Texas Shipping Guide: Packages, Pallets, Freight, Furniture & Luggage

Texas ships more freight than any other state, and almost none of the usual state-guide framing survives contact with it. Most of that freight never crosses a state line: 87% of Texas tonnage stays inside Texas. Yet the state is so large that staying inside it is no guarantee of a short trip — a parcel from Houston to El Paso crosses four carrier rate bands and costs what a parcel to Atlanta costs. This guide treats Texas the way carriers do, as six regional markets stitched together by long-haul trucking, Gulf Coast ports and the busiest land border crossing in the United States, and then answers the practical question underneath: what will it cost to ship your package, pallet, furniture or luggage out of Texas, and which method should you use?

1. Executive Summary

Texas ships more freight than any other state, and the scale is not the interesting part. What makes it hard to price is that the usual questions — how far, how much, which carrier — have different answers depending on which Texas you are in. Two numbers frame the rest. In the most recent federal survey of what American businesses ship, 87.0% of Texas-origin tonnage never left Texas, the highest share of any state in this series [1]. And the state is large enough that a parcel from Houston to El Paso prices in the same carrier zone as a parcel to Atlanta.

1.1 Six findings for a shipper

1. Texas is not one shipping market. Measured in carrier zones from Houston it spans four: Beaumont and Austin in zone 2, most big metros in zone 3, the Panhandle and West Texas in zone 4, and El Paso in zone 5 at 674 miles. Atlanta, 701 miles away, prices the same as El Paso.
2. Pipelines carry more Texas freight than rail and water combined: 18.1% of tonnage in 2022, against rail at 10.3% and water at 4.3% [1]. It is also why the truck share, at 58.7%, is the lowest of the five states covered — which surprises people who picture Texas as a trucking state.
3. Laredo is the busiest land port of entry in the United States. 2,945,388 trucks entered through it in 2025, roughly 2.6 times the next busiest crossing on either border [6], and Texas ports handled 71.4% of all trucks entering the country from Mexico.
4. Texas is the top exporting state, and the ranking is an energy ranking. Texas exported $450.3 billion of goods in 2025, more than twice California’s total [9], of which crude, gas and refined products are roughly $215 billion. Exports actually fell 1.0% while national exports rose 5.8%, because energy prices moved against the state.
5. Parcel matters less here than anywhere else in this series. Parcel, USPS and courier carried 9.1% of Texas shipment value, against 23.0% in New York and 20.5% in Washington [1]. Texas freight is heavy, cheap per ton and short-haul — which says nothing about whether parcel suits your box.
6. The border rules changed twice in 2026, and most published guidance is now wrong. The 25% tariff on Mexican goods was struck down by the Supreme Court and terminated on February 24, 2026 [27][28]. A 10% duty took its place on July 24, 2026, but goods entered free of duty under USMCA are carved out [29]. Separately, the $800 de minimis exemption no longer exists for any mode, mail included [32][64].

2. Texas Shipping at a Glance

Two freight totals appear here deliberately. The 1.67 billion tons is what Texas establishments themselves shipped, measured by federal survey in 2022; the roughly 4 billion tons is everything moving on the Texas system including through freight, from a modelled vendor database with a 2019 base year. Section 21 explains why neither can be updated to 2025.

3. Why Texas Is a Unique Shipping Market

Start with the distances, because they explain most of the rest.

El Paso to Beaumont is 741 miles in a straight line; El Paso to Brownsville is 678. Both are longer than Houston to Atlanta. A carrier serving “Texas” is serving an area roughly the size of France, with its major population centres at the corners rather than the middle.

Measured in carrier zones from Houston, Texas spans four of them. Beaumont (78 miles) and Austin (146) sit in zone 2; San Antonio (189), Dallas (225) and Brownsville (297) in zone 3; Lubbock (464) and Amarillo (533) in zone 4; and El Paso, at 674 miles, in zone 5 — the same band as Atlanta, 701 miles away. Brownsville is a zone cheaper than New Orleans at 318 miles, and Amarillo prices the same as Oklahoma City despite being 119 miles further out. Table 10 prices these lanes.

From Dallas the picture compresses. Every major Texas metro except the Panhandle and El Paso falls inside zones 3 and 4, and El Paso itself drops to zone 4 at 570 miles — a real commercial advantage, and a large part of why the warehousing went north.

3.1 Five things that make Texas different

The industrial base is heavy and concentrated on the coast. Gasoline and jet fuel, other petroleum products and fuel oils were 739 million tons of Texas outbound freight in 2022, 44% of the state total [1]; with basic chemicals and plastics the petrochemical complex reaches 58%. Most of it moves a very short distance: gasoline averages 41 miles, fuel oils 22.

Five of the country’s twenty busiest ports by tonnage are in Texas [18], and only one is a container port. Section 6 pulls them apart, because conflating them produces most of the bad numbers written about Texas shipping.

The border is a freight system in its own right. Twelve Texas ports of entry took commercial truck traffic in 2025 [6], and the busiest is the busiest in the country. Mexico is Texas’s largest export market by a factor of three and a half over the next [10][26].

Population is growing faster in absolute terms than anywhere else. Texas added 391,243 residents in the year to July 2025, about twice Florida’s gain [13] — though not uniformly: the El Paso metro lost population and McAllen lost domestic migrants.

Texas taxes turnover rather than profit, through a franchise tax on margin. It has no personal income tax, a prohibition written into the state constitution in 2019 [54]. Section 13 covers what that means for a small shipping business.

4. Texas Freight by the Numbers

The only official survey of what American businesses actually ship is the Commodity Flow Survey, whose most recent benchmark is 2022 [1]. Everything in this section is measured data from it; section 21 explains why no 2025 equivalent exists.

