. To fit your own carton or pallet size, run the CBM calculator and the pallet calculator.

When the comparator is being used to decide what to buy, divide price by volume. A used cargo-worthy 20 ft runs $1,200–2,500 for 33.2 m³ — $36–75 per cubic metre. A used 40 ft (standard or high cube) runs $1,500–3,500 for 67.7–76.4 m³ — $22–52 per cubic metre. The 40 ft wins on volume economics every time: forties are plentiful at import-heavy ports, so doubling the steel costs nowhere near double the money.

The 20 ft still earns its price when the constraint is something other than volume: a tighter site (6 m vs 12 m of level ground), a payload-bound load (28,250 kg vs 26,740 kg), or resale liquidity — twenties move faster in the second-hand market. Current market ranges by size and grade, updated regularly, are in the container prices guide.

The comparisons above assume dry boxes; the special types bend every rule of thumb. A reefer gives up volume to insulation — 28.3 m³ in a 20 ft against 33.2 dry — and its working machinery makes even a retired unit cost 2–3× a dry box. A flat rack inverts the payload table: a 40 ft rack is rated to ~40 t of cargo, half again more than any dry container. An open top matches dry-box volume but trades its roof stack rating for crane access, and a tank measures in litres (21,000–26,000) rather than cubic metres. Compare any of them against a standard box in the tool above — the silhouettes make the geometry obvious.