The smallest load of concrete you can order, and what happens below it

A minimum load is a property of the delivery vehicle, not of the concrete. Once the mixing water meets the cement and aggregate the load is committed: it goes to one address and it discharges inside one window. Washington State's 2024 highway specifications put numbers on both. Section 6-02.3(4)A permits a maximum of 320 drum revolutions, mixing and agitation combined, before discharge, and requires that central-mixed concrete carried in a truck mixer undergo no more than 250 revolutions before discharging begins. Section 5-05.3(3)B allows concrete hauled in a non-agitating body only where discharge is completed within 45 minutes of the mixing water being introduced, or within 60 minutes if the mix is at 70°F or below or carries an approved set retarder at minimum dosage. None of that lets a producer batch a quarter load, park it, and add to it later.

So the producer's cost floor is a truck movement — driver, drum, fuel, wash-out, round trip — and almost none of it changes with how much is in the drum. The minimum load and the short-load fee are the gap between what you ordered and what the trip costs. The two clauses of the American ready-mixed concrete specification that we read state no figure of their own. In its 24d edition, clause 6.1.10 makes the limit from the start of mixing to the completion of discharge the purchaser's to state, falls back to the producer where the purchaser states none, and requires that limit to be printed on the delivery ticket; clause 6.1.9 puts the revolution limit on the same footing, though it requires only that the producer communicate it before delivery. The window became a contract term. It did not become optional, and it is why one trip cannot be shared between two addresses.

We opened three calculator pages on this question on 24 September 2026. They do not agree on whether the figure can be published at all. The Ready-Mix Short Load Fee Guide at easyconcretecalc declines it in terms: "The exact rules vary by supplier and region, so this guide explains the questions to ask rather than claiming a universal current price." In place of a number it publishes seven questions to put to a supplier — the minimum order size before a short-load fee applies, whether concrete is sold in quarter, half or full yard increments, whether delivery is included or listed separately, how much unloading time is allowed before waiting charges begin, whether fuel, environmental, weekend or remote-area charges apply, whether the truck can reach the forms or a pump or wheelbarrow crew will be needed, and what happens if the pour needs slightly more or less than was ordered.

The other two do publish figures, and both label them. concreteestimatorhub works one order through in United States dollars per cubic yard — an assumed price per yard, an assumed delivery charge, an assumed flat short-load fee and a three-cubic-yard minimum — and states the assumptions as assumptions before using them. allconcretecalculator does the same in a reference table, captions its price and fee fields as United States averages, gives the standard American ready-mix truck as eight to ten cubic yards, and repeatedly tells the reader to take the figure from his own supplier. So the honest reading of that set is not that the figure is being withheld. It is that the two pages willing to print one print an American illustration and then send the reader back to his own supplier for the real number. Which is the answer: this question has a per-supplier answer, obtained in writing before the order, and no general one.

The economics of a short load travel. The figures do not, and neither does the unit. Our own autocomplete sweeps found the ready mix minimum order and ready mix concrete minimum delivery cluster returning the same United States result set under Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the Philippines and Indonesia; a separate sweep of the truck-dimension cluster returned a byte-identical list under Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia and India. The two sweeps did not use the same set of countries, and neither of them is a measurement of demand; each is a record of what an autocomplete endpoint offered to complete on the day it was run. What they show is that the query localises in the searcher's head and not in the results, so a contractor in Davao or Port Harcourt asking this gets an American answer with nothing on the page to say that is what it is.

Two things follow outside the United States. The unit on those pages is cubic yards and the machines here are specified in cubic metres, so a figure converted between the two and presented as a local price is two errors stacked — a conversion and a transplant. The mechanism that produces a minimum load is the same wherever a truck hauls a drum, so the reasoning above is worth carrying home while the dollar figure is not. We have sourced no published minimum order and no short-load fee for Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria or any other destination market, so none appears here. What does transfer is the structure of the bill. One line scales with the volume you take and one line scales with the trip that brings it, and a small pour is punished on the second. Ask the supplier who would actually serve your site to itemise both, in your own currency and your own unit.

Below the supplier's line the question stops being what you can order and becomes what you can batch. Our specification records cover sixteen self-loading mixers, and fourteen of them carry a real discharge figure, from 1.0 to 4.5 cubic metres per load. The three at the bottom discharge 1.0, 1.3 and 1.5 cubic metres, and none of the three has a detail page on this site, because the written factory specification behind it has not reached us. The five crawler dozers in the same records carry no discharge figure at all, which is a difference of category rather than a gap in the data. What the mixer figures establish is the shape of the thing: a machine that loads its own aggregate, mixes on board and discharges at the form is not amortising a round trip over the load. There is no commercial floor under a batch, because there is no trip to pay for.

