FEU

What happens when a 40-ft box hits the yard

A 40-ft container comes off the tilt-bed as one continuous steel floor, 40 feet of it, and it gets treated as a single unit the whole way through delivery: one set of chains, one truck, one drop, one box sitting where you want it. Nobody at the yard splits a 40-ft into two anything. It is a single piece of steel from corner casting to corner casting.

Step outside the yard and into a shipping-industry ledger, and that same single box stops being counted as one. It gets logged as two.

The rule: one FEU equals two TEU

Ports, ocean carriers and logistics reports measure capacity in twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEU, because a 20-ft container is the base unit that scale was built around. A 40-ft container is roughly double the length, so on that same scale it counts as two TEU, and that count has its own shorthand: FEU, forty-foot equivalent unit. One FEU and two TEU describe the identical amount of capacity, just from different starting points on the measuring stick.

None of that changes what shows up on your property. You still get one 40-ft container, one delivery, one box. The FEU label only matters upstream, in the paperwork that tracks how much cargo capacity a ship, a port or a rail yard is handling.

What it actually means if you are buying

If you are ordering storage for a farm, a jobsite or a home, you will never be quoted in FEU. You get a length and a grade. A standard 40-ft here runs about 320 square feet of floor and roughly 2,390 cubic feet of volume, and we deliver it free inside 75 road miles of Woodlawn.

• 40-ft used cargo-worthy, delivered: around $4,900
• 40-ft rental: $235 a month
• See the full walk-through in 20-ft versus 40-ft

The FEU count matters to a port scheduler. What matters to you is whether that same box fits your driveway. Browse every size and grade we carry before you call.