Source: 2022 Commodity Flow Survey, Texas origin, all commodities [1]. The survey covers mining, manufacturing, wholesale and selected retail and services establishments; it excludes farms, most retail, construction, government and every household shipment, so none of the personal shipping in sections 12 and 14 to 16 appears in it. “Withheld” means the cell was suppressed, not that the figure is zero. A small “other single modes” row (3,055 thousand tons) is omitted, which is why the listed rows fall just short of the all-modes line.

Three things in that table are worth sitting with.

Pipelines are the second-largest freight mode in Texas at 302 million tons, 18.1% of everything the state ships — more than rail and water combined. The average distance is withheld, so no haul length can be quoted.

Truck’s share is the lowest of the five states covered here: 58.7% of tonnage, against 88.5% in New York and 80.3% in Oregon. Texas is not less truck-dependent — it runs more truck freight by volume than anywhere else. It simply has a denominator that includes an enormous quantity of crude, gas and refined product moving by pipe and rail.

Customer pick-up is 15.5% of tonnage. Nearly 260 million tons left on a vehicle the buyer sent — the aggregate, cement and oilfield-supply pattern, and a sign that much Texas freight never touches a carrier’s system.

4.1 Inside versus outside: the 96-mile state

Source: [1]. The out-of-state row is the all-modes total less the within-Texas row.

Texas keeps a larger share of its own freight than any state in this series, and keeps it close: 96 miles on average. What leaves is worth nearly three times as much per ton, because the heavy, cheap material is consumed locally and what crosses the line is manufactured.

4.2 How Texas compares with the rest of the series

All figures from the 2022 Commodity Flow Survey, state of origin, all commodities [1]. Shares are calculated from the published tonnage and value rows.

California is the only state here that outships Texas on headline value: $2,060.6 billion of goods against Texas’s $2,037.0 billion, on 55% of the tonnage — $2,264 per ton against $1,222, the difference between an economy exporting semiconductors and one exporting hydrocarbons. The parcel column runs from 23.0% in New York down to 9.1% in Texas, tracking how heavy each state’s underlying freight is rather than how much anyone there ships by parcel.

5. Texas Freight Regions

The Census Bureau breaks Texas into eight metropolitan survey areas plus a remainder, which maps almost exactly onto the way carriers price the state. The table shows how much Texas-origin freight each received in 2022 — a fair proxy for regional consumption and distribution weight.

Source: [1]. Figures are Texas-origin shipments received by each survey area, all modes, 2022. Dallas–Fort Worth and El Paso–Las Cruces cross into Oklahoma and New Mexico respectively; only the Texas portion is counted. Beaumont–Port Arthur is suppressed in both tonnage and value — the area exists in the survey and its 101-mile average haul is published, but the volumes are withheld. Reporting it as zero, as an automated read would, is badly wrong: it handles one of the largest refining complexes in the country. Several estimates carry coefficients of variation above 25 (Austin 27.5, Corpus Christi 26.5, El Paso 28.5) and are indicative only.

5.1 What the regional split means when you quote a shipment

Average haul length is the most useful column in that table. Dallas–Fort Worth receives freight that has travelled 43 miles on average; Laredo’s has travelled 250. A DFW delivery is almost certainly a short regional run with dense carrier coverage and competitive pricing; a Laredo delivery is a long-haul movement that may well be positioning cargo for an export crossing. More generally, freight moving between the Texas Triangle metros gets the deepest carrier coverage and tightest LTL pricing in the state, because those lanes run constantly whether or not you ship; freight to West Texas, the Panhandle or the Valley runs on thinner lanes and shows a much wider spread between quotes. Section 14 puts numbers on that.

6. Houston and Gulf Coast Freight

More bad numbers are written about Texas ports than about any other part of the state’s freight system, and the reason is a category error: Texas has one large container port and several enormous tonnage ports, and they measure entirely different things.

2025 figures from each port’s own release [7][15][16][17]. USACE rankings and tonnages from the BTS Port Performance Freight Statistics 2026 Annual Report, Table 5, calendar year 2023 [18], which publishes a top 25 only. The two columns are not comparable and must not be read as a trend. Freeport’s 39.3 million tons counts foreign waterborne cargo only; the near-identical USACE figure counts total including domestic. Brownsville’s 28 million tons is the port’s own fiscal-year count across its whole channel. No official statewide 2025 tonnage figure exists.

Houston had a solid container year built on exports: loaded exports rose 7% against imports up 1%, while steel through the multi-purpose terminals fell 8% [7]. Corpus Christi slipped 1.5% as crude eased, though LNG rose 15.4% [15]. Freeport had the best year of the group. Texas City, at 29.9 million tons in 2023, ranks 21st and publishes no 2025 figure.

6.1 Why port volume is not your shipping rate

Container freight and parcel freight are different industries that happen to share a coastline. A container booking needs a steamship line or forwarder, a bill of lading, a commercial invoice, a packing list, a customs entry and usually a broker, and moves on a schedule measured in weeks; parcel and LTL move pieces or pallets through an integrated network in days. Port statistics describe the regional economy; no TEU figure has ever told anyone what it costs to send a box.

6.2 What the Gulf Coast does change for a shipper

Three things, concretely. Houston has unusually deep capacity for oversized and heavy-lift cargo, because the petrochemical build-out keeps riggers, crane operators and specialist crating firms in business. The region also generates a constant flow of hazardous and regulated materials, so carriers serving it are likelier to be properly certified — and likelier to ask pointed questions about what is in the box. And hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, peaking around September 10 [57]. Carriers rarely suspend Gulf Coast service outright; they issue alerts, extend transit times and suspend the money-back guarantee. If a delivery date matters between August and October, build in slack rather than rely on a guarantee that has been switched off.

7. Dallas–Fort Worth Freight and Distribution

If Houston is where Texas makes things, Dallas–Fort Worth is where Texas distributes them. Freight arriving in the DFW area had travelled an average of 43 miles, the shortest haul of any Texas region and less than half the state average [1] — the signature of a warehouse cluster serving a metro, not a production centre shipping out.

