A damaged pallet is not a cosmetic problem. It is a load that can drop in a racking aisle, a shipment that gets refused at the gate, and a pallet you paid for that cannot be exchanged. The good news is that the criteria are precise, published, and quick to apply once you know them.
The twelve rejection criteria
EPAL publishes a specific list of conditions that make a pallet not exchangeable and not fit for use. A pallet showing any one of these needs repair before it goes back into the pool:
- A board is missing, in part or in full.
- A board is broken crossways or at an angle.
- A board is broken or split such that more than one nail shank is visible.
- A block is missing, or split such that more than one nail shank is visible.
- A block is twisted and protrudes more than 1 cm beyond the outer edge.
- The EPAL marking is missing from both corner blocks on one long side, or no marking is legible.
- Load-bearing capacity is no longer assured — rotten or decayed boards, severe breaks or splits.
- Several blocks show severe breaks or splits.
- Components are obviously unacceptable — boards too thin, blocks too narrow, wane, rot.
- Severe soiling that could contaminate the payload: paint, oil, odour, mould, damp staining.
- A repair not carried out to specification.
- Visible nail tips, or more than two nail shanks per pallet.
That last one is the single most useful number to memorise. The rule is at most one visible nail shank per component and at most two per pallet, with no nail tips visible or exposed at all. Exposed nail tips tear film, cut hands and damage goods on the pallet below.
A practical two-minute check
You will not run twelve criteria across a full truckload. In practice, a fast physical routine catches almost everything:
- Look along the stack edge-on. Twisted blocks and missing boards show up instantly as an irregular profile; a clean stack has a straight edge.
- Run a gloved hand along the deck boards. You are feeling for protruding nail tips and splinters, which is faster and more reliable than looking.
- Check both long sides for the EPAL oval. One legible mark per side is the minimum.
- Tip one pallet up. The bottom boards and block undersides are where rot, wane and residual bark hide, and nobody inspects them.
- Smell the stack. Mould and chemical contamination announce themselves before they are visible.
Sample rather than inspect exhaustively: pull a few pallets from different parts of the load, including the bottom of a stack. Damage is rarely evenly distributed, and the bottom of a stack is where a forklift's mast has usually been.
Repair or reject?
The economic answer is usually repair — a pallet with one cracked board has a lot of serviceable life left, and repair is a fraction of replacement cost. But there are constraints worth knowing.
For EPAL pallets, a repair that restores exchangeability must be carried out by an EPAL-licensed repair company, using dimensionally correct components, and finished with a repair nail carrying that repairer's licence number. A repair done in your own yard with whatever timber was to hand is, formally, one of the twelve rejection criteria — you have converted a repairable pallet into a rejected one.
If your packaging is exported, ISPM 15 adds a second constraint. Replacing up to roughly a third of the components counts as repair: the replacements must be treated wood or exempt processed wood, and each added treated component is marked individually. Replace more than about a third and the unit counts as remanufactured — the old marks must be permanently obliterated and the whole unit re-treated and re-marked.
What to write into your delivery terms
Most disputes we see are not about pallet condition but about undefined expectations. Three lines fix that:
- Name the class. "Used EPAL Euro pallets, class B or better." Remember the quality classification only applies if both parties have agreed to it — without agreement, classes A, B and C are all exchangeable.
- State automation requirements explicitly. If pallets feed conveyors or high-bay racking, exclude class C, which is not MCH-suitable.
- Set an inspection window. A stated period for rejecting a delivery protects both sides and ends arguments about when damage occurred.
Where damage actually comes from
Worth noting, because it changes what you fix. Most pallet damage is not from the load — it is from handling: forks driven in at an angle, pallets dragged rather than lifted, dropped from height onto a hard floor, or stored outdoors where the bottom boards sit in water. If a particular site keeps producing broken pallets, the pallets are usually reporting a handling problem rather than a quality one.
We repair to specification and can assess a used batch if you are unsure what you have. If pallets from one route keep coming back damaged, tell us — the pattern of damage usually points straight at its cause.
