What a shipping container costs after you have bought it

Start with what the number on the price page is

Every figure on the prices page is a "from" price for the container itself, ex GST, ex depot. Delivery sits outside it and is quoted with the unit against your actual address, because what a truck costs depends on where it is going and what it finds when it arrives — which is why you will not find a delivery figure anywhere on this site.

Everything below is the third category: what you spend on the container once it is standing on your ground. None of it is enormous. Most of it is one-off. And a fair bit of it is optional in a way the seller has no incentive to tell you about.

The one that is not optional: getting it level

A shipping container carries its entire weight on eight corner castings, and the four on the bottom are the ones that matter. Sit it square and level on all four and it will still shut properly in fifteen years. Sit it on three, or on ground that moves, and the frame twists — and a container racked out of square fights you every single time you close the doors. It cannot be economically fixed. It is the most expensive mistake available on this list and it happens on day one, usually because somebody was in a hurry.

What it takes is not much: something under each bottom corner that spreads the load onto firm ground and keeps the steel out of the dirt. Concrete pads, besser blocks or hardwood sleepers all do the job. Four of them, bought at a hardware store or a landscape yard, is the single cheapest insurance policy in this article.

The other half of it is free. Look at where it is going before delivery day, not on it. Ground that carries a loaded truck in September may not in February, and a spot that drains away from the doors will always be better than one that drains towards them.

Security: a lock box and the right padlock

A container door is not the weak point. The padlock is, and a standard padlock on a container is an invitation, because the shackle sits out in the open where bolt cutters reach it in about four seconds.

The fix is a lock box — a welded steel shroud over the locking bar that covers the padlock so nothing can get a jaw onto the shackle. Every unit we hire out has one fitted as standard. On a purchase it is worth asking about when you order, because retrofitting one later means somebody with a welder.

Then buy the lock properly. A closed-shackle, hardened, weather-rated padlock is the one that belongs inside a lock box; a brass hardware-store lock will be seized shut by salt air or rain inside two years, which is its own kind of security problem. This is a genuinely small amount of money against the value of what is usually going inside.

Ventilation, if the doors stay shut for weeks

Shipping containers sweat. Warm, moist air inside meets a steel roof that has dropped below dew point overnight, condensation forms on the underside of the ceiling and then it drips. People report this as a leak and it very often is not — a cargo-worthy unit is checked wind and watertight before it leaves the depot, and that check is about rain arriving from above.

If the container gets opened most days, air moves and you will probably never think about it. If it is sealed for weeks at a time and holding anything that minds moisture, fit vents. A pair of louvre vents cut into opposite ends, high on one and low on the other, sets up enough cross-flow to deal with most of it. Add a couple of desiccant buckets for a sensitive load and keep everything up off the floor on pallets, which costs nothing if you have pallets.

Two things worth knowing before you cut anything. Vents are a modification, so if the unit is on hire rather than bought, ask first. And if you are going the whole way to lining and insulating, buy the high cube in the first place — you give 50 to 75mm of headroom straight back to the lining, and a new 40ft high cube starts at the same $5,500 as a standard new 40ft.

Rust: a ten-year cost, not a first-year one

Corten steel is designed to form a stable surface oxide and then largely stop, which is why used containers are covered in rust and still perfectly sound. Left entirely alone on an inland block, a cargo-worthy unit will look worse every year and take a very long time to become a problem.

Two situations change that. Salt air, within a few kilometres of the coast, accelerates everything and concentrates it on the roof and the door hardware. And any spot where water sits and does not drain — the bottom rail, the underside of the door sill, a dented roof panel holding a puddle — is where perforation actually starts, because rust needs standing water more than it needs time.

The maintenance is unglamorous and cheap. Once a year, walk around it: clear leaves and debris off the roof so water runs off, wire-brush any spot that has gone past surface rust and hit it with a rust converter and a coat of enamel, and put a shot of lanolin spray or grease through the door hinges and locking bars. Half an hour and a few tins. Do that and a full repaint — which is a weekend with a roller and a few litres of paint, not a trade job — becomes something you do once a decade if you feel like it, rather than a rescue mission.

The floor

Container floors are marine ply, usually 28mm, and on a used unit they will be stained because they have carried things. Staining is not damage. A floor only becomes a cost in two ways: something gets spilled on it and left, or water has been getting in for long enough to soften it.

If you are storing anything that might leak — drums, chemicals, a mower with fuel in it — a sheet of ply, a rubber mat or a drip tray under it is a few dollars against a floor section that has to be cut out and replaced. And if the unit is going to be walked on constantly with steel-capped boots and dragged pallets, the same sheet of ply saves the real floor underneath it.

Shelving, and the mistake people make with it

This is the line item that varies most, because it runs from a few pallets standing on the floor to a full racking fitout. It is also the one worth thinking about before you choose the size, not after.

The mistake is buying a container for its floor area and then discovering the volume is in the height. A 20ft is 33 cubic metres and a great deal of that is above head level, which is doing nothing at all unless something is holding your gear up there. Cheap steel shelving down one wall roughly doubles what a container usefully holds, and it costs a fraction of the difference between a 20ft and a 40ft. Work out the shelving before you work out the size and you will sometimes find you did not need the bigger box.

What it does not cost you

This is the part that rarely gets said, and it is the reason the sums work.

• No registration, no rego, no roadworthy. It is not a vehicle. It sits there.
• No power, no connection, no standing charge. Unless you deliberately run something to it, it consumes nothing.
• No service contract, no scheduled maintenance, no parts. There is nothing in it that can break down, because there is nothing in it. The only moving parts are four hinges and two locking bars.
• No storage fees. This is the whole point, and it is the comparison most buyers are actually making. A self-storage unit bills every month forever whether you open the door or not.
• No rent on the land, if it is your land.

Worth checking rather than assuming: whether your local council has anything to say about a container on a residential block, which varies by area and by whether it is temporary, and whether your insurer wants to know about it and about what is inside it. Neither is usually a cost. Both are a five-minute phone call that is much better made before the truck than after.

The one-off spend, roughly

Indicative retail costs for the hardware itself at the time of writing — these are what the items generally cost at a hardware store or landscape yard, not our prices. Our container figures are the ones published on the prices page, with the date they were set. Delivery is not in this table because it is quoted with the container against your address.

Add it up and the unavoidable part — four pads and a decent padlock — is a couple of hundred dollars against a used cargo-worthy 20ft starting at $2,200 ex GST. Everything else on the list is a choice, and most of it is a choice you make years later.

The bit at the end

One thing does work in the other direction, and it is the reason the ownership sums on a container look nothing like the sums on most things you buy: at the end of it you still own a large steel box, and there is a real second-hand market for large steel boxes. A unit that has been sat level, kept out of standing water and had its doors greased is worth meaningfully more at that point than one that has been left to seize on soft ground — which is a reasonable summary of everything above.

If you want the purchase side of the arithmetic, it is all published: the prices page has every figure with the date it was set, the cost per cubic metre across all four sizes works out which size is the value buy, and the dimensions page has the measurements. Or ring 1300 639 282, describe the block and what is going in it, and we will tell you what the job actually needs — including when that is the smaller, cheaper one.