DFW is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 8,477,157 people, and grew by 123,557 in the year to July 2025 [14]. Fort Worth alone added 19,512 residents and has overtaken Austin as the state’s fourth-largest city.

7.1 Air cargo: two airports, three metrics, easy to confuse

Cargo tonnage from each airport’s own reporting [20][22]. Note the units differ: DFW publishes US short tons, Houston metric tonnes; DFW’s 858,329 US tons is roughly 778,600 tonnes. Landed weight and rank come from the FAA’s final CY2025 all-cargo file [23] and measure the certificated weight of arriving freighter aircraft only — not the cargo carried, and not belly cargo on passenger flights. DFW illustrates the gap: its own cargo tonnage rose 4.9% while its all-cargo landed weight fell 1.32%.

Fort Worth Alliance is the one to know about. It ranks 20th in the country on freighter landed weight while carrying no scheduled passengers at all, hosts FedEx’s Southwest regional sort hub and an Amazon Air regional hub, and is a designated port of entry with foreign trade zone coverage. For air freight out of North Texas, Alliance rather than DFW is often where the aircraft actually is. DFW itself handled 85,660,127 passengers in 2025, down 2.5%, still the fourth-busiest airport in the world [21] — which matters to freight because belly capacity on widebodies is a large part of how high-value Texas goods reach Europe and Asia.

8. Texas–Mexico Trade

No other state in this series has a chapter like this one, because no other state carries anything close to this volume. In 2025, 5,419,053 trucks entered the United States through Texas ports of entry — 71.4% of every truck crossing the Mexican border [6], two and a half times California, Arizona and New Mexico combined.

Source: BTS Border Crossing/Entry Data, incoming trucks, 2025 [6]. Port rows sum exactly to the state total in both years. BTS reports Pharr–Reynosa within Hidalgo and publishes no separate Pharr row; Ysleta is reported separately from El Paso, and the Zaragoza bridge at Ysleta carries roughly four times El Paso’s truck count. Nationally, 7,589,315 trucks entered from Mexico in 2025, down 0.4% — Texas gained share while the border as a whole shrank.

Two crossings moved sharply in 2025. Eagle Pass rose 44% and Tornillo 76%, while Laredo slipped 2.7% and Rio Grande City fell 23.5% — freight redistributing rather than growing, which fits a border total that barely moved. Taken together, El Paso, Ysleta and Tornillo handled 842,659 crossings, up 2.1%, making the El Paso metro the second-largest Texas gateway.

8.1 The tariff position, as it actually stands

Anything written about Texas–Mexico tariffs during 2025 is now out of date, and the sequence matters. The 25% tariff imposed on non-qualifying Mexican goods in early 2025 rested on emergency economic powers. On February 20, 2026 the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the statute does not authorise tariffs, and all duties imposed under it terminated on February 24, 2026 [27][28]. The refund process was remanded to the Court of International Trade rather than settled by the Court [27].

What replaced it is narrower. On July 24, 2026 a Section 301 duty arising from forced-labour investigations took effect at 10% on products of Mexico. Crucially for Texas, goods entered free of duty under USMCA are carved out of it by HTSUS heading 9903.05.94, and the Section 232 sectors — steel, aluminium, copper, vehicles and parts, heavy trucks, wood products and semiconductors — are carved out separately under 9903.05.90 [29][30][31].

Section 232 duties were untouched by the court: 50% on steel, aluminium and copper articles, 25% on passenger vehicles and parts, 25% on medium and heavy-duty vehicles and parts since November 1, 2025, 10% on buses, plus lumber and semiconductors [34][63]. USMCA preference does not waive these; for qualifying goods the duty generally falls on the non-US content, not the full value.

Mexico imposes no retaliatory tariff on US goods. Retaliation was announced in March 2025 and never published or brought into force. Mexico did raise tariffs on roughly 1,463 lines from January 1, 2026, but those increases apply to goods from countries it has no trade agreement with; US-origin goods keep their USMCA preferential rates [59]. For a Texas exporter shipping southbound, that is the number that matters, and it has not changed.

One more development belongs here. At the mandatory six-year joint review on July 1, 2026, the United States declined to extend USMCA in its current form, triggering annual reviews for the rest of the term [33]. The agreement remains fully operational — preferences, rules of origin and dispute mechanisms all continue — and runs to July 1, 2036 unless extended. Nothing changes for a shipment crossing at Laredo next week.

8.2 What a cross-border shipment actually needs

Southbound into Mexico, a commercial shipment needs a commercial invoice with the importer’s RFC tax number, an itemised packing list, HS classification per line, the correct incoterm, and a certificate of origin where USMCA preference is claimed. Mexican clearance is handled by a licensed customs broker — a legal requirement, not a convenience. Shipments from the United States and Canada valued at USD $50 or less enter duty- and tax-free under USMCA, and Mexico’s 2026 increase in the general courier rate does not apply to US- or Canada-origin goods [59].

Northbound, allow for inspection time. Texas DPS has run enhanced commercial vehicle safety inspections at the crossings since December 2022 on top of federal processing, and TxDOT’s plan records that nearly half of northbound crossing times exceeded thirty minutes [4]. That is a scheduling fact rather than a cost, and the one first-time cross-border shippers most often fail to budget for.

9. Major Texas Freight Corridors

Six interstates carry almost everything. TxDOT designates more than 23,000 miles as the Texas Highway Freight Network out of some 80,000 miles of state roadway [4].