What we cannot give you is the technical floor. A drum has a charge below which it will not mix properly, and no figure for it exists in our records for any of the sixteen mixers — no minimum batch volume, no minimum charge as a fraction of drum volume. That is a question for the manufacturer, in writing, before the order, and it matters most to the buyer this page is written for: the one whose typical pour is a stair flight, a pile cap or forty metres of kerb. Ask it with a mix design attached, since the answer moves with the mix. What is documented machine by machine, and what is not, is set out on the model pages for the self-loading mixer range; the SLM-18 is the one model whose specification is complete enough for us to publish in full.

One sub-minimum pour is a pricing problem. A day of them is a logistics problem, and the harder one, because each pour is a fresh trip, a fresh minimum and a fresh window. Equipment for drawing the machine's own water is recorded on fifteen of the sixteen mixers — an automatic water-fill controller with an external suction pump on seven of them, a high-capacity water tank with an on-board filling system on eight — so water is taken on from a drum, a bowser or a standpipe at the site rather than by returning to a supply. A drum that lifts and rotates through 270° is recorded on seven of the sixteen, so those machines discharge to either side and behind without being repositioned. Both are declared equipment lists rather than anything we have measured, and neither says how long a cycle takes.

Road speed is recorded on four of the six mixers in our catalogue: 0 to 23 km/h on the SLM-18, and 0 to 36 km/h on three larger machines in the same range. It is not recorded on the other two catalogued models, one of which is the 1.0 cubic metre machine, and the 1.3 and 1.5 cubic metre machines are not in the catalogue at all — which is to say, no speed is recorded for any machine this page is about. They move between pour points under their own power; how fast the small ones do it we cannot say, and we will not borrow a figure from a larger machine to fill the gap. No output per hour, no cubic metres per day, no loads per shift, no cycle time and no fuel figure exists in our records for any machine, so none appears here. How many pours fit into your day is arithmetic against your own distances and crew.

In September 2026 we counted registered business listings within 50 km of ten Southeast Asian cities and divided construction companies by ready-mix concrete suppliers. The ratio runs from 44.5 in Davao through 61.9 in Cebu, 63.0 in Jakarta, 68.7 in Surabaya, 69.6 in both Metro Manila and Iloilo, 80.2 in Medan, 84.9 in Makassar and 89.6 in Hanoi, to 96.5 in Ho Chi Minh City. Three conditions travel with those numbers. They are registered business listings inside a radius — not batching plants, not working contractors and not a market size — and one company can be listed under more than one category. Listing coverage differs by country, so comparing two cities inside one country is more reliable than comparing across a border. And the pull is a first version we have flagged as carrying errors elsewhere in it; the correction re-pulled a different category and changes neither of the two counts used here.

What that establishes is narrow, and it is worth being exact about. It tells you that in these ten cities the count of firms that might want concrete is between 44.5 and 96.5 times the count listed as able to supply it ready-mixed. It does not tell you that any supplier will refuse your order, and it cannot tell you whether the nearest plant sits inside the discharge window your specification sets, because a count of listings contains no distance and no drive time. We have measured neither, for any city. The figure that decides it for your site is a drive time at the hour you pour, and it is the one number this page cannot give you. No African or Latin American city appears in this data, so nothing here carries to Nigeria, Kenya, Peru or Mexico, and no market size is drawn from it.

Put those seven questions to the supplier and get the answers in writing before the order. They are not ours — they are the published checklist of the one page we read that refused to name a figure, and the refusal is what makes them worth using: they separate the charges that scale with your pour from the charges that scale with the trip. Add two of our own. Which time limit from the start of mixing to the completion of discharge will be printed on the delivery ticket, since the 24d edition of the American specification requires that a limit be stated there. And how far is the plant from your gate, measured as a drive at the hour you will pour rather than as a line on a map. Neither answer is a price, and both change what a price means.

If the answers come back that the nearest plant sits outside that window, or that it will not send a truck for the volume you need, the equipment question opens — and it is settled on documents rather than on a brochure. Measured width against your narrowest gate, discharge per load against your form, shipping mode against your port, and a written specification for the model you are buying rather than a range borrowed from its neighbours. Ask for the machine's dimensioned drawing by model, and for the specification on the plant's own letterhead rather than a figure carried over from a neighbouring model; that carry-over is where a container booking goes wrong. That sequence is set out on the how we work page. No price for concrete and no price for a machine appears here: we hold no sourced figure for the first, and the second is a commercial decision we have not taken.