Pallet Racking

Pallet Racking

Pallet racking is the structural steel frame that holds palletised stock off the floor so a forklift or reach truck can put it away and get it back. It is the single biggest storage decision most warehouses make, and it is the one that is hardest to undo — a pallet racking system is bolted to your slab, designed around your pallet and your truck, and expected to stand for twenty years.

We supply STOW Conventional Pallet Racking, a modular adjustable system built to order for your building. It is not a boxed product with a price on a shelf, and this page is written to help you decide whether that is what you actually need — including the cases where it plainly is not.

Pallet racking, pallet rack, warehouse racking, storage racking — one product, many names

Buyers search for the same thing under a dozen labels, and suppliers use them interchangeably. Pallet racking, pallet rack, storage racking, warehouse racking, industrial racking, steel racking, heavy duty racking and adjustable pallet racking all describe the same family: bolted upright frames carrying horizontal beams, loaded by truck, one pallet or more per beam level.

Three things are frequently called racking and are not pallet racking, and choosing the wrong one is expensive:

If you are not yet sure which system your stock profile calls for, start with warehouse racking types explained, then come back here.

What we supply: STOW Conventional Pallet Racking

STOW is a European racking manufacturer and the conventional adjustable system is its mainstream product. The published specification of the range we supply:

  • Frames — high-strength bolted construction, available painted or galvanised. STOW rates the frame system for heights of up to 40 metres and bay loads of up to 45 tonnes.
  • Beams — cold-formed tubular beams, box beams, and shelf beams where a level is used for hand picking rather than pallets.
  • End connectors — boltless, micro-alloy steel, with safety pins to stop a beam being knocked out of its frame by a mis-placed pallet. This matters more than it sounds; dislodged beams are one of the commonest causes of rack collapse.
  • Rack protection — optional upright protectors and end-of-aisle guards.
  • Design — computer-aided layout, so the bay and beam configuration is drawn to your building and your pallet before anything is ordered.
  • Standards — designed to meet the European FEM and EN standards for static steel storage systems.
  • Supply — made to order, 30–45 day lead time, quoted per configuration.

The 40 metre and 45 tonne figures are frame capability, not your building

Those two numbers are what the steel can do. They are almost never what limits your installation, and it is worth being blunt about that because racking is routinely specified from the wrong end.

In a typical UK unit the binding constraint, in the order it usually bites, is:

  1. Your forklift's lift height. The top beam level has to be one your truck can actually serve, loaded, with the mast raised inside the building. A counterbalance truck typically runs out long before a reach truck does. This is the constraint that decides the number of beam levels, and therefore the whole design.
  2. Clear height under the lowest obstruction. Not the apex — the sprinkler drops, lighting, ducting, roof bracing and door heads. Pallets need clearance above them, and sprinkler design in particular imposes rules about what may sit under a head.
  3. The floor slab. Every upright concentrates a large load into a small footplate. Slab thickness, construction and condition determine what the base plate can transmit and whether the anchor detail works. An unknown slab is a survey item, not an assumption.
  4. Aisle width. The truck's right-angle stacking aisle governs how much of the floor is racking and how much is air. Narrowing the aisle buys pallet positions and costs truck flexibility.
  5. Only then, the frame.

The practical consequence: if a supplier quotes racking from a floor plan alone, without asking what truck you run and what the clear height is under the sprinklers, the quote is a guess. Bay and beam sizing starts with the pallet itself — our guide to UK pallet sizes, standard versus Euro dimensions covers footprints and how pallet depth drives frame selection, and the pallet racking buying guide works through bays, beams and load ratings in detail.

How pallet racking is priced — and why there is no price on this page

"How much does pallet racking cost?" is the most-asked question on this subject and almost nobody answers it, because a bay price without a configuration is meaningless. What we can do is explain the arithmetic, which is more useful than a number.

You are buying two things: frames and beams. Frames are the expensive part per unit. Beams are cheaper and you buy a pair per pallet level per bay. Two pieces of arithmetic follow, and both of them are worth knowing before you take a quote:

  • A run of n bays needs n+1 frames. Adjacent bays share an upright. A single run of ten bays needs eleven frames; five separate runs of two bays need fifteen. Same twenty bays, four extra frames — so long continuous runs are materially cheaper per pallet position than short ones, and a layout that breaks the racking into stubs to work around an obstruction is paying for that obstruction twice.
  • Adding beam levels is the cheapest capacity you will ever buy. Once the frame is bought and anchored, each additional pallet level costs a pair of beams. If the clear height and the truck allow a fourth level where you specified three, the marginal cost per pallet position collapses. This is why point 1 above — lift height — decides the economics as well as the design.