Two operational facts are worth knowing before you quote a lane. TxDOT’s 2025 congestion ranking puts four of the five most congested segments in the state in Houston, led by the West Loop, rather than on the I-35 corridor through Austin that usually gets the attention [55]. And truck parking on I-20, I-30, I-35 and I-45 runs above 100% of capacity at the peak hour, against a statewide shortfall of roughly 3,700 spaces [56] — drivers running out of hours there have nowhere legal to stop, one of the quieter reasons Texas long-haul transit times vary.

9.1 What the corridors cost in parcel terms

The table prices a standard box from Houston at 2025 published FedEx Ground rates. Zones are estimated from great-circle distance using the carriers’ standard bands; your actual zone depends on the ZIP pair. “All-in” adds the $5.95 residential surcharge and 20% fuel [35][36].

List rates from FedEx Standard List Rates effective January 6, 2025 [35]. All-in = list + $5.95 residential + 20% fuel; excludes delivery-area, additional-handling and peak surcharges. Zone bands: 2 at 150 miles or less, 3 to 300, 4 to 600, 5 to 1,000, 6 to 1,400, 7 to 1,800, 8 beyond.

Read the El Paso and Atlanta rows together: both zone 5 from Houston, both $30.41 all-in for a 10 lb box and $80.21 for a 70 lb one. A Texas business that thinks of El Paso as a local delivery and Atlanta as an export is pricing on a mental map the carriers do not share. The flip side is that Texas’s out-of-state reach is unusually cheap for a state this far from the coasts. New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Memphis all fall in zone 4, Atlanta and Chicago in zone 5 — from New York, Chicago is zone 5 too, but Los Angeles is zone 8 rather than Houston’s zone 6. Central positioning costs Texas nothing on the short lanes and saves it real money on the long ones.

10. What Texas Ships

Texas outbound freight is hydrocarbons and the things made from hydrocarbons, plus a thin layer of very valuable manufactured goods on top.

Source: [1], two-digit commodity codes. “Mixed freight” is consolidated consumer goods for grocery, restaurant and retail replenishment. Several commodities are suppressed and so cannot appear in a ranking built on published figures: coal is withheld in both tonnage and value, as are live animals and precision instruments, and miscellaneous manufactured products has its tonnage withheld against a published $65.2 billion of value. Treat both tables as “the top ten among commodities with published figures” rather than an unconditional ranking.

Petroleum products are the story by weight and, unusually, by value too. Gasoline and jet fuel lead both tables; fuel oils are second by value. The two move an average of 41 and 22 miles — refinery to terminal, nothing more. This is what drags the Texas all-modes average haul down to 378 miles despite the state’s size.

Pharmaceuticals sit fourth by value at $64,040 per ton, the densest freight Texas produces and a reminder that the state’s medical-device and pharmaceutical sector ships small, dense and largely by air and parcel.

10.1 International exports, and what the number one ranking actually measures

Texas exported $450.3 billion of merchandise in 2025, first among the states and more than twice second-placed California’s $188.4 billion [9] — a position it has held for over two decades.

Source: US Census Bureau, state exports by origin of movement, December 2025 and December 2024 [9].

Two corrections to the usual telling. First, Texas exports fell in 2025 — down 1.0% on the Census origin-of-movement basis while national exports rose 5.8%, costing the state 1.4 points of share. The decline came almost entirely from the non-manufactured column, which is to say from energy prices. Second, when the US Trade Representative names computer and electronic products as Texas’s largest export category at $70.8 billion, that is the largest manufacturing category [10]. Crude oil and gas are classified as mining, and at $146.4 billion they dwarf it. Adding refined petroleum and coal products at $68.5 billion puts energy at roughly $215 billion, about 48% of everything Texas exported; with chemicals, close to 60%.

Source: USTR Texas trade profile, 2025 [10]. USTR publishes only the top five destinations. The Netherlands appearing third is an energy artefact: Rotterdam is the entry point for much of Europe’s refined product and LNG.

11. What Comes Into Texas

Source: [1]. Outbound figures are Texas-origin shipments to the same state. Several estimates carry high coefficients of variation — California inbound tonnage is 47.7 and is indicative only. Texas’s own intrastate movement of 1,449,722 thousand tons dwarfs every interstate flow and is excluded here.

Neighbours send weight; distant states send value. Louisiana and Oklahoma together ship 84.6 million tons into Texas at under $1,000 a ton — petrochemical feedstock, grain and oilfield material crossing a short border. California sends a third as much tonnage as Louisiana but four and a half times the value per ton, over 1,259 miles.

Oklahoma is the most lopsided relationship on the list: 36.0 million tons in against 12.6 million out, nearly three to one, and Illinois runs 2.5 to one the same way. Operationally that means a carrier delivering into Texas from the north or east has a reasonable chance of arriving loaded and leaving empty, so outbound capacity from Texas on those lanes is easier to buy than inbound. Shipping from Texas toward Chicago or Kansas City, that imbalance is quietly working in your favour.

11.1 Imports

Texas imported $411.6 billion of merchandise in 2025, second among the states behind California, up 3.6% from $397.2 billion [11]. The growth was in manufactured goods, up 6.1%, while non-manufactured imports fell 13.9%. Against exports of $450.3 billion, Texas ran a goods surplus of roughly $38.7 billion — calculated from the two Census series rather than published, and one of the few state surpluses of any size.

12. Personal Shipping in Texas

Nothing in the official data counts household shipments. The Commodity Flow Survey excludes them by design, TxDOT measures tonnage rather than customers, and no carrier publishes parcel volume by state. What follows is built from national benchmarks and Texas indicators.

12.1 Small packages

Americans received 23.1 billion parcels in 2025, up 3.3% — 67 per person, 171 per household, at an average of $9.34 each. Amazon Logistics carried 6.9 billion, USPS 6.2 billion, UPS 4.3 billion and FedEx 3.9 billion; by revenue the ranking inverts, UPS at 31.6% and FedEx at 30.8% [12]. USPS separately reported 6.837 billion shipping and package pieces in fiscal 2025, down 5.7% [38].

