Your accounting team will never record this loss, because it appears on no invoice: the air you ship.
When pallet dimensions do not match the container, you pay full freight and carry empty space — on every sailing, every month, every year.
The number that decides everything is 2.35 m
That is the internal width of a standard container. How your pallet divides into it governs your loading efficiency.
- 1100 × 1100 mm (the Asian standard) — two rows across use 2.20 m. A clean fit.
- 1200 × 1000 mm — two rows across the 1000 side use 2.00 m, leaving 35 cm of dead width running the full length of the box.
- 1200 × 800 mm (EUR) — usually needs a pinwheel pattern to reach maximum count.
The gap between the best and the worst layout is typically one to three pallets per container. Over a year of shipping, that difference exceeds everything you spend on pallets.
Height is money as well
Standard internal height is roughly 2.39 m; high cube, roughly 2.69 m. If your cargo double-stacks, the height your pallet consumes decides whether the second tier fits at all. Thirty millimetres sounds trivial until it is the reason you book an extra container.
“My cargo weighs one tonne” is not a specification
A pallet has three different load ratings, and they are far apart:
- Static — stacked on a flat floor.
- Dynamic — lifted and moved by forklift.
- Racking — supported at two ends only, unsupported in the middle.
Racking capacity is the harshest of the three and is a fraction of static capacity. Most pallet failures are not weak pallets; they are warehouse pallets that ended up on racking in the buyer’s facility overseas.
How QP Pallet handles it
We do not open with “how many do you need.” We ask what you ship, in which container, to which market — and whether the pallet will sit on a floor or go onto a rack. From there we calculate the loading pattern and propose the specification that maximises pallets per container, rather than the size we happen to have in stock. For volume orders we build and load-test a sample before you commit, because one wrong design multiplied by several thousand units is an expensive mistake.
Send us your carton dimensions and weights. We will return a specification with a container loading plan — at no cost, whether or not you order