Fabric Container Loading Calculator

Fabric is booked and paid for by the metre but moves by the roll, and a roll is a poor fit for the space inside a container. The gap between the two is where freight budgets go wrong. This calculator converts quantity, width and weight into roll dimensions, packed volume, total weight and the container you actually need — including the payload limit, which is often the real constraint rather than space.

Container Reference

Roll Dimensions Decide the Load

The roll length you specify becomes the roll diameter, and the diameter decides how efficiently rolls stack. This is the part of the calculation most buyers never check, and it changes the metres per container by a factor of two.

A fabric roll is a cylinder, and cylinders do not tile a rectangular space. The void left between rolls is real dead freight, and it grows as diameter increases. A common mistake is to specify 50 m rolls for a 400 GSM fleece: the roll reaches roughly 35 to 40 kg, which is awkward to unload by hand and leaves poor packing density. Heavy fabric is normally shipped in 30 m rolls for exactly this reason.

The two rules that matter

• Roll length should be close to the container width. Two rolls sit end to end across a 2.35 m container interior. A roll of 1.80 m width leaves about 0.55 m of dead space per pair, so the effective length consumed is closer to 2.35 m for every two rolls.
• Keep diameters in the 28 to 32 cm range for export. Below 25 cm there are too many rolls to handle; above 35 cm the stacking density falls off and manual unloading becomes difficult.

Roll Weight and Handling

Roll weight is a practical limit as much as a freight limit. A 320 GSM fleece at 1.80 m width weighs about 576 g per metre, so a 50 m roll is roughly 29 kg. That is workable for one person with a trolley, not for two. Heavier fabric should drop to 30 m rolls, and very heavy or stiff fabric may need to go to 25 m.

Roll weight is also where the cutting room and the warehouse need to agree with you. A 30 m roll suits a cutting table laid for 30 m; a 50 m roll means the fabric is cut across two lays, which changes the pattern lay planning and can increase marker waste. Specify the roll length for the cutting room, not only for the container.

Space or Weight: Which One Binds

For light and medium knits, space binds first: a 40ft high cube will fill up before it reaches 26 tonnes. For heavy fabrics the reverse happens, and the payload limit arrives well before the container is full. This distinction matters because it changes what you should optimise.

Where weight binds, buying a larger container achieves nothing. The levers that actually help are splitting the shipment, reducing roll length to improve handling, or moving to a lighter construction. Where space binds, a larger container is a real saving, and compressing bales instead of rolling them buys roughly 30 to 40 percent more metres per container.

Note also that loading does not scale inversely with weight. Going from 50 to 300 GSM is a sixfold increase in weight, but the metres per container fall by roughly a factor of four, because a heavy fabric packs denser per gram than an open sheer. This is why published loading tables are not reliable across weights and should be treated as a starting point.