Applying those rates to Texas counts gives 10,992,816 households × 171 = 1.88 billion, and 31,709,821 people × 67 = 2.12 billion. Call it 1.9 to 2.1 billion parcels delivered in Texas in 2025, around 5.2 to 5.8 million a day — a Tier 4 estimate resting on the untested assumption that Texas households order at the national rate. What is verified is smaller and more interesting: Texas businesses shipped $185.4 billion by parcel, USPS and courier in 2022, 9.1% of shipment value [1] — the lowest parcel share in this series, reflecting how heavy Texas commercial freight is rather than anything about your box.

12.2 What personal shipping costs from Texas

Table 10 prices a standard box by destination. As a curve, the same rates expose two features a table hides.

The first is the step at 100 lb, where a zone 2 package jumps from $32.75 at 70 lb to $70.39 — the tier where pricing it as freight starts to pay. The second is how the bands fan out with weight: at 10 lb El Paso costs 29% more than Austin, at 70 lb 86% more. Light packages barely notice the size of Texas; heavy ones notice a great deal.

12.3 Residential delivery, surcharges and rural Texas

On 2025 published rates FedEx charged a $5.95 residential surcharge per package on Ground and Home Delivery, $6.55 on international express, $27 to $38 for additional handling internationally and $240 to $305 for oversize domestically [35][36].

Delivery area surcharges are where Texas differs from the coastal states in this series. They attach to rural ZIP codes, and Texas has an enormous number: the Panhandle, West Texas, the Big Bend, the Piney Woods and much of the Valley. A package to a ranch address outside Amarillo carries a surcharge that a package to central Houston does not, and it does not scale with distance — it is a flat penalty for being somewhere the carrier does not already drive past. For freight the problem is harder. Before accepting an LTL quote to a rural Texas address, establish whether a 53-foot trailer can reach and turn at the delivery point; if it cannot, the shipment needs a shuttle onto a smaller vehicle, and that charge lands after the fact.

12.4 Moving boxes, personal effects and household moves

Texas added 391,243 residents in the year to July 2025, the largest numeric gain of any state and roughly twice Florida’s [13]: 157,111 of natural increase, 167,475 net international migration and 67,299 net domestic migration, against a −642 residual.

Three qualifications belong with that number, since the mover indices get misreported constantly. Texas was fourth by percentage growth, not first, and second for net domestic migration, behind North Carolina. U-Haul ranked it the number one growth state for 2025, but on a 50.7% to 49.3% split of arrivals against departures [61], while United Van Lines put Texas on neither its inbound nor outbound top ten [62]. Both indices measure share of their own traffic, not volume; the Census figure is the one with magnitude behind it.

How Texas regulates movers

Intrastate household goods movers answer to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles under Transportation Code Chapter 643 and 43 TAC Chapter 218 [40][41]. The consumer rules were rewritten effective January 2, 2025, and most moving-company websites still describe the old ones.

• Registration is required regardless of vehicle size, so a mover needs it even to move a load in a pickup. The credential is a nine-digit certificate number the rules require in advertising as “TxDMV No. ______”; verify it before booking [42].
• A written proposal must come before loading, stating the maximum you could be required to pay, whether it is binding or not-to-exceed, and the carrier’s liability for loss or damage, if any.
• There is no 110% rule in Texas. To add items or services the mover must obtain a written amendment signed by both parties before doing the work; without one, only the charges on the original proposal may be assessed. The effective cap is 100% of what you were quoted.
• There is no state default on cargo liability, and this is the change most worth knowing. The old minimum of 60 cents per pound per article was deleted in January 2025 after TxDMV concluded it lacked authority to impose one. Carrier and shipper may now agree any liability term, including zero; the only remaining protection is that the proposal must state liability conspicuously, so read that line before signing [39].
• Disputes go to free mediation. TxDMV coordinates it at no cost; request it within 35 days of an unsatisfactory response from the mover, or after 90 days of no response [39].

Moving out of Texas is federal, under 49 CFR Part 375 [44]. Full Value Protection is the default there and must be waived in writing to drop to 60 cents per pound; a non-binding estimate caps payment at 110% at delivery; and the mover must offer arbitration, binding at your request up to $10,000.

12.5 Shipping a vehicle from Texas

Auto transport is a separate industry with its own licensing. Interstate carriers need FMCSA operating authority and brokers a $75,000 surety bond [45]. Cargo insurance is not federally required for general freight, so coverage on an auto hauler is contractual, typically $100,000 to $250,000 per vehicle. Ask to see the certificate.

Tier 4, industry estimates rather than official data. A consumer survey of nearly 800 quotes from more than thirteen carriers, collected October 2025 [46]. No credible source publishes car shipping prices specific to Texas, so none are invented here. Estimate from road miles, which run roughly 10 to 15% above the straight-line distances in Table 10 — Houston to Los Angeles is about 1,550 by road against 1,371 in a straight line — at about two to three days per 500 miles.

Texas is a heavy auto-transport market because a great many people are moving there and cars do not fit in boxes. Two local points. Intrastate moves are long enough to quote properly — Houston to El Paso is 674 miles, a real haul rather than an errand. And a good deal of Texas vehicle traffic runs southbound into Mexico, an export with title and customs requirements domestic carriers do not handle. As for belongings inside the car, there is no federal entitlement to ship them: the common allowance — about 100 lb, in the trunk, below the window line — is carrier policy driven by the truck’s 80,000 lb weight limit, and those items travel at owner’s risk outside the cargo policy [47].

13. Commercial Shipping in Texas

Commercial shipping in Texas falls into four patterns that price on entirely different logic: inventory replenishment on recurring lanes, which should never touch a published rate; industrial and oilfield freight, where crating, permits, rigging and coverage swamp the line haul; samples and small commercial parcels, where declared value and paperwork decide the cost; and cross-border movements, where the broker matters more than the carrier.

