Outside dimensions do not tell you how much paper goes in
Every boxing estimate that comes up short does it the same way. Somebody measures the outside of a carton, divides the filing they have by that number, and orders. The filing length inside is shorter than the outside length by two wall thicknesses, by the hand-hold recess if there is one, and by however much the box bows once it is loaded. Then the box gets filled to about nine tenths, because a box packed to the last inch cannot be opened without pulling half of it out.
Those two reductions compound. A carton fifteen inches long on the outside might take fourteen inches of filing, and filled to ninety percent it takes 12.6 inches of actual paper. Against the outside figure that is a sixteen percent shortfall: paper you thought would fill forty boxes fills forty-eight. The fix is not a safety margin. It is measuring the inside of one box and being honest about how full you fill it.
Filing inches, and why drawers are the easy case
Paper archives are measured along the direction the files are filed — the depth of a drawer, or the run along a shelf — and that is the unit everything converts through. A file drawer with 24 inches of filing space that is 80 percent full holds 19.2 inches of paper. Twelve of those drawers is 230.4 inches, which is 19.2 linear feet.
| What you have | Filing inches each | How to measure it |
|---|---|---|
| A drawer | Its inside front-to-back length | Tape measure inside the empty part of the drawer, then estimate how full it is |
| A shelf of upright binders | The run along the shelf | Push them together and measure the block |
| A box already packed | The filing length inside it | Measure the inside, not the label |
| A stack lying flat | The height of the stack | Flat paper files the same way, standing on its edge instead of its back |
The one thing not to do is count sheets or folders. Folder thickness varies more than book thickness does, and a folder with a dozen sheets and a folder with two hundred are the same object in a count and eleven times apart in the drawer.
Weight, which is the part that surprises people
Paper is dense. A filing inch of ordinary correspondence weighs somewhere in the region of a pound and a half, so a carton holding twelve or thirteen inches of it is around twenty pounds before the box itself. That is manageable one at a time and it is not manageable fifty at a time, and it is well over the weight of the same volume of household goods.
The figure is a field rather than a constant because it moves with the paper. Heavy stock, card dividers, hanging folders with metal rails and anything printed on both sides of thick paper all push it up; carbon copies and onion skin pull it down. Weighing a measured inch of your own files on a bathroom scale beats any default, and it takes one minute.
Stacked on a pallet the numbers get large quickly, and this is where the calculator stops and points elsewhere. Paper on a pallet puts a concentrated load on a small footprint, and whether a floor takes it depends on the floor. That is an engineer's question. Naming the hazard is the useful thing a calculator can do here; specifying the floor is not.
Shelf or pallet, and what each costs you
Cartons on shelving are reachable and countable, and every carton is retrievable without moving another one. Cartons on pallets are cheaper per cubic foot and are a block: getting at the bottom layer means unstacking the top. The choice usually comes down to whether anybody is going to look in the boxes again during the storage period.
On shelving, the binding number is how many carton widths fit the clear shelf length, and the remainder is dead. A 42 inch shelf takes three 12 inch cartons with six inches left over, which is not enough for a fourth and is enough to be annoying. On pallets the binding number is which of the two floor orientations fits more, which the calculator works out both ways and takes the better of.
For general household boxes rather than files, the moving box calculator estimates from room count, and the moving load weight calculator shows what a box of paper weighs against a truck payload. If the boxes are going into rented space, the storage unit size calculator converts cubic feet into a unit size, and for a warehouse layout the pallet rack layout calculator handles bays and aisles.
Questions people ask
How many file boxes do I need for one filing cabinet?
Work it in filing inches. Measure the inside front-to-back filing length of one drawer, estimate how full it is, and multiply by the number of drawers. A four-drawer cabinet with 24 inches of filing per drawer at 80 percent full holds about 76.8 inches, and a carton taking 12.6 inches of paper does about six of them. The reason to do it this way rather than by a rule of thumb is that drawer depths differ, and how full a drawer is differs a lot more.
Why is the inside filing length shorter than the box?
Two walls of corrugated board, plus the hand-hold recess if the box has one, plus the fact that a loaded box bows outward at the middle and inward at the ends. On a fifteen inch box that easily adds up to an inch. It sounds trivial and it is not: combined with filling a box to ninety percent rather than the brim, it is the difference between the count you calculated and the count you needed, and it always goes the same way.
How much does a full file box weigh?
The calculator works it from a weight per filing inch that you measure, because that is the figure that actually varies. As orientation, ordinary correspondence weighs somewhere around a pound and a half per filing inch, so a box holding twelve or thirteen inches lands near twenty pounds plus the box. Heavier stock, card dividers and hanging folders push it up. If you are moving a lot of boxes, weigh one full one before deciding how they get carried and how high they get stacked.
How long do I have to keep these records?
That is not a question a calculator can answer, and any page that gives you a number for it is guessing. Retention periods differ by the kind of record, by jurisdiction, by industry, and by whether anything is under legal hold. Tax, employment, medical and contract records all run on different clocks. The people to ask are a lawyer and whoever handles records management where the files came from. This page counts boxes.
Should I box files upright or lying flat?
Both work and the arithmetic here handles either, as long as you measure the filing direction consistently. Upright in the box, as they sat in the drawer, is easier to file into and easier to search later, and the filing length is the front-to-back dimension of the box. Lying flat is denser and harder to look through, and the filing length becomes the stack height. What matters more than the orientation is that you use the same convention for the paper measurement and for the box measurement.