Two Ways to Protect a Load, and Most Shippers Use Neither

A pallet arrives crushed. The claim goes in. Weeks later a number comes back, and it is a fraction of what the freight was worth.

Almost nobody sees it coming, because the number was not decided when the pallet broke. It was decided before the truck moved.

How Freight Liability Works, Everywhere

Every carrier publishes a limit of liability. Absent anything else, that limit is a set rate per pound, and across the industry the standard is fifty cents. The one group that runs higher is household movers, at sixty to seventy cents, because federal rules hold movers to more.

So take that fifty cents and a pallet that weighs four hundred pounds. If that pallet is damaged, lost, or destroyed in transit, the ceiling on your recovery is two hundred dollars. Same two hundred whether the pallet holds floor tile or networking equipment.

The industry calls this released value, and it is the default on nearly every shipment moving today. It is also not a trick. A carrier that guaranteed full value on everything would have to price every load as if it were the most valuable thing it could be, and the person shipping floor tile would be paying to cover somebody else's servers.

The tradeoff is that the person who knows what the freight is worth has to say so.

The First Lever: Declare the Value

Declaring a value means stating what your shipment is worth, in writing, before it moves. It goes on the paperwork at booking and carries an excess valuation charge above the base rate.

One thing gets misunderstood constantly, and Roanoke Group, which underwrites cargo insurance, states it plainly: "Declaring a value does not increase the carriers scope of liability, it simply allows the shipper to pursue a higher recovery."

It moves your ceiling. It does not rewrite what the carrier is responsible for. If a loss falls into a category the carrier is not liable for, declaring a hundred thousand dollars changes nothing.

The Second Lever: Insure the Freight

Cargo insurance is a separate policy on the goods, bought by the shipper. It is not the carrier's liability and it does not come out of the carrier's limit.

The practical difference, again from Roanoke: with insurance, the shipper does not have to prove the carrier is legally liable. An insurance claim asks whether the loss happened. A liability claim asks whose responsibility it was.

A cargo policy typically covers physical damage, theft, natural disasters, and improper handling or storage.

What it costs: a premium, which is real money, and which is why it is not the answer for every load.

Where Purpose Sits, Specifically

Everything above is how the industry works. Here is our own contract, so you are not guessing at it.

Our limit is fifty dollars per shipment or fifty cents per pound, per piece, whichever is greater, absent a higher declared value. Declared values above that carry an excess valuation charge, and those charges are owed whether or not a signature made it onto the waybill.

What we are not liable for, and this list is standard across freight: acts of God, adverse weather, strikes and labor disputes, mechanical failures, civil unrest, war and terrorism, actions by customs or public authorities, defects inherent to the goods themselves, and losses caused by improper packaging or bad waybill information from the shipper.

We carry cargo insurance with policy limits of one million dollars for aggregate losses at any single time or location. High-value coverage starts at one hundred thousand dollars, and it is a separate policy that has to be in place before pickup, not after. So if a shipment is worth more than that, tell us before we arrange the truck.

There is no ceiling on what we can insure. We have covered single loads past three million dollars. What changes with the number is the runway. Up to $499,000 approval is close to instant. From $500,000 to a million there is another layer of paperwork and sign-offs. Above a million is a different process entirely. And at every step up, the underwriters approve the specific carrier, not just the load, and they can turn one down. That is why the high-value conversation happens days before pickup, not the morning of.

And one detail worth more than the rest of this paragraph. If you declare a value on a shipment but do not itemize each piece on the waybill, a claim gets calculated on the shipment's average declared value multiplied by the weight of the damaged piece. Not the full amount you declared. Itemize.

Ten Minutes, Once

None of this is a project.

Multiply your typical pallet weight by your carrier's per pound rate. That number is your recovery ceiling today if that pallet is damaged, lost, or destroyed.

Go through the last twelve months and mark the shipments where that number and the real value are nowhere close. It is usually a short list.

For each one, decide which lever fits. Then do it before the load ships, and itemize the pieces.

The Honest Version

None of this is hidden. Ours is published on our own site and every carrier you use publishes theirs.

It just lives in a document nobody opens until the week they need it. By then the freight has already moved, and both of the choices that decide how the week ends were made before it did.

Sources: Purpose Transportation's published Terms and Conditions. Roanoke Group, "An Inside Look at Declared Value vs. Cargo Insurance," May 8, 2017. EFW, "Carrier Liability vs. Cargo Insurance," June 12, 2025.