Why some pallet and container pairs waste floor space

Across all 240 pairings of 12 pallet types with 20 containers and trailers, half cover 90.8% of the floor or more. The waste comes mainly from the width: if the inside width is not close to a multiple of a pallet side, a strip along the wall stays empty for the full length. The worst case is the 1165×1165 Australian pallet in a 20ft reefer, at 43.6%.

By Oliver Bennett · Published 27 October 2026 · Data as of 27 October 2026, from spec sheets retrieved that day

Floor that no pallet can use is paid for on every trip. Some of it is unavoidable, because pallets are rectangles of fixed size and floors are not cut to match them. How much is lost depends almost entirely on how the pallet's sides divide into the inside width.

How much floor a typical load covers

We packed every pallet on PalletSpec into every container and trailer with a floor: 240 pairings. Half of them cover 90.8% of the floor or more. 39 reach 95%, and 18 fall below 80%.

The best pairing is the 48×20 half pallet on the floor of a 53 ft dry van at 99.3%. Its 508 mm width goes into the van's 2,540 mm width exactly 5 times, and 13 rows of 1,220 mm use 15,860 of the 15,977 mm length.

The width decides most of it

A gap along the side wall runs the full length of the unit, so a few hundred millimetres of width can cost a whole column of pallets. The length matters less: a leftover at the door end is a single strip across the floor.

The table shows, for each inside width in the data, how many pallet sides of 800, 1,000 and 1,200 mm fit across it and what is left over.

Containers are the problem. At 2,350 mm wide, a standard container leaves 750 mm when two EUR1 pallets go lengthwise and 1,150 mm when one goes across. European trailers at 2,480 mm take three 800 mm sides with 80 mm to spare, which is why the same pallet covers more than 96% of a curtainsider floor and about 85% of a 40ft container floor.

Mixing orientations claws some of it back

When neither direction fills the width, a layout can mix them: a run of pallets lengthwise, then a block turned across where the length allows. In 82 of the 240 pairings the best layout beats both single-direction patterns. The EUR1 in a 20ft container is the clearest case: 8 pallets all lengthwise, 7 all across, 11 mixed.

The worst ten

The two worst are not borderline. A 1,165 mm square pallet needs 2,330 mm for two across. A 20ft reefer offers 2,288 mm and a 40ft high cube reefer 2,280 mm, so only one pallet fits across and nearly half of the floor stays empty: 4 pallets (43.6%) and 9 (46.3%). In a dry 20ft, 2,350 mm wide, the same pallet covers 97.9%.

The rest of the list is mostly 20ft boxes. At 5,440 to 5,897 mm they are the shortest floors in the data, which leaves the least room for a mixed layout to recover the width.

Insulation costs floor

Reefers show how a few centimetres of wall add up. Averaged over all 12 pallets, the best layouts cover 83.3% of a 20ft reefer floor against 84.4% in a dry 20ft, and 88.0% of a 40ft high cube reefer against 91.0% in the dry high cube. The percentages hide the loss in pallets: the reefer is also shorter inside, so the EUR1 count falls from 25 to 23 in the 40ft high cube sizes.

How close the layouts get to perfect

The area upper bound, floor area divided by pallet area, is the most any layout could reach if pallets could be cut to fill every corner. The best layout hits that bound in only 15 of the 240 pairings. In the rest, the gap is floor that whole pallets of that size cannot reach, however they are turned. For EUR1 pallets in a 40ft container the bound is 29 and the best layout 25, so 4 pallets' worth of floor is lost to geometry alone.

Length leftovers are smaller but not zero. The best 48×40 layout in a 53 ft van leaves 737 mm at the doors, not quite enough for another row of 1,016 mm pallets.

Spare floor for any pairing is shown in the load planner, and the EUR1 in a 20ft container load plan walks through one case in detail.

More guides: EUR1 vs 48×40 pallets: which fits more? · 20ft vs 40ft vs 40ft high cube containers · Pallet sizes by region · European vs North American trailers · How to use the pallet load planner