UK shipping container prices
How much does a shipping container cost in the UK?
Prices move week to week, and no honest site can tell you yours from a drop-down. What this one gives you is the estimated range for a shipping container by type and condition, the prices we have recorded at named UK suppliers with the date we saw them, and a straight account of what actually decides your bill: how far you are from the depot, how many units you need, and the real state of the box on the ground. Everything here is + VAT and before delivery, the way the British trade writes it.
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Estimated range, + VAT — 20ft shipping container · Used
£1,470 – £2,940
No range is published for this combination.
An estimate, not an offer. It excludes VAT and it excludes delivery — and delivery is usually the line that decides whether a container is cheap or expensive for you. The range is wide on purpose: it covers boxes that are genuinely different from one another and are all sold under the same word. For a figure you can hold a supplier to, ask for a quote.
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Fill it in once and it goes to five suppliers at most, picked because they cover your country and handle that container type. They send you their best offers direct — usually inside 48 working hours. Free, no obligation.
The quote service is operated by ContainerEU, which puts you in touch with its partner suppliers. ContainerEU.
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20ft shipping container: what does it cost in the UK?
Read these figures the way the trade writes them: unless the supplier states otherwise, a British price is + VAT, ex-depot, and excludes delivery to you. A weekly hire rate is not the cost of hiring — the haulage in and out routinely outweighs months of rate, and the low headline exists because of it. Each figure also attaches to one particular unit in one particular condition, so it tells you the level of the market, not the size of your invoice.
Publishes no prices — quotes only.
| Supplier | Product | Price | Depots |
|---|---|---|---|
| Universal Containers | Conteneur 20 pieds occasion, qualité inférieure | £895+ VAT | Manchester (Irlam) |
| Universal Containers | Conteneur 20 pieds occasion, qualité supérieure | £1,595+ VAT | Manchester (Irlam) |
| S Jones Containers | Conteneur 20 pieds à la vente (à partir de) | £1,750VAT not stated | West Midlands · Londres · Liverpool |
Container prices
Shipping container prices in the UK, by type and condition
Pick the box you actually need and the range narrows usefully: a high cube and a reefer share a footprint and almost nothing else, and the gap between used and one trip is wider than the gap between most types. Each page below gives the estimated range by condition, what moves it, and which UK suppliers put a figure on it in public.
| Container type | Used | One trip | New (factory) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20ft shipping container | £1,470 – £2,940 | £3,360 – £4,095 | £3,780 – £4,725 |
| 40ft shipping container | £1,995 – £3,990 | £4,095 – £5,670 | £4,410 – £6,510 |
| High cube container | £2,205 – £4,410 | £4,410 – £5,670 | £4,725 – £6,510 |
| Refrigerated container | £5,775 – £13,650 | £9,975 – £18,900 | £8,925 – £26,250 |
| Open top container | £2,310 – £5,040 | £3,990 – £7,140 | |
| Flat rack container | £3,360 – £8,400 | £6,825 – £13,125 | |
| Tank container | £9,450 – £36,750 |
Why a range, and never a firm price
A single number on a page like this would be wrong before you had finished reading it. Here is what sits behind the range, and why the honest answer to "how much?" comes in three parts.
- 01
The market moves weekly
Container prices track shipping flows, the steel price and stock imbalances between ports, so a figure carved out in spring is already lying by autumn. The yards at Felixstowe, Southampton and London Gateway fill and empty on schedules nobody publishes; when a depot is overstocked the boxes go cheap that month and not the next. A range is what survives the week — a fixed price is a snapshot pretending to be a rule.
- 02
Delivery is the real bill
The box has one price and getting it onto your ground has another, and the second is very often the one that decides. Haulage is priced by distance from the nearest depot, by whether a HIAB or a tilt-bed lorry can physically reach your gate, and by whether the driver can turn round once there. Since Brexit that arithmetic is strictly domestic: sourcing from Rotterdam or Antwerp looks clever until duty, import VAT and the crossing cancel the gap, so a British buyer buys British and the depot map matters far more than the continental one.
- 03
No two boxes are the same
"Used" covers a twenty-year-old unit with pitted corner posts and a recent one still wind and watertight, and the trade sells both under that single word. Grades — cargo-worthy, wind and watertight, one trip — narrow it down, but they are trade shorthand rather than a warranty, and what you are offered is whatever happens to be standing in that yard on the day. Quantity shifts it again: nobody prices a single box for a garden the way they price a run for a site.
So the range says honestly what it knows — the order of magnitude, enough to tell whether your budget stands up and whether it is worth going further. A quote says what the range cannot: your price, at your postcode, for the unit that is actually available. Whilst an estimate is allowed to be approximate, a quote is not, which is precisely why it is worth asking for one.
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Compare UK shipping container suppliers: depots and dated prices
These are real companies with real depots, not a directory padded out to fill a page. Where a supplier publishes a price, we have recorded it and dated it; where one does not, we say so rather than guess on their behalf. Read every figure as evidence of the level, on the seller's own terms — never as an offer made to you.
S Jones Containers
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · Refrigerated container · Storage container · Office container · Site cabin · Converted container
DepotsWest Midlands · Londres · Liverpool · Manchester · Felixstowe · Glasgow · Leeds · Southampton · Newport
Published
Billie Box
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · High cube container · Storage container
DepotsFelixstowe · Grays (Essex) · Birmingham · Middlesbrough · Liverpool · Southampton
Published
TITAN Containers UK (ArcticStore)
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · Refrigerated container · Storage container · Office container
DepotsLondres · Birmingham · Glasgow
Published
Cleveland Containers
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · Storage container · Office container · Converted container
DepotsStockton-on-Tees
Published
Universal Containers
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · High cube container · Storage container · Converted container
DepotsManchester (Irlam)
Published
Willbox
20ft shipping container · 40ft shipping container · Storage container · Site cabin · Office container
DepotsSouthampton (Nursling)
Published