What rate types does a 3PL rate card include?

Five families cover almost every Australian warehouse contract: storage rates, activity rates, fixed weekly or monthly fees, cost-plus pass-through items, and hourly labour rates for ad-hoc work.

How are warehouse rate card rates calculated?

Each cost is sorted into a pool by its nature, then each pool is divided by the volume that drives it. Activity pools divide by the activity volume, storage pools by pallet positions and weeks. Overhead and margin are applied on top as a separate commercial layer.

Why do warehouse rates differ so much between providers?

Because a rate is the output of a specific operation, not a market price. Rent per square metre, racking density, labour agreement, shift pattern, automation and the customer's own order profile all change the underlying cost. Two providers quoting the same service can be equally correct and quote very different numbers.

Warehouse Rate Card: What It Is and How the Rates Are Built

Looking for warehouse worker pay rates? This page is about the commercial rate card — the charges a 3PL bills its customer. For employee award wages, the Storage Services and Wholesale Award is published by the Fair Work Ombudsman.

What a warehouse rate card is

A warehouse rate card is the schedule of charges a third-party logistics provider bills a customer against. Storage per pallet per week. Picking per carton, line or order. A fixed weekly management fee. Consumables at cost plus a margin. Labour by the hour for anything outside scope.

It is the commercial face of a cost model. Every line on it should trace back to a real cost in the operation, and every line should be defensible when a customer asks where the number came from — because sooner or later, one will.

The five rate types

Almost every Australian warehouse contract is built from five families. What varies is which lines are switched on and how granular the activity rates get.

Rate type	Charged on	Covers
Storage	Per pallet per week or month	Rent, outgoings, insurance, racking — the cost of holding stock.
Activity	Per pallet, carton, line, order or container	The variable labour of doing the work: receive, putaway, pick, pack, despatch.
Fixed weekly / monthly	Per week or month	Site management, supervision, IT and systems — cost that does not move with volume.
Cost-plus	Actual cost + agreed margin	Consumables, pallet hire, freight recovery — pass-through items.
Labour rate	Per hour	Ad-hoc and out-of-scope work, at the fully loaded cost of an FTE plus margin.

A more granular seven-line breakdown, including pallet management and manual charges, is in 3PL Rate Card Template Australia.

A sample Australian rate card

Indicative only — these are illustrative figures for an ambient outer-metro site, not a benchmark to price against. The point is the shape, not the numbers.

#	Line	Rate type	Unit	Rate (ex GST)
1	Pallet Storage	Storage	Per pallet / week	$5.80
2	Putaway per Pallet	Activity	Per pallet	$4.25
3	Order Picking	Activity	Per order	$6.90
4	Item Line Pick	Activity	Per line	$0.95
5	Packing per Carton	Activity	Per carton	$1.10
6	Site Management Fee	Fixed weekly	Per week	$3,200
7	IT Systems Fee	Fixed weekly	Per week	$230
8	Consumables	Cost-plus	Per month	$1,450
9	Additional Labour	Labour rate	Per hour	$40.62

Where each rate actually comes from

A rate is not chosen. It is the result of a division: a pool of cost, divided by the volume that drives it.

Sort every cost into a pool by its nature — activity, storage, fixed and overhead, IT, pallet hire. A cost in the wrong pool gets recovered on the wrong basis and never reconciles.

Divide each pool by its driver. The activity pool for picking divides by cartons picked. The storage pool divides by pallet positions and weeks. That division is the rate.

Apply the commercial layer separately — corporate overhead and profit, as a mark-up or a margin. Keeping it separate is what lets you show an all-inclusive price without exposing where your margin sits.

Worked end to end, with the full cost stack and the arithmetic, in Rate Card Pricing: From Cost Pools to Per-Unit Rates.

Why two providers quote such different numbers

There is no standard warehouse rate, and a rate card copied from another operator is close to worthless. A rate is the output of a specific operation:

Rent and density. Outer-metro ambient space runs roughly $180–$250 per SQM against $500–$700 for frozen — and how many pallets fit per SQM changes the per-pallet cost as much as the rent does.
Labour. The agreement, the shift pattern and the state all move the fully loaded cost of an FTE. Penalties on an afternoon shift are a real cost, not an average.
Productivity. Two sites doing identical work rarely achieve the same rate per hour. Layout, equipment, systems and stock profile all matter.
The customer's own profile. The same warehouse costs a different amount to run for a bulk customer than for an ecommerce one. That is cost to serve, and it is why a blended rate quietly cross-subsidises.

Four mistakes that cost real margin

Blending everything into one rate. Simple to negotiate, and it hides which customers are profitable. A single blended charge is too high for some and too low for others.
Pricing storage on floor area instead of pallet positions. Racking density is the variable that actually determines what a pallet position costs.
Forgetting that rates are volume-sensitive. Fixed cost spread across a forecast volume becomes the wrong rate the moment actual volume lands elsewhere.
Never revisiting it. A rate card is accurate on the day it is signed and decaying from the next.

Common questions

What is a warehouse rate card?

The schedule of charges a 3PL bills a customer against — storage, activity rates, fixed fees, cost-plus items and hourly labour. It is the commercial expression of the provider's cost model.

How are the rates calculated?

Each cost is sorted into a pool, then each pool is divided by the volume that drives it. Overhead and margin are applied on top as a separate layer.

Why do providers quote such different rates?

Because a rate is the output of a specific operation, not a market price. Rent, density, labour agreement, shift pattern and the customer's order profile all change the underlying cost.

How often should a rate card be rebuilt?

At every renewal at minimum, from actual captured volumes rather than the original forecast — and monitored continuously in between.

Warehouse Rate Card