Rates

What a Rate is

A Rate is a pricing/service result returned for a Shipment in the current request and available Account/carrier context. It is not a booking, reservation, purchased service, permanent quote, standalone public CRUD resource, or persisted selection.

Get Rates

There are two public paths to Rate results:

• get Rates for an existing Shipment.
• Create an Order with Rates creates one Order and returns its Shipment Rates in the same response. It is one Order per request, not a batch operation.

Packed is not a prerequisite for either path.

Select a Rate for Label purchase

Shipment
  -> Rate results
  -> client selects rateId
  -> Label purchase request

The client selects a returned rateId and supplies it to the Label purchase request. Retain that value only as needed for the current workflow. Selecting a Rate is not documented as a mutation of Mailhub state.

See Labels for the bounded Label operation behavior. Use Select a Rate for the application-owned selection step.

Public Rate fields

Field	Classification	Public meaning
id	IDENTIFIER	Returned Rate identifier. A selected returned id is supplied for the Label-purchase workflow.
rate	PRICE	Returned Rate price value.
currency	CURRENCY	Returned currency value associated with rate.
carrier	CARRIER_DISPLAY	Returned carrier display value.
serviceCode	SERVICE_DISPLAY	Returned service code value.
serviceName	SERVICE_DISPLAY	Returned service display value.

For the complete Rate response schema, including all optional fields and types, see the API Reference.

serviceCode is provider-dependent. Do not hard-code or parse it, and do not build against a fixed list of values — the public contract does not define one. Recognize a service by its returned serviceName, and carry the returned id into the Label-purchase workflow.

Result interpretation

More than one Rate result can be returned. The client makes the selection for its own workflow.

Do not infer cheapest, best, recommended, or otherwise ranked meaning from the response order unless a future public contract explicitly defines one.

Validity and outcomes

The current public contract does not define a Rate validity period.

For V1, a successful response can contain rates: []. Inspect carrierResponses when it is present in the response, together with the public response envelope. This page does not assign a complete diagnostic meaning to that field.

For Create an Order with Rates, the documented 422 response can represent an invalid Order or a case where no carrier could rate the Shipment.

See Rate Errors for the documented error guidance.