You’ve got one skid steer to move. Maybe it’s going to a job site, maybe it’s a sale, maybe it’s coming back from a rental. Either way, it’s a real problem to ship, and you already know why: it’s too big and too heavy for dry-van LTL, but a full flatbed leaves twenty feet of empty deck you’d be paying for. So you sit there staring at a machine that’s smaller than a truck and bigger than a pallet, stuck in the gap nobody built a good option for.
There is an option. It’s partial flatbed, and it exists for exactly this.
Why a single skid steer is so awkward to ship
A compact skid steer usually runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 to 8,000 pounds and takes up a handful of feet of deck. That puts it right in the partial flatbed sweet spot: under about ten feet of deck space and under roughly 10,000 pounds. It needs an open deck because you load it from the top and drive it on, and it needs tie-down room around it. Dry-van LTL can’t take that. A full flatbed can, but then you’re renting a whole trailer for one machine.
Here’s the part that stings. When shippers try to force a machine like this through traditional LTL, big networks either say “we can’t take that” or take it and surcharge it later. Long, heavy, hard-to-handle freight is exactly what gets hit with accessorials you never saw in the quote. More on that below.
How partial flatbed moves it
With partial flatbed, your skid steer rides on shared deck space alongside other partial open-deck loads. You pay for the part of the deck your machine uses, not the whole trailer. That’s the whole idea, and it’s how everybody wins: you get a fair price, the carrier fills deck space that would’ve run empty, and the machine actually moves.
A few things that make it work for equipment specifically:
- Open decks load from the side and top. You drive the skid steer on and chain it down. No dock, no forklift wrestling, no “it won’t fit through the door.”
- Securement is planned around the weight. Equipment gets chained at the manufacturer’s rated points, and any attachment like a bucket comes down and gets secured separately. The aggregate Working Load Limit of the tie-downs is planned against the machine’s weight, so it’s held to spec, not eyeballed.
- It can dispatch direct. Partial loads can run origin to destination without bouncing through a hub-and-spoke terminal network. Fewer handoffs means fewer chances to bang up your machine and fewer days lost.
The quote is the price
This is the part shippers get burned on most. On big LTL networks, a machine like this can trigger a Density Minimum Charge or a Linear Foot Charge, rules that let a carrier re-rate low-density or long freight after the fact. You budget one number, and the invoice comes back a lot higher.
A FlatbedLTL partial flatbed quote is locked in. It is not subject to Density Minimum or Linear Foot charges. The number you get is the number you pay. If you want the full breakdown of how those accessorials work and how a quote balloons on the invoice, read our accessorial explainer.
When your skid steer is NOT a partial flatbed job
Straight talk, because pointing you to the right mode is the whole point:
- If it’s a big machine over about 10,000 pounds or wider than a standard machine, it may need full or specialty open-deck. That’s a job for our parent company, Comet National Shipping, which handles full flatbed, oversized, and specialty loads.
- If you’re shipping several machines at once, you may be better off with a full flatbed too. Ask us and we’ll tell you honestly which way pencils out.
A single compact skid steer, though? That’s home base for partial flatbed.
Getting an accurate quote
- Tell us the machine: make, model or dimensions, and weight. Note any attachment.
- Give us pickup and delivery points and how it loads (drive-on is easiest).
- Get a price for the deck space it needs, with a single point of contact who owns the shipment.
That’s it. No logistics department required to move one machine.
Got a skid steer that won’t fill a trailer? Get a locked-in quote at /get-a-quote or call (800) 831-5376, and send us the load that LTL won’t take.