Container or porta cabin?
A porta cabin is a cabin built new: a light steel frame clad with sandwich panels or steel sheet, made to the size ordered, 8 to 12 ft wide, often 10. A shipping container is a box of weathering steel built to carry cargo at sea, 2,438 mm (8 ft) wide, whose corrugated walls and corner posts carry the load. Many Indian sellers call their cabins “containers”. A cabin suits a wider room that stays put; a container, a unit lifted and moved by crane, or stock kept behind steel walls. A used 20 ft box is listed from ₹1,04,000, and comes to about ₹4.4 to ₹4.8 lakh as an insulated, air-conditioned office by our estimate; we do not price cabins.
Updated 22 Oct 2026What is a porta cabin?
The word began as the name of a British company’s cabins in the 1960s; in India it now means any portable cabin built in a factory: a site office, a guard cabin, a toilet block, a small home or shop. It is made to the size ordered, on a frame of mild-steel sections. The walls and roof are either sandwich panels, two sheets of colour-coated steel around a core of polyurethane foam (PUF), expanded polystyrene or rock wool, or plain mild-steel or galvanised (GI) sheet, insulated or not; small guard cabins are also made of fibreglass (FRP). The floor is usually fibre-cement board, vinyl or chequered sheet, and the doors, windows and wiring are fitted before dispatch. The one PUF panel certificate we read, issued in 2021 by the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC), an agency of the housing ministry, covers panels whose steel faces are 0.8 mm thick at most.
A shipping container is a different object: a cargo box built to ISO standards, which a converter later turns into an office, a home or a shop. Its strength is in its shell.
Porta cabin vs shipping container: the differences
| What we compared | Shipping container | Porta cabin |
|---|---|---|
| Built as | a cargo box, converted afterwards | a cabin, built new to order |
| Walls and roof | corrugated weathering steel that carries the load: 1.6 mm side panels and a 2.0 mm roof on factory data sheets, 6 mm corner posts | sandwich panels (steel faces of 0.8 mm at most on the certified PUF panel we read) or flat steel sheet, on a light steel frame that carries the load |
| Width | always 2,438 mm (8 ft) outside, 2,352 mm inside | 8 to 12 ft, often 10, as ordered |
| Floor | 28 mm plywood on steel cross members | fibre-cement board, vinyl or sheet |
| Lifting | by its corner fittings, with a crane of the right capacity; factory data sheets (2015 and 2022) rate each corner post for 97,200 kg, for stacks of loaded boxes at sea | at the points its maker provides: ask how |
| Insulation | none: it is added inside, and takes width | in the panels, from the factory, or none in a bare sheet cabin |
| Fire | the steel shell does not burn; foam or plywood added inside does | PUF and polystyrene cores burn, rock wool does not; PUF releases twice the heat of wood per kilogram (35.2 against 17.6 MJ/kg, 2016 National Building Code). The certified PUF panel passed the British surface-spread-of-flame test (BS 476-7, Class 1): ask for the test report of the panels offered |
| Empty weight | about 2,230 kg for a 20 ft box | not published: ask the maker for the weight as delivered |
| GST | 18% (heading 8609) | 18% (heading 9406, prefabricated buildings) |
Container figures from two factory data sheets (2015 and 2022) and the data sheets behind our size guides; the cabin panel figures from one certificate of the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (2021). GST from Notification 9/2025-Central Tax (Rate), entries 530 and 615; see GST on shipping containers. Cabins are not priced on this site.
Container or porta cabin: which to choose?
- A container suits a unit that will be lifted and moved by crane, stands on a rough site, or holds stock that should stay behind steel walls; it can be stacked to an engineer’s design and lifted onto a truck again as one unit. It needs insulation and shade added, and its width is fixed.
- A porta cabin suits a fixed office or room that needs a width of 10 or 12 ft, or factory insulation and finish. Judge it by its frame sections, the thickness of the steel faces and of the core, the fire test of the panels and its weight as delivered.
What is the cost of a container room?