13.1 Documentation

A commercial international shipment needs an invoice on company letterhead with a tax ID, a packing list, the correct incoterm, HS classification per line, a certificate of origin where a trade agreement is claimed, export control screening and an AES filing above $2,500 per Schedule B line.

Two Texas-specific additions. Anything moving to Mexico needs the importer’s RFC tax number and a licensed Mexican customs broker — statutory, not a service you can skip. And if the shipment is oilfield equipment, chemicals or anything with a hazard class, the carrier needs to know before it quotes: a hazmat reclassification discovered at the dock is the most expensive surprise in Texas freight.

13.2 The Texas tax position

Texas has no personal income tax, and since 2019 the state constitution forbids one [54]. What it has instead is a franchise tax on margin, and the distinction matters for a small shipping business.

Texas rates and the $2,650,000 no-tax-due threshold apply to report years 2026 and 2027 [53]; it was $2,470,000 for 2024 and 2025, so older guidance understates it. The Washington and New York columns are summarised for contrast and are not the operative authority in those states.

The margin tax sits between the other two. It taxes turnover rather than profit, but unlike B&O it lets you deduct either cost of goods sold or payroll — materially lighter on labour-intensive businesses. A small moving company or freight broker usually falls under the revenue threshold and owes nothing. Sales tax is 6.25% at state level with local add-ons capped at 2.00%, a maximum combined 8.25% [52], and Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin are all at that maximum, so there is no local sales-tax arbitrage between the big Texas metros.

14. Texas Pallet and LTL Shipping

A pallet is the unit of freight, and getting it right decides the class, the price and whether the shipment arrives intact. In Texas it also decides whether the truck can legally carry it.

14.1 Dimensions, weight and class

The standard North American pallet is 48 × 40 inches, which LTL tariffs and trailer layouts assume; a 53-foot trailer holds 26 floor-loaded or 52 double-stacked. Keep the loaded height at or under 48 inches including the pallet. A standard pallet handles 2,000 to 2,500 lb comfortably, most carriers setting a practical ceiling around 4,000 to 5,000 lb, and nothing should overhang the edge — overhang causes more damage claims and reclassifications than any other packing error.

Freight class is mostly density. Multiply length by width by height in inches, divide by 1,728 for cubic feet, then divide weight by cubic feet. A 48 × 40 × 48 inch pallet is 53.3 cubic feet; at 800 lb that is 15 lb per cubic foot, around class 70; at 300 lb it is 5.6, around class 125 to 150. Two extra inches of height can cost a band.

FedEx Freight zone-based rates effective January 6, 2025, Priority service [37]. Zones 101 to 150 are assigned per ZIP pair; the columns are the tariff’s shortest, middle and longest zones rather than specific Texas lanes. These are published list rates; contract LTL is routinely discounted by a large fraction of tariff — see section 18.

Moving from class 70 to class 100 adds 29% at 500 lb on a short lane and 43% on a long one. For a first-time LTL shipper, getting the class right is the highest-value five minutes available.

14.2 The Texas size and weight rules that catch people out

TxDMV published size and weight limits [43]. Oversize and overweight permits are issued by TxDMV; there is no separate state port-of-entry weight collection in Texas, and weight enforcement is carried out by DPS on the highway network.

The 59-foot trailer limit surprises people, and in the outbound direction: Texas allows a longer semitrailer than most states, so a trailer perfectly legal loading in Dallas may be illegal at its destination. Building a Texas-origin lane means confirming the destination state’s limit, not the origin’s. Texas does offer two tolerances — an annual intermodal container permit within thirty miles of a port, and intermodal permits within five miles of the Arkansas border — because container weights legal on the water are not automatically legal on the road.

14.3 Accessorials, and where they bite in Texas

LTL was built for businesses with loading docks. When either end is a residence a stack of charges applies that can double a short-haul quote: residential pickup or delivery at each end; liftgate, since a trailer floor sits four feet off the ground and must be requested at booking or the driver will not deliver; limited access for self-storage, schools, construction sites, farms and ranches; appointment scheduling; and inside delivery, because standard LTL stops at the curb. Inside the Texas Triangle those are occasional surcharges on otherwise competitive lanes; outside it they are close to routine. A delivery in the Permian Basin, the Panhandle or the Valley is likelier to be limited access, likelier to need a shuttle and quoted by fewer carriers — where comparing quotes changes the number most.

14.4 Securing a pallet

Square, even stack, heaviest on the bottom, nothing overhanging. Full-perimeter stretch wrap of at least five turns, carrying the bottom two courses into the pallet deck. Two banding straps above roughly 500 lb, corner boards on anything crushable, and the address on two sides, because labels get torn off in terminals. Anything crossing into Mexico needs stamped ISPM-15 pallets; untreated wood is refused.

14.5 How much does it cost to ship a pallet from Texas?

On the 2025 tariff above, a 500 lb class-70 pallet prices at $572 on a short zone, $1,249 on a mid zone and $3,169 on the longest, with minimums of $530, $939 and $2,120 [37]. Houston to Dallas or San Antonio sits at the short end, the West Coast or Northeast at the long end. Contract rates run at a fraction of these figures.

A rough rule for one pallet out of Texas: under 150 lb, price it as parcel too. Between 150 and 1,000 lb inside the Triangle, LTL is almost certainly right. To West Texas, the Panhandle or out of state, take several quotes. Above six to eight pallets, price a truckload. And settle the access questions before the quote, not after.

15. Texas Furniture Shipping

Furniture is the hardest ordinary shipment to price: too large for parcel, too small for a moving company, awkward for LTL. Texas distances add a twist, since a piece that would be a local delivery elsewhere becomes freight here.

