Dry van

Dry vans move the freight most people picture on a highway: palletized consumer goods, packaged food, paper, plastics, retail replenishment, anything that fits in a box and tolerates the weather inside a sealed trailer. The common specification is a 53-foot trailer with roughly 3,400 cubic feet of space, a legal payload around 42,000 to 45,000 pounds depending on the tractor, and floor space for 26 standard pallets single-stacked.

Three things a broker confirms before calling a load “a van”:

• Weight and pallet count against the trailer’s limits; 26 pallets and 44,000 pounds is full.
• Loading method: dock-high for a standard van, or a liftgate for a ground-level stop.
• Special handling the trailer cannot provide: temperature, tarping, oversize dimensions. A reefer can run as a van (“dry reefer”) when van capacity is short; a van cannot run as a reefer.

Dry van is also the reference market for freight rates: the spot and contract indexes quoted in the trade press are van rates per mile unless labeled reefer or flatbed, and van capacity is the tightest signal of where the truckload market is heading.