A used 20 ft box is listed from ₹1,04,000 before GST. Insulated, lined, wired, earthed and air-conditioned as an office, and brought by trailer from Mundra to Delhi NCR, it comes to about ₹4.4 to ₹4.8 lakh by the estimate of our container office page, or ₹2,790 to ₹3,050 per sq ft of its 159 sq ft footprint, before the openings are glazed, the door, lights and a toilet. Cabins are usually quoted per square foot: to compare, ask the cabin maker for a total with the same items, GST, delivery and unloading. For a site that lasts months, a container can also be rented as a site office.
Asia Containers does not sell or convert containers, and does not list cabin makers. A quote request goes to partner sellers who cover your PIN code: say what the unit is for, its size, the insulation you want and where it will stand.
Container cabin or porta cabin? How to tell a real container
Listings called “container cabin”, “container office” or “prefab container cabin” are mostly cabins: of the 156 “container offices” listed with a price on two online marketplaces that we read on 22 October 2026, 97 were described as fabricated cabins. A real container shows:
- a CSC safety-approval plate on the door; on a box that has been cut, whose plate must then be removed, a photo of the plate or the container number from before the conversion;
- a size-type code painted beside the container number, such as 22G1 for a 20 ft box or 45G1 for a 40 ft high cube;
- eight cast steel corner fittings with oval holes, and an outside width of exactly 8 ft.
A width of 10 or 12 ft, a price per square foot, “PUF”, “sandwich” or “GI” panels, or a size like 20 × 10 ft point to a cabin. If a listing says “container”, ask the seller in writing whether the unit is built from a shipping container, and for its number. How to inspect a used container shows what to look at on the box itself.
How long do porta cabins last, and containers?
In shipping service, a container lasts 10 to 15 years, rarely 20, and a used box has already spent part of that life at sea. On land, away from salt spray and crane handling, what it has left depends on its rust and repairs, then on paint, drainage and upkeep. We found no independent figure for a porta cabin: it depends on the frame’s steel and paint, the panels’ faces and the joints that keep the rain out. For either, ask the seller what the warranty covers and for how long, in writing.
Porta cabin for terrace or rooftop: the load on the slab
Indian Standard IS 875 (Part 2):1987 sets the load a flat roof is designed to carry at 1.5 kN/m² where people have access, and 0.75 kN/m² where they do not. An empty 20 ft container, about 2,230 kg, spread over its 14.8 m² footprint, would load the roof by about 1.5 kN/m²: all that an accessible roof is designed for, and twice what a roof without access is designed for, before furniture and people. It also stands on four corners, each pressing about 5.5 kN (some 560 kg) on a small patch. No maker publishes the weight of a porta cabin: ask for it, as delivered, and for the points where its frame bears. Before either goes up, have a structural engineer check the slab, the supports and the base they stand on, and plan the crane (site preparation and unloading). A room on a terrace is also a building under rules such as Tamil Nadu’s, which cover a structure of any material: see the permit section below.
Security cabin or guard cabin: when a container makes sense
Guard cabins sold in India are small, from about 4 × 4 to 8 × 8 ft, insulated in their panels or made of fibreglass. A container is a bigger post. A used 20 ft box, from ₹1,04,000, gives the guard a rest area or a store behind steel walls and doors that lock with their own bars. A used 10 ft container (72 sq ft inside) fits a narrow gate but costs more, from ₹1,67,000, because few reach the used market. Bare steel gets very hot in the sun: a guard who sits inside all day needs insulation, a window cut with a steel frame, and a fan or an air conditioner. In Delhi, a porta cabin of up to 4.5 m² (about 48 sq ft, such as 6 × 8 ft) inside the plot line needs no building permit; even a 10 ft container, about 7.3 m², is larger.
Does a porta cabin need a building permit?
In Delhi, the building bye-laws exempt from a building permit a porta cabin of up to 4.5 m² placed within the plot line, if fire tenders can still move freely (Unified Building Bye-Laws for Delhi 2016, clause 2.0.1(d)(xv)). Even a 10 ft container is larger than that: outside a temporary site office during construction, it falls under the ordinary rules. See permission to place a container for Delhi, Pune and Chennai.