FreightPaperwork

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Free Bill of Lading Form

A bill of lading is the receipt and the contract a carrier signs when it takes your freight. Fill the form in below — shipper, consignee and the freight itself — and download a print-ready PDF. Free, no signup, and nothing you type is uploaded unless you sign in to save it. If you would rather write it out by hand, take a blank bill of lading instead.

Bill of lading

Standard short form. Required fields are marked; the rest print blank if you leave them.

Document
Ship from — shipper
Ship to — consignee
Carrier

Four-letter carrier code.

Freight

One line per commodity. Weight and description are what a carrier checks first, and a missing NMFC class is the usual reason an invoice comes back higher than the quote.

Line 1
Charges, value and terms

Leave blank and the carrier's tariff cap applies.

Non-recourse: the carrier collects from the consignee only.

Special instructions

Required on the shipping paper whenever hazmat is aboard. It must be answered by someone who knows the load.

Everything stays in this browser tab. Nothing you type is uploaded, and no account is needed.

What this does and does not do

What comes out is a standard short-form straight bill of lading — the layout most LTL and truckload carriers work from every day. It is not a carrier-branded form. FedEx Freight, some retail distribution networks and any lane running on EDI will want their own document or a tendered shipment instead. It also does not rate your freight, look up NMFC item numbers or talk to a carrier's system. You fill it in, it prints.

What a bill of lading is, in three sentences

It is a receipt: the carrier signs to say it took this freight, in this condition, on this date. It is a contract of carriage: the terms printed on the face bind the shipper and the carrier for the length of the haul. And for some types it is a document of title, which means whoever holds the paper controls who gets the goods.

Those three jobs are why a scribbled note on a packing slip will not do. When something goes wrong — a shortage, a crushed pallet, an invoice for double the quote — the bill of lading is the first document anyone asks for, and the second is the signed delivery receipt. If you want the long version, the legal background is set out here.

Every freight document, in one place

The bill of lading is the one everybody needs. The rest of the paperwork around a load — the lumper receipt, the POD, the invoice you send the broker — is being built out the same way, one document at a time.

Why another bill of lading form

Search for a BOL form and you get two kinds of result. The first is a flat PDF you download, print, and then fill in by hand at a desk with a pen — fine if you ship one pallet a month, awful if you are doing four a day and the shipper block never changes. The second is a template behind a signup wall, where the price of a piece of paper is your email address and, on some sites, your shipment details sitting on somebody else's server.

This is the third option. Type into a real form, get a real PDF, and keep the data on your own machine. The generation happens in JavaScript in your browser, with no server-side step and no signup — which is not a privacy slogan so much as an architectural fact. Used this way there is no store of shipment data here to leak, because none is created.

Why it is built this way is a longer answer, but the trade-off is honest enough to state plainly: nothing is saved between visits, so if you ship to the same twelve consignees every week you retype them every week. That is exactly what the paid plan is for — a company account that keeps saved parties, a document history and sequential numbering. It is opt-in, it costs money, and the generators above never stop working without it.

The four fields that cause trouble

Most BOL errors are harmless. Four are not, and they are the ones that turn a routine claim into a denied claim or a quoted rate into a rebill.

Each of those has a field on the form above, and the field-by-field walkthrough explains what a carrier actually looks at when it reads them.

How the generator works

  1. Fill in the shipper and consignee blocks. City and state are required on both; the rest print blank if you skip them.
  2. Name the carrier. Add the SCAC, trailer and seal numbers if you have them at the dock.
  3. Add a freight line for each commodity — handling units, description, NMFC number, class and weight. Tick the hazmat box on any line that needs it.
  4. Set the declared value if the freight is worth more than the tariff cap, and mark the freight terms as prepaid, collect or third party.
  5. Hit Download PDF. Print three copies: driver, consignee, your file.

Prefer paper the whole way? The Print button renders the same document through your browser's print dialog, no download step. And if you land here with JavaScript switched off, printing this page still gives you a ruled blank BOL you can complete by hand.

Common questions

Is this bill of lading generator really free?

Yes. Every generator is free, with no trial and no watermark. The form runs in your browser and the PDF is built on your own device. There is a paid plan for companies that want saved addresses, document history and sequential numbering, and it is optional — nothing behind it is needed to produce a document.

Do I need to sign up or give an email address?

No. Signed out, nothing you type is sent anywhere: close the tab and the shipment details are gone, which also means we cannot recover a BOL for you later, so save the PDF when you download it. Signing in is only for the paid plan, where documents are deliberately kept so you can reopen them.

Will my carrier accept a bill of lading I generated here?

Most LTL and truckload carriers accept a standard short-form BOL, and that is what this produces. Some carriers — FedEx Freight and several retail distribution networks among them — require their own branded form or an EDI tender. Ask your carrier before the truck shows up, not after.

How many copies of a bill of lading do I need?

Three is the working answer: one for the driver, one for the consignee, one you keep. Print the PDF three times. If the freight is moving on an order bill of lading rather than a straight BOL, the original set matters legally and the consignee must surrender an original to take delivery.

What is the difference between a BOL number and a PRO number?

You create the BOL number; the carrier creates the PRO number. The BOL number is your reference for the shipment and can be anything you like, including a purchase order. The PRO is the carrier's tracking number, usually printed on a barcode label the driver applies at pickup. Both end up on the freight invoice.

What happens if I leave the declared value blank?

The carrier's tariff limitation of liability applies instead, and that is usually a released value measured in dollars per pound rather than what the freight is actually worth. On a pallet of electronics the difference between the two numbers can be thousands of dollars. Declare the value when the freight is worth more than the tariff cap.

Can I use this on my phone in the truck?

Yes. The form is built for a 360-pixel screen, the Generate button stays reachable at the bottom while you scroll, and the PDF downloads to the phone. Most truck stop print kiosks will take it off a USB stick or an emailed attachment.

Does a bill of lading have to be signed to be valid?

For it to work as a receipt, yes — the carrier signs at pickup to acknowledge what was loaded and in what condition. The consignee signs at delivery, and that signature is what turns the document into proof of delivery. An unsigned BOL is a shipping instruction, not evidence.