15.1 What the rules do to furniture

Parcel carriers bill the greater of actual and dimensional weight, dimensional being length by width by height in inches divided by 139, rounded up [35][36]. For furniture, dimensional weight nearly always wins.

DIM and girth calculated from the stated box sizes using the carriers’ published formula, taking the longest dimension as the length [35][36]. Parcel limits: 150 lb, 108 in length, 165 in length plus girth; oversize above 96 in length or 130 in length plus girth.

15.2 The selection model

15.3 The Texas question to settle first

Not which floor, as it would be in a dense city, but how the truck reaches the door. Texas furniture deliveries fail on access far more often than on price: a long gravel driveway, a gate too narrow for a 53-foot trailer, a rural road with no turnaround. Any of those converts a standard LTL delivery into a shuttle, charged after the driver has already been. The second question is distance — a sofa from Houston to El Paso is a 674-mile freight movement priced like a shipment to Atlanta. Inside the Triangle a blanket-wrap specialist is often competitive with LTL once crating, liftgate and damage risk are counted; beyond it the economics shift back toward palletised LTL, because the specialists run thinner networks out there.

16. Texas Luggage Shipping

Shipping luggage rather than checking it has become steadily more attractive, and 2026 pushed it further that way.

16.1 Who ships luggage from Texas

Texas hosted 97,043 international students in 2024/25, third among the states and up 8.4%, contributing an estimated $2.49 billion [51]. The University of North Texas led with 12,982, then UT Dallas 10,280 and UT Arlington 7,864; add the far larger domestic populations across the UT and A&M systems and the autumn and spring peaks are substantial. Texas also received 167,475 net international migrants in the year to July 2025 [13].

16.2 Ship it or check it?

All three carriers that dominate Texas airports raised checked-bag fees in 2026, and Southwest — the largest at both Dallas Love Field and Houston Hobby — ended its free-bag policy in May 2025 before raising the replacement fees the following April.

Airline fees as published by each carrier and verified September 2026 [48][49][50]; all three allow 50 lb and 62 linear inches as standard, and a third bag costs $150 on Southwest, $200 on American and United. Southwest’s free-bag benefit survives for Choice Extra fares, A-List Preferred members and active-duty military. Shipping rates are 2025 published FedEx Ground list rates from Houston, all-in adding the $5.95 residential surcharge and 20% fuel [35].

On short Texas lanes the arithmetic is lopsided: shipping a bag to Austin costs less than checking one anywhere. Across the state to El Paso it runs about $67 against $45 for a first checked bag, and against $55 for a second, so checking wins on the long lanes — but a third bag costs $150 to $200, and an overweight bag adds $100 on top. Shipping beats a second checked bag on the short and mid Texas lanes, and beats any overweight charge outright: a 65 lb bag costing $145 or more at the counter ships to Dallas for roughly $56 all-in.

Two rules apply whatever you decide: pieces over 70 lb are heavy packages and over 150 lb are freight; and liability on an unboxed suitcase is limited, so box it. Allow several days — Texas lanes are long.

17. Texas Shipping Costs

There is no single answer to what shipping costs, and any page offering one flat number is selling something. What can be stated is what drives it.

Parcel and LTL from FedEx 2025 published tariffs [35][36][37]; all-in adds the $5.95 residential surcharge and 20% fuel. Car shipping is in section 12.5 and international rates in the companion 2025 cost study [58]. Worked example: 500 lb of palletised inventory from Dallas to Chicago is $1,249.15 of tariff line haul before residential pickup, liftgate and appointment charges.

18. Published Rates versus Market Rates

Every price in this guide is an undiscounted published list rate. Carriers keep a tariff because it anchors negotiation, and almost no business pays it: discounts follow volume, lane density, predictable pickups and commitment, and in LTL routinely run to a large fraction of tariff. The result is a market with two prices:

• Published rate. What an occasional or household shipper is quoted at the counter or on a public rate tool — Tables 10, 18, 21 and 22 here.
• Market rate. What a carrier will actually accept for a given shipment on a given day, given its capacity on that lane. Invisible from outside, and varying by carrier, week and direction.

18.1 Where the gap is widest in Texas

The spread is narrowest where published pricing is already competitive and the shipment simple. It widens where three conditions combine: LTL rather than parcel, a long lane, and an imbalanced direction where a carrier with empty capacity prices to fill it. Texas presents all three more often than most states and adds a fourth. Lane density varies enormously inside the state. Houston to Dallas is run constantly and the quote spread on it is narrow, because everybody is already going. Dallas to Midland, or San Antonio to the Valley, has fewer carriers and a spread running to multiples rather than percentages. Get more than one quote on anything leaving the Triangle.

The directional imbalance usually works in a Texas shipper’s favour. Section 11 showed Oklahoma sending almost three tons into Texas for every one it takes back. Equipment arriving loaded has to leave, so outbound capacity toward the Midwest is easier to buy than inbound.

19. International Shipping from Texas

Texas exports more than any other state, but for a small business the rules that matter are the destination’s.

Tier 4. Compiled from destination customs and tax authorities; full citations by country are in the companion international cost study [58], Mexican thresholds from current trade guidance [59]. Verify before shipping.

19.1 Documentation

Section 13.1 lists the commercial paperwork. Three additions for personal shipments: the declared value must match the invoice, since it sets duty and carrier liability both; a change of residence needs an inventory, passport or visa copy and proof of the move; and wooden pallets need an ISPM-15 stamp.

19.2 What changed in 2026

The United States indefinitely suspended the $800 de minimis exemption — for every mode other than the international postal network from June 24, 2026, and for mail as well from July 24, 2026 under a companion rule that replaced it with a postal informal entry process for goods of $2,500 or less [32][64]. For a Texas importer that removes any low-value threshold on truck freight from Mexico: every commercial entry is now a formal entry. Bona fide gifts of $100 or less and personal articles up to $200 accompanying a traveller survive; nothing else does. This is an import rule, so it reaches Texas businesses bringing goods north and has no application to a Texas exporter shipping south, governed entirely by Mexican rules.

