A sealed box on wheels — and most freight’s default.
Roughly 70% of everything that moves by truck in North America moves in a dry van. There’s a reason it’s the baseline.
A dry van is the standard fully-enclosed trailer: an insulated, weatherproof box, sealed at the rear with swing or roll-up doors, riding behind a tractor. It protects freight from rain, road spray, sun and theft, and it loads from the dock by forklift or pallet jack. If your cargo is palletized, boxed or floor-loaded, fits inside the box, and doesn’t need refrigeration, the dry van is almost always the cheapest, fastest and most available way to move it.
The standard unit is the 53-foot van— about 630″ of interior length, 98″ wide and 110″ tall, holding 26 floor pallet positions and roughly 45,000 lb of payload. For tighter urban work and LTL doubles there’s the 28-foot pup. Beyond that the variations are about cleanliness and access: food-grade washed trailers for edible freight, swing-door versus roll-door for dock fit, and air-ride suspension for fragile loads. We spec the right one for your dock, your lane and your commodity.
How do you load a dry van efficiently?
Most dry-van loads are limited by one of three things: floor space, weight, or cube. Heavy, dense freight (paper, canned goods, liquids) hits the 45,000 lb weight ceilinglong before the trailer is full. Light, bulky freight (foam, packaging, furniture) cubes outfirst. And non-stackable pallets run out of the 26 floor positionsregardless of weight. The calculator below shows which limit you’ll hit — and whether a full van, a partial, or LTL is the economical call.
Dry van vs reefer vs flatbed
The mode choice comes down to three questions. Does it need temperature control?If yes, it’s a reefer, not a dry van. Will it fit through the doors and inside the box? If no — too tall, too wide, loads by crane — it’s flatbed/open-deck. If it’s dry, boxable and door-loadable, it’s a dry van, and you get the lowest rate and the deepest carrier pool in freight. That availability is the dry van’s quiet superpower: when capacity tightens, vans cover first.
