Pallet: Meaning, Types and Uses in Logistics

A pallet is a standardised flat platform used to bundle, store and move goods, built so a forklift or pallet truck can lift it from any side. It is the basic handling unit in European road freight: goods are stacked on it once at the loading point and stay on it until delivery.

For a dispatcher the pallet is a unit of measurement as much as a piece of equipment. Its footprint decides how much trailer floor a shipment occupies, its own weight counts against the permissible payload, and the count per stop is what turns into a freight price.

On This Page

1. The five pallet types you meet in road freight
2. Sizes, weights and load ratings
3. Why the empty pallet costs you payload
4. From pallet count to loading metres
5. Pallets in day-to-day dispatching

The five pallet types you meet in road freight

Pallet is a category, not a single object. Five formats cover almost everything moving on European roads:

• Euro pallet (EPAL 1): the normed European load carrier and the default assumption in any freight quote. Its 1,200 by 800 mm footprint and open exchange pool are what make it interchangeable between carriers.
• Industrial pallet (EPAL 2): a 1,200 by 1,000 mm frame for heavy and bulky industrial loads, with a base frame that also runs on chain and roller conveyors.
• Half pallet (EPAL 6, also Düsseldorf pallet): half a Euro footprint, used for retail display so it can go straight onto the shop floor.
• One-way pallet: a cheap single-trip pallet with no exchange and no governing standard, so build quality and rating vary by supplier.
• Pooled pallet: a rental carrier from a pool operator, built for many trips and swapped at depots rather than exchanged truck to truck.

The licence, the inspection rules and the repair marks that decide whether a used pallet is still exchangeable belong to the association that certifies pallet production and repair, not to the carrier.

Sizes, weights and load ratings

The footprint decides how many pallets fit across a trailer, and the safe working load decides how much you may put on one. These are the official EPAL figures, not rounded trade estimates:

Note: the safe working load is the limit for one laden pallet in transit. Stacking is rated separately, and the bottom pallet in a stack carries a much higher ceiling: 5,500 kg for EPAL 1 and 4,250 kg for EPAL 2.

Why the empty pallet costs you payload

Pallet weight is not neutral. At roughly 25 kg each, a full trailer of Euro pallets puts several hundred kilograms of timber on the deck before a single carton is loaded, and that timber counts towards the permitted gross weight exactly like the goods do.

This is why quotes distinguish between the weight of the goods and the weight the vehicle and its load carriers bring to the scale. On a full tour, swapping to lighter one-way pallets or to half pallets can be the difference between a legal axle load and a fine.

From pallet count to loading metres

Trailer space is sold by the metre, not by the pallet. One loading metre is one metre of trailer length across the full internal width, so the way loading metres are counted across the floor is what converts a pallet count into a price.

Council Directive 96/53/EC caps vehicle width at 2.55 m, which leaves a standard trailer roughly 2.4 m of usable internal width. Across that width a Euro pallet occupies about 0.4 loading metres in either orientation: two side by side at 800 mm deep, or three across at 1,200 mm deep. Both arrangements work out the same, which is why 0.4 is the figure dispatchers carry in their heads.

Where a shipment does not fill the trailer, the balance is sold to someone else as a part load sharing the same deck. The full formula and an interactive calculator sit in our guide to calculating loading metres for any pallet arrangement.

Pallets in day-to-day dispatching

On a live tour the pallet drives three numbers at once: floor space, weight and cost. Entering loading units per stop is what makes those visible before the truck leaves, instead of at the weighbridge.

The three numbers move together, and that is what makes pallet planning error-prone by hand. Adding two pallets at stop three changes the metres consumed, the running weight against the axle limits, and the cost of every leg after it. Getting all three from one calculation rather than three spreadsheets is the difference between a quote you trust and one you hope about.