Industrial Pallets

Pallets Buying Guide

Start with the material, because it decides everything else. Every pallet on this page does the same job, so the real decision is the material, and each one trades cost against durability, weight, hygiene, and corrosion resistance. Wood is the default in most buildings and is not what this catalog sells; the pallets here are the ones you reach for when wood keeps failing, contaminates product, rots outdoors, or gets rejected at a customs border. Plastic, steel, aluminum, wire, and presswood each answer one of those failures. Sort by the problem first, then by footprint and load rating, and the range separates cleanly into a handful of clear choices.

Plastic: hygiene, washdown, and no loose hardware. Our two plastic lines, the Plastic Pallet/Skids and the larger Plastic Pallets and Skids range, are the answer wherever wood's splinters, nails, and moisture are the problem. Plastic will not absorb water or harbor bacteria, it has no protruding nails or screws to snag, and it wipes down, which is why food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and clean-room operations standardize on it. Pick a grated deck for drainage and airflow, or a solid deck where fines and liquids would fall through, and the larger range comes in seven colors for line coding or department sorting. Static capacity on the plastic pallet reaches near 8,800 lb, well above any single palletized load, but read the dynamic and rack numbers before you trust that figure on a forklift or a beam.

Steel and galvanized steel: heavy loads that outlast the freight. The Heavy Duty Solid Deck Steel Pallet and the Steel Pallets with Hot-Dipped Galvanized Finish are what you buy when a load is too heavy or too hot for anything else, or when the pallet lives outdoors. Welded steel has no boards to crack and a far longer service life than wood under repeated heavy loads. The hot-dip galvanized version adds a zinc coating that resists corrosion in wet, outdoor, and washdown settings, so it is the pick for rust-prone environments where a painted or bare pallet would fail. Galvanized comes in 36 in square, 48 by 40 in, 48 by 42 in, and 48 in square footprints on our site. Steel is the heaviest option by a wide margin, so factor the empty weight into your handling and freight.

Aluminum: steel-grade capacity at a fraction of the weight. The Aluminum Pallets and Skids line splits the difference. Aluminum's strength-to-weight ratio beats steel's, so an aluminum pallet carries a heavy rating, up to 6,000 lb static in our catalog, while staying light enough for easier manual handling and lower shipping weight. It also resists corrosion with no coating, which suits export, cleanroom, and precision work where a light, non-rusting, reusable pallet earns its higher price over many trips. The range runs from a compact 20 by 24 in skid to a full 48 in square, in standard or solid tops and standard or open-skid bottoms, with prices from around $103 to just over $500 depending on size and configuration.

Wire and presswood: the two specialty decks. Two pallets here solve narrower problems. The Galvanized Welded Wire Pallets use an open mesh deck, which drains, lets air through, keeps stored goods visible, and works with overhead fire sprinklers where a solid deck would block the spray; they come in 48 by 40 in and 48 in square. The Recycled Nestable Presswood Pallets are the cheapest pallet on the page, in the mid $30s, and molded from recycled wood fiber so they nest to save storage space when empty. Because presswood is classed as processed wood material, it is exempt from ISPM-15 heat-treatment and stamping rules, which makes it a clean single-trip pallet for international export without the customs risk raw solid wood carries.

The specialty item: the scaffold transport pallet. The Star Industries Scaffold Pallets are the outlier here, and the reason for the near $4,900 price. This is a scaffold transport and storage pallet built for rental yards, not a shipping platform: loose frames and braces load once, stack uniformly, and stay consolidated through delivery, the job, return, and redeployment, moving as one 950 lb unit by forklift. Fork loops set the forks correctly and two anchor points take a strap for transport. If you run scaffold, it removes the repetitive hand-stacking that drives most of the labor cost in scaffold rental. If you are buying a pallet to ship product, it is the wrong item on this page, and a standard Vestil pallet is the right buy.

Read the load rating and the fork entry before you buy. Two spec details cause most mistakes. First, pallet ratings come in three flavors and they are not interchangeable: static is the pallet resting on a flat floor and is always the highest number, dynamic is what it carries while a forklift moves it, and rack or edge-rack capacity, supported only at its ends on beams, is the lowest and the one that actually governs rack storage. Buy to the number that matches how you store, not the headline static figure. Second, check fork entry: a 4-way pallet accepts a forklift or pallet jack from all four sides, while a 2-way takes entry from two sides only, which limits how you approach it in a tight aisle. Match footprint to your racking and your product before you settle the deck material, because a pallet that will not fit the beam or the truck is the wrong pallet at any price.