In the Midwest the pallet you will be offered is almost always hardwood, and the reason is not engineering. It is that oak grows here, sawmills cut it here, and the offcuts that make good pallet stock are a by-product of a local furniture and flooring industry. In the Pacific Northwest the same logic produces pine pallets.
How they actually differ
Oak and mixed hardwood decks are denser, hold fasteners far better and tolerate repeated handling. They are also five to eight pounds heavier per pallet, which matters if you are near a trailer weight limit or paying airfreight by the kilogram.
Softwood decks are lighter, cheaper and perfectly adequate for one-way shipments of modest weight. Their weakness is fastener grip: nails loosen sooner, and a softwood pallet that has been handled thirty times feels noticeably sloppier than an oak one at the same age.
Failure modes
Hardwood tends to fail suddenly and locally: a board cracks along a nail line, usually the lead board, and everything else remains sound. That is good news, because it is a two-minute repair.
Softwood tends to fail gradually and everywhere: fasteners loosen, boards cup, the pallet racks and squeaks. There is often nothing specific to repair, which is why softwood pools are more frequently scrapped wholesale.
- Returning pool, repeated handling, racked storage: hardwood, every time.
- One-way shipment under 1,200 lb, weight-sensitive freight: softwood is defensible.
- Export: species matters less than the ISPM-15 mark, but bark-free is mandatory either way.
- Mixed-species decks are normal in recycled stock and are not a defect.
The moisture question
Both species shrink as they dry, and both are frequently built wet. A new pallet at 22% moisture content will lose dimension and fastener grip in a heated warehouse over about six weeks. This is the main reason a seasoned recycled deck often outperforms a new one in the first months of service: its drying is already behind it.
What we stock, and why
Our intake is oak-dominant mixed hardwood because that is what arrives in St. Louis. We build new in the same material, from mills inside a 180-mile radius, which keeps the freight short and the species consistent with the repair stock on our bench. If you genuinely need softwood, we will source it and tell you what it will and will not do.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on June 13, 2023. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- June 13, 2023
- Category
- Materials
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Hardwood or softwood? The Midwest answer”, Repallet Shop, June 13, 2023. repalletshop.com/blog/hardwood-vs-softwood-pallets