TOOLS & CALCULATORS
What does your warehouse actually cost?
Rent and payroll are the easy part. Equipment, software, insurance, utilities and supplies are the part that gets left out of the mental math, and together they usually add 10 to 20 percent to the real figure.
This works out your fully loaded cost per pallet position per month, which is the number to hold any 3PL quote against.
Your space
Start here. Everything else is estimated from this number until you change it. Count all the space you pay for, including aisles, dock, staging and the office attached to the warehouse.
Industrial leases are usually quoted this way. Worth checking the lease rather than guessing, since this is one of the most important inputs in the calculation.
Only if billed separately from base rent. Set it to 0 if your rent is all-in.
Your people
Labor is usually the largest cost in a warehouse and the one most often understated, because people enter wages instead of what an employee actually costs.
Full-time equivalents on the floor. Two half-time people count as one. Leave out office and sales staff.
Not wages. Wages plus payroll taxes, benefits and workers comp, which typically runs 25 to 40 percent above base pay.
What you pay the agency, including their markup. Leave at 0 if you don't use temps.
The share of a manager's loaded cost that goes to the warehouse. If your ops manager spends half their time here and costs $110,000, enter $55,000.
Equipment
Forklifts are the obvious one. Maintenance, fuel and racking are the ones that get left out.
Lease payments. If you own them, take what you paid and divide by the years you expect to get out of them.
Service contracts, repairs, propane or battery replacement.
Leave at 0 if it came with the building or you'd rather not count it.
Systems and overhead
Individually small, collectively not. These are the line items most people leave out of the mental math entirely.
Licence or subscription. Set it to 0 if you run on spreadsheets, though that has its own cost.
RF guns, printers, and whatever share of IT support keeps them running.
Heat, light and power. Use an average across the year rather than a summer month.
Pallets, stretch film, labels, tape, corrugate.
Your volume
These two turn a total into something you can compare, and the gap between them is usually where the surprise is. Worth replacing the estimates if you know your real numbers.
Your average across the year, not your best or worst week.
Your fullest stretch of the year. This is what the building is really sized for, and what you pay for all twelve months.
Throughput (optional)
Fill these in and you'll also get your cost per pallet received and per order shipped. Leave them blank and those two figures simply won't appear.
Cost per pallet position, per month
$39.52
This is the number to hold a 3PL quote against.
14 of 14 figures are still our estimates. Replace the ones you know and this number gets a lot more useful.
$216,800
a year for capacity you aren't using. You're sized for 2,240 positions and averaging 1,600, so 640 sit empty most of the year.
The totals
Where it goes each month
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An estimate based on what you entered. Figures shown in grey are our suggestions, not your actual costs. It doesn't include the cost of your time managing the operation, or what the space would be worth used another way.
What these numbers mean
Cost per pallet position, per month. Your total operating cost divided by the positions you actually use. This is the figure a 3PL quote is directly comparable to, since warehouses price the same way.
Cost of unused capacity. Your building is sized for your busiest weeks, and you pay for that size all year. This takes the gap between your peak and your average, prices it at what a position costs when the building is full, and annualizes it. For seasonal operations, it’s often the largest single line of waste in the business, and almost nobody has calculated it.
All-in cost per square foot. Shown next to your rent per square foot. The distance between the two is everything that isn’t rent, and it’s usually a bigger gap than people expect.
Cost that continues regardless of volume. Your lease, equipment, software, and insurance don’t move when shipments stop. This tells you how much of your warehouse cost is locked in no matter what happens to demand.
What it doesn't include
Your time. The hours spent hiring, scheduling, covering absences, managing a landlord and sorting out problems on the floor are real cost, and there’s no honest way to put them in a calculator.
Opportunity cost. If your warehouse sits next to production, that square footage might be worth more as manufacturing space than as storage.
Growth. The figure reflects your operation as it is today, not what expanding it would cost in a new lease, more racking and more people.
Why a 3PL is often cheaper
Look at two numbers the calculator gave you: the cost of capacity you aren’t using, and the share of your cost that continues regardless of volume. Those two are the structural argument for outsourcing, and they’re the reason the comparison usually isn’t as close as people expect.
You stop paying for your peak all year. A warehouse serving one company has to be sized for that company’s busiest month. A warehouse serving twenty companies has peaks that land in different months, so the same square footage carries more business. That’s not a pricing trick. It’s the whole economic basis of the industry, and it’s why a 3PL can charge you for what you use and still make money on space you’ve vacated.
Fixed cost becomes variable cost. Your lease, your forklifts, your software and your insurance don’t care whether you shipped anything this month. With a 3PL, most of that moves onto someone else’s balance sheet and your bill tracks your volume. For a business with a real season, that difference shows up in cash flow long before it shows up in the annual total.
Shared overhead gets cheaper per unit. A warehouse management system, a safety program, a maintenance contract, a supervisor, a food-grade certification. Each of those costs roughly the same whether it supports one customer or fifteen. Run your own building and you carry the full cost alone.
Capacity becomes a phone call. Adding 500 pallet positions to your own operation means a lease negotiation, racking, more equipment and hiring. Adding them at a 3PL takes a conversation. Giving them back takes another one.
Labor stops being your problem. Recruiting, turnover, absence coverage, workers comp, peak-season temps, training. That work doesn’t disappear, but it moves to a company whose entire business is doing it well.
The people running it do nothing else. A warehouse attached to a manufacturer is usually managed by someone whose real job is manufacturing. It gets attention when something breaks. At a 3PL it’s the only job there is.
What is doesn't include
Plenty of the time, and it’s worth being clear about when. If your volume is high and genuinely steady, the flexibility you’d pay a 3PL for is flexibility you don’t need, and your own operation at full utilization is hard to beat on cost. If the warehouse is attached to your plant and product moves straight from the line into storage, the handoff you’d be adding can cost more than the space you’d save. If your product needs handling that requires equipment or expertise specific to you, that’s often better kept where the knowledge already is. And if you own the building, the math changes completely. The calculator treats space as a cost. If it’s an asset you already hold, that’s a different conversation. The number this tool gave you is the input to that decision, not the answer to it.
An estimate is half the exercise. The other half is a quote from a 3PL priced the same way. Tell us what you're storing and how it moves, and we'll price it against the number you just calculated.