A shipment that quoted cleanly off an LTL tariff last week may not qualify for one today. The freight did not change. The definition did.

Effective September 7, 2026, R+L Carriers redefined LTL as shipments under 16,000 pounds occupying no more than 16 linear feet — down from under 20,000 pounds and 20 feet (FreightWise, State of LTL). Anything between those lines now falls outside standard LTL pricing and into volume or spot quote territory.

This lands in a market that is already shifting. As truckload prices rise, some freight that moved TL is sliding back into LTL, and LTL service is becoming more variable. More freight is crowding toward the boundary at the same time the boundary moved.

What falls into the gap?

The gap is freight between 16 and 20 linear feet, or between 16,000 and 20,000 pounds. In practice, that is a lot of ordinary shipments:

• Nine or ten standard 48-inch pallets loaded two-wide and single-stacked
• Non-stackable freight that takes floor space regardless of weight
• Long or oversized items — pipe, lumber, fixtures — that use linear feet quickly
• Consolidated multi-order shipments built to fill more of the trailer

None of these are exotic. They are the freight profiles that sit naturally between LTL and full truckload, and under the new definition, at least one major carrier will now price them differently.

Why does linear footage suddenly matter so much?

Because most quoting logic does not look at it.

Traditional LTL quoting starts with weight, class and zip codes. Linear feet — how much of the trailer floor the shipment occupies — is often not captured at all, or captured as a pallet count that someone converts by rule of thumb.

When the carrier's definition was 20 feet, that gap was mostly invisible. Now a quote built from weight and class alone can come back from the carrier as a reclass, a rejection or a volume-rate adjustment after pickup. The customer sees a price change; your team sees a margin hit and an awkward conversation.

It is the same dimensional-data problem that surfaced with NMFC's density-based classification changes: pricing now depends on inputs that many intake processes never collect.

How should brokers quote shipments over 16 linear feet?

Brokers should check linear footage and weight on every LTL request at intake, and route shipments above a carrier's LTL threshold to volume or partial-truckload quote requests across multiple carriers, rather than pricing them from a standard LTL tariff. Because thresholds now differ by carrier, the routing logic has to be carrier-specific, not a single rule.

That breaks into three changes to the quoting workflow:

1. Capture linear feet at intake. Pallet count, pallet dimensions, stackability. If the request does not include them, ask — immediately, in the same thread.
2. Apply carrier-specific thresholds. One carrier may cap at 16 feet, another at a different figure. A single company-wide cutoff will be wrong for some carriers.
3. Fan out volume requests. For shipments in the gap, send volume or partial quote requests to several carriers at once and compare, instead of defaulting to one tariff.

• Under 16 ft and 16,000 lbs — Old path: Standard LTL tariff · New path: Standard LTL tariff
• 16-20 ft, under 20,000 lbs — Old path: Standard LTL tariff · New path: Volume / partial quote at affected carriers
• Over 20 ft or 20,000 lbs — Old path: Volume or FTL · New path: Volume or FTL
• Missing dimensions — Old path: Quoted on weight/class · New path: Hold and request dims before quoting

The last row is the one that causes most of the damage. A quote issued without dimensions is a quote that may change after pickup.

Why volume quotes need a different process

A standard LTL quote is a lookup against a tariff. A volume quote is a request — sent to a carrier's volume desk, answered by a person, often by email, with varying turnaround.

That difference is why partial and volume freight has historically been slow to quote, and why the operational gaps between LTL and FTL quoting are so pronounced. Pushing more shipments into volume quoting means more emails out, more replies to track and more comparisons to make — just as service variability is rising.

An AI agent changes the economics of that work:

• Reads the inbound request and extracts weight, dimensions, pallet count and stackability.
• Asks for missing details before quoting, so the quote holds.
• Calculates linear feet and checks it against each carrier's threshold.
• Sends volume quote requests to several carriers in parallel and tracks the replies.
• Compares responses and returns the best option to the customer, or to a rep for approval.

The customer gets a firm number faster, and the broker stops absorbing reclass charges on freight that was never really LTL.

This is part of a bigger reshuffle

The R+L change is one piece of a year in which the boundaries between parcel, LTL, volume and truckload have all moved. We looked at the parcel side of that in the parcel-to-LTL break-even shift. The common thread is that mode and pricing decisions now depend on dimensions and carrier-specific rules, and static thresholds age badly.

Frequently asked questions

What is R+L Carriers' new LTL definition? As of September 7, 2026, R+L defines LTL as shipments under 16,000 pounds and no more than 16 linear feet, down from under 20,000 pounds and 20 linear feet.

What happens to shipments between 16 and 20 linear feet? They generally fall outside standard LTL tariff pricing at carriers using the new threshold and need a volume or partial-truckload quote instead.

How do you calculate linear feet for a shipment? Linear feet is the length of trailer floor the freight occupies. It depends on pallet dimensions, how pallets are oriented and whether they can be stacked — which is why pallet dimensions and stackability need to be captured at intake.

Can AI agents quote volume LTL? Agents can capture dimensions, check carrier thresholds, send volume quote requests to multiple carriers, and compare the responses. Rate approval can stay with your team.

The bottom line

R+L cut its LTL definition from 20,000 pounds and 20 feet to 16,000 pounds and 16 feet, effective September 7. Freight in between now needs a volume or partial quote — and quoting logic built on weight and class alone will miss it.

Capture linear feet and stackability on every request, apply carrier-specific thresholds, and fan out volume quote requests in parallel. The goal is a quote that still holds after pickup.

Debales deploys AI agents for freight quoting that capture dimensions at intake and fan out volume and partial quote requests across carriers in parallel. Book a demo.