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 and tank. 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 7.7 m longer and a foot taller.

Read the marked rows first: identical values stay plain, a difference is set in bold with a bar beside it. Comparing a 40 ft standard with a 40 ft high cube, for instance, marks five rows: the two heights and the volume, which are the extra foot, and the tare and the payload, because the taller box carries more steel on the same 32,500 kg rating. 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 $1,700–2,800 for 33.2 m³ — $51–84 per cubic metre. A used cargo-worthy 40 ft (standard or high cube) runs $2,100–3,500 for 67.7–76.4 m³ — $27–50 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 heavy load that weighs out before it fills the box (a 20 ft carries 28,250 kg, nearly as much as a 40 ft’s 28,800 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 puts even a used unit at about 3–5× the price of a used dry box. A flat rack inverts the payload table: a 40 ft rack carries ~40 t of cargo, about 39% 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 (20,000–26,000 for a 20 ft across the published sheets) rather than cubic metres. Compare any of them against a standard box in the tool above — the silhouettes make the geometry obvious.