20. Texas Shipping Corridors

Section 9 sets out the state’s corridors and Table 10 prices them. The guides below go deeper by shipment type.

20.1 Plan your shipment

• ExpediShip services — parcels, pallets, luggage, furniture and freight
• Duty and tax calculator for Mexico, Canada and other destinations
• Request a quote for a Texas shipment
• Our guarantee
• Contact us

21. Methodology and Data Sources

Every figure carries a tier, and the tier tells you how much weight to put on it. Tier 1, measured is an official count of something that happened — port volumes, truck crossings, air cargo, trade values, carrier tariffs. Tier 1, survey is an official sample survey of real shipments: the 2022 Commodity Flow Survey. Tier 2, modelled is an official document built on a vendor model, such as the TxDOT freight-flow analysis with its 2019 base year. Tier 4, estimate is derived or commercial: Texas parcel volume, auto transport and international thresholds.

21.1 Why the freight-flow data is not from 2025

Most of this guide genuinely is 2025: port volumes, truck crossings, air cargo, trade, population, carrier tariffs, airline fees and the regulatory position. Freight flows are the exception, and neither source produced a 2025 figure. The Commodity Flow Survey runs every five years and its latest benchmark is 2022; it is the only official survey of what US businesses actually ship. TxDOT’s Texas Delivers 2050, published January 2023 with a 2019 base year, rests on a licensed commercial database analysed by a consultant [4][5] — a model, not a measurement, and the source of the roughly four billion ton figure. A successor is due for federal review in early 2027 [60], so 2019 will stand for some time. Anyone quoting a “2025 Texas freight tonnage” is quoting a projection.

21.2 How the estimates were built

• Texas parcel volume (1.9 to 2.1 billion). National 2025 per-household and per-capita rates applied to Census Texas counts; no official state count exists.
• Parcel zones and prices. Zones estimated from great-circle distance between city centres using the carriers’ published bands, where real zones go by ZIP pair. All-in prices are the list rate plus the $5.95 residential surcharge, times 1.20 for fuel.
• Auto transport costs come from a commercial quote survey; no Texas-specific route prices are published. The goods surplus in section 11 is calculated from two Census series and is not itself published.

22. Limitations

No dataset counts every package, pallet, suitcase and sofa that moves in Texas. The gaps:

• Household shipments are not counted anywhere. Every figure in sections 12 and 14 to 16 on personal shipping volume is a national benchmark or derived estimate.
• Several Texas commodities are suppressed in the 2022 survey — coal entirely, and the tonnage or value of five others. Suppressed cells store as zero in the raw data, so any ranking built without checking the flags understates Texas.
• Texas freight-flow data is 2019 (modelled) or 2022 (surveyed). Neither is current-year activity, and Beaumont–Port Arthur is suppressed in both tonnage and value despite being one of the country’s largest refining complexes.
• Port figures are not comparable with each other. Port Houston’s public-terminal tonnage, the Ship Channel total, USACE rankings and each port’s own release count different things over different periods, and no official statewide 2025 port tonnage exists.
• Air cargo units differ between airports, and FAA landed weight measures aircraft rather than cargo. Several state-pair and regional estimates carry coefficients of variation above 40, marked indicative where quoted.
• Published rates are not market rates, and no marketplace transaction data is used. Treat every price here as a ceiling.
• Rules change. Tariffs, customs thresholds, carrier surcharges, airline fees and mover regulations all moved during 2025 and 2026.

23. Texas Shipping Profile 2025

Tiles with a bracketed source are measured or official; the rest are derived as described in section 21. No marketplace transaction data was used.

24. How ExpediShip Can Help

Section 18 makes the central point of this guide: every price in it is a published list rate, and published tariffs are what an occasional shipper is quoted. They are the ceiling, not the market. Carriers discount heavily for volume, and a household or small business shipping one pallet, a few boxes or a suitcase out of Texas has no volume of its own to negotiate with.

ExpediShip solves that by aggregating. We book through UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS and freight carriers at bulk-negotiated rates and pass the discount to shipments that would otherwise pay list — which is why the saving is largest on exactly what this guide covers: heavy boxes, single pallets, furniture, luggage and international parcels leaving Texas for any of more than 200 countries, Mexico included.

What we ship from Texas

Before you request a quote

Have the seven items listed in the FAQ ready — ZIP codes at both ends, weight, dimensions of the packed piece, piece count and whether it is palletized, residential or dock at each end, commodity and value, and your timeframe. For a rural Texas address, say whether a full-size trailer can reach and turn at the delivery point. For shipments to Mexico, Canada or further afield, our duty and tax calculator estimates what the recipient will be charged on arrival — the figure most first-time exporters forget to budget for.

25. Frequently Asked Questions

References

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42. TxDMV, motor carrier and mover lookup. link
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45. FMCSA, operating authority and broker bond requirements. link
46. Move.org, car shipping cost survey, quotes collected October 2025. link
47. AmeriFreight, personal belongings in a shipped vehicle. link
48. Southwest Airlines, travel fees and checked baggage policy. link
49. American Airlines, checked baggage policy and optional service fees. link
50. United Airlines, checked bags. link
51. Institute of International Education, Open Doors 2025, Texas. PDF
52. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, sales and use tax rates. link
53. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, franchise tax rates and thresholds. link
54. Texas Constitution, Article 8, Section 24-a (individual income tax prohibited). link
55. TxDOT, Top 100 congested road segments, 2025 edition. link
56. TxDOT, statewide truck parking needs assessment. link
57. NOAA National Hurricane Center, tropical cyclone climatology. link
58. ExpediShip Research, 2025 International Shipping Cost Study — customs and VAT citations by country. Available on request.
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