Beyond the steel, a realistic budget also carries decking or mesh if you are storing anything that will not span two beams safely, upright and end-of-aisle protection, load notices, delivery, and installation. We quote against the drawn layout rather than publishing a bay rate, because the bay rate is the part of the price that varies least.

Adjustable, drive-in, push-back, narrow aisle and double-deep

Conventional adjustable pallet racking — what we supply — gives you direct access to every pallet. That is its defining property and the reason it dominates: any pallet, any time, no shuffling. The alternatives all trade access for density, and the trade is worth understanding before anyone sells you one.

  • Adjustable (APR / conventional) — every pallet directly accessible. Best where you hold many SKUs in small quantities, or where stock rotation matters. The default, and usually the right answer.
  • Double-deep racking — pallets stored two deep, served by a truck with extending forks. Roughly halves your aisles and roughly halves your selectivity: you must move the front pallet to reach the back one, so it suits pairs of identical pallets.
  • Drive-in racking — the truck enters a lane and stacks pallets on rails. The densest conventional option and the least selective: last in, first out, one SKU per lane. Excellent for a small number of high-volume lines; painful for anything else, and harder on the steel because trucks drive inside the structure.
  • Push-back racking — pallets sit on nested carts on inclined rails; loading a new pallet pushes the others back. Denser than adjustable, still last-in-first-out, but loaded from the aisle rather than from inside the lane.
  • Narrow aisle (VNA) — conventional racking set at aisles a dedicated man-up or turret truck can work. Buys a large amount of floor without giving up selectivity, but ties you to a specific truck, demands a much flatter floor, and usually needs guidance rails or wire.

Drive-in, push-back and VNA are specialist designs and each one changes the truck you must run for the life of the installation. If you are considering them, the truck decision and the racking decision have to be made together, not in sequence.

New or used? An honest answer

A large share of the UK pallet racking market is second-hand, and searches for used pallet racking, racking for sale and second hand pallet racking are heavy for good reason. We do not sell used racking, and there are cases where used is the better buy:

  • You need bays in days, not weeks. Our system is made to order with a 30–45 day lead time. If a container lands next Tuesday, that is not a fit.
  • You are fitting out a short lease and the racking will not follow you.
  • You need to extend an existing run and can source the identical manufacturer's components.

Three things to insist on if you buy used, because the risk in second-hand racking is not rust:

  1. Do not mix manufacturers. Beam end connectors and upright perforations differ between makes, and a connector that appears to engage in another manufacturer's upright may not be transmitting load the way either design intended. Mixed-make racking is a recognised hazard, not a cosmetic concern.
  2. Get the rated capacity in writing. Racking with no known design capacity cannot be given a correct load notice, and a load notice you cannot substantiate is worse than none.
  3. Have it inspected before you load it. Prior damage, previous repairs and unrecorded modifications are the real risk, and they are not always visible from the aisle.

Installation, load notices and inspection

Can you install pallet racking yourself? Nothing forbids it — but the design capacity assumes the system is erected to specification: frames plumb, floor-fixed with the specified anchors into a slab that will take them, beams level and every safety pin engaged. Racking that is out of plumb or short of its anchors is not carrying the load it was designed to carry, whatever the beam label says.

Once it is up, the rated load has to be displayed. Load notices are how anyone driving a truck knows what a beam level will take, and they are the first thing an inspector looks for.

Racking is then a maintained asset, not a fixture. Impact damage accumulates quietly, and the guidance — SEMA good practice, HSE's HSG76 and the EN 15635 approach to inspection — expects routine visual checks by your own people plus a documented expert inspection. We have written that up separately: see warehouse racking inspection: SEMA, HSG76 and what UK law expects. Prevention is cheaper than repair, and upright guards and end-of-aisle barriers pay for themselves the first time a truck clips a frame — see also our safety barriers range.

What we do not supply

Stated plainly so you are not waiting on a quote that is not coming:

Specifying a system in five steps

  1. Measure the pallet, not the product. Footprint, height loaded, weight loaded, and whether it overhangs. If you run mixed pallet types, size to the worst case.
  2. Establish the truck. Make, model, lift height at full load, and right-angle stack aisle. If you have not bought it yet, buy the truck and the racking together — see pallet trucks, stackers and lifters and loaders for the ground-level end of the fleet.
  3. Measure clear height to the lowest obstruction, and note the sprinkler arrangement.
  4. Establish the floor. Slab construction and thickness, and any known joints or repairs where uprights would land.
  5. Draw the runs long. Set the layout out to give the longest continuous runs the building allows, and count pallet positions rather than bays when comparing options.

Bring those five answers and we can put a configuration and a price to them. If block stacking would serve you better than steel, our guide to stacking and storing pallets safely sets out the decision — and if you are working alongside the racking on foot, using a pallet truck safely is worth ten minutes.

Browse the wider racking and shelving range, or see the full STOW offering.

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