What actually fits in a 20GP of flooring and trim

Most flooring quotations cover the boards and leave the trim as an afterthought. That is usually where a container plan goes wrong, because accessories are awkwardly shaped, they are quoted by the piece, and they eat volume faster than their weight suggests.

All the figures below are published in full on our accessories page.

Palletised loading costs about a quarter of the load

Every SPC accessory we make is quoted two ways: loose-loaded and palletised. The gap is consistent and larger than most buyers expect.

Item	Loose (PCS/20GP)	Palletised	Lost
T-moulding (FNSTM)	23,400	20,800	11%
Reducer (FNSRD)	25,200	19,200	24%
End cap (FNSEC)	35,100	28,800	18%
Stair board (FNSSBR)	8,400	5,760	31%
Skirting 100 (FNSS100)	7,500	5,520	26%

Loose loading is worth it when labour at the destination is cheap and the goods go straight into a warehouse. Palletising is worth it when the container is discharged by forklift on a tight window, or when the goods are cross-docked — the handling damage you avoid usually exceeds the freight you lose.

The one case where palletising is not optional is a stair board. At 2400 × 115 × 24 mm and 22.5 kg a box, loose-loaded stair boards get damaged.

Profile height drives the quantity, not length

Everything is 2400 mm long, so the differences come entirely from cross-section. Compare the skirtings:

Skirting	Section (mm)	PCS/20GP
Skirting 50 (FNSS50)	50 × 13	13,900
Skirting 60 (FNSS60)	60 × 12	13,700
Skirting 70 (FNSS70)	70 × 12	10,974
Skirting 80-1 (FNSS80-1)	80 × 15	13,900
Skirting 90 (FNSS90)	90 × 15	8,320
Skirting 100 (FNSS100)	100 × 15	7,500

Note that the 80-1 at 80 × 15 loads better than the 70 at 70 × 12. Section alone does not predict the answer — it depends on how the profile nests in the box and how the boxes stack. This is why we publish per-item figures rather than a rule of thumb.

Specifying 60 mm skirting instead of 100 mm nearly doubles the pieces per container. On a large project that is a real freight saving, and it is a decision worth taking deliberately rather than by default.

Planning a mixed container

The published figures are single-item full loads — nobody ships a container of nothing but end caps. For a real order, work from the take-off:

1. Floor area in m², which sets the board quantity.
2. Room perimeter in linear metres, minus door openings, divided by 2.4 — that is your skirting piece count. Add 8–10% for cuts and mitres.
3. Transitions: one T-moulding per doorway, one reducer per change of floor height or covering.
4. Stairs: one stair nose and one stair board per tread.

Send us those four numbers and we will return a loading plan with the exact carton count per profile and the residual volume available for boards. It is usually worth a short conversation before the order is fixed, because trim is the part that is expensive to air-freight when it is forgotten.

A note on the weights

Our printed catalogue carries both kilogram and pound columns and they disagree on several rows — Skirting 70 is listed as 12.5 kg and 14.33 lb, but 12.5 kg is 27.6 lb. The kilogram figures are the correct ones and are the only ones we publish here. If you have an older PDF with the pound column, work from the metric values.