How many cases fit on a pallet? Ti-Hi and stacking patterns

A Ti-Hi describes a pallet build as cases per layer (the Ti) times the number of layers (the Hi). A Ti-Hi of 8 × 5 is 40 cases. Retailers and warehouses use it to standardise how a product is received, stored and counted: if every pallet of an item is built the same way, a full pallet is a known quantity and nobody has to count cases at the dock.

The two halves are limited by different things. The Ti is geometry - how many carton footprints fit on the pallet deck. The Hi almost never is. It’s set by a height or weight limit that usually comes from outside the pallet, and by what the bottom layer can carry. This guide works through both by hand, then looks at the choice that sits between them: stacking the layers in columns or interlocking them.

The Ti: cases per layer

For one carton type laid one way round, the number per layer is:

floor(pallet length / carton length) × floor(pallet width / carton width)

Then turn the carton 90° on the deck and do it again, because the answer often changes.

Take 400 × 300 mm cartons on a Euro pallet (1200 × 800 mm).

With the 400 mm side along the pallet’s length:

floor(1200 / 400) × floor(800 / 300) = 3 × 2 = 6 per layer

That leaves a 200 mm strip unused down one long side. Turn them 90°, with the 300 mm side along the length:

floor(1200 / 300) × floor(800 / 400) = 4 × 2 = 8 per layer

Eight cartons of 0.12 m² cover the 0.96 m² deck exactly, so 8 is the ceiling for this carton. There’s nothing cleverer to find.

Most cartons don’t divide the pallet that neatly, and that’s where turning some of the cartons beats turning all of them. A 500 × 300 mm carton gives 4 per layer either way round:

floor(1200 / 500) × floor(800 / 300) = 2 × 2 = 4

floor(1200 / 300) × floor(800 / 500) = 4 × 1 = 4

Mix the two orientations and you get 6: a row of four cartons standing 500 mm deep across the full 1200 mm, and a row of two lying 300 mm deep in the remaining 300 mm, with a 200 × 300 mm gap at the end. That’s 50% more cases on the same pallet, and neither simple formula will ever show it.

The orientation question runs vertically too. If the carton may be laid on its side, a 400 × 300 × 250 mm case becomes a 400 × 250 mm footprint that’s 300 mm tall - a different Ti and a different Hi. “This side up” markings take that option away, so it’s worth being clear about which faces a carton may rest on before you compare anyone’s numbers.

One detail catches out more of our customers than anything else in this section: the edge of the pallet is a hard limit. Every so often someone asks why Cargo-Planner won’t reach the Ti-Hi they build every day, and it turns out their cartons hang a few millimetres over the pallet edge. On the warehouse floor nobody would ever notice. To a load planning algorithm, a few millimetres over is simply not allowed, so that pattern never comes up. Fixing it is a judgement call - trim the packaging, or set up a custom pallet a few millimetres larger so the tool gets the same tolerance your warehouse already works with. Either way, it’s the small details in the setup that make the difference.

The Hi: what limits the layer count

Once the Ti is fixed, the number of layers looks like a simple division:

floor((max build height - pallet height) / carton height)

For the 400 × 300 × 250 mm carton on a Euro pallet (144 mm deck) with a 1600 mm height limit:

floor((1600 - 144) / 250) = floor(5.82) = 5 layers

So the Ti-Hi is 8 × 5, 40 cases. The arithmetic is easy. The hard part is the number that goes into it, because the height limit is rarely a property of the pallet or the product. It usually comes from whatever the pallet has to fit into next:

• The racking. A pallet that’s 50 mm too tall for the beam spacing in the receiving warehouse doesn’t go into that location, whatever the truck could carry.
• The vehicle. The door and internal height of the trailer or container - and if the pallets are double-stacked, two builds and two pallet decks inside that height, not one.
• The receiving customer. Retailers commonly publish a maximum pallet height and weight for inbound deliveries, and a build that ignores it gets refused or reworked at their dock.
• The freight rate. Pallet networks price by height and weight bands, so the build that fits the next band down can be the cheaper one, even with fewer cases on it.

Real life is usually messier than that list. Quite often the person asking us for help doesn’t actually know where their limit comes from - it’s just how it has always been done. That’s fine. To begin with, it’s easier to make Cargo-Planner follow the existing norm than to change it, so that’s where most setups start. And when there is a reason, it isn’t always a logistics one. We’ve seen layer counts that were really the pack quantity sold to customers, baked into the pricing. We’ve also seen cargo that could only take so much weight on top, which capped the build and ruled out a better container layout.

Weight caps the Hi as well, in two places. The first is the pallet’s rated load: 40 cases of 11 kg is 440 kg before you count the pallet itself. That limit is behind a question we hear a lot - “why are my pallets only half built?” Usually the customer routinely puts more on a pallet than the standard pallet type allows. In their operation that’s perfectly fine, but the tool treats the payload as a hard limit. Set the pallet up with the payload you actually work to, and the builds fill out.

Your own pallets, with your own limits

The second is the bottom layer, which carries everything above it. In the 8 × 5 build, each bottom carton supports four others - 44 kg. Whether that’s acceptable depends on the carton, what’s inside it and how long the pallet sits in storage, and it’s the number people most often don’t have when they set a layer count. Where a product has a known limit - “no more than four high” on the spec sheet, or a maximum load on top - that limit is the Hi, whatever the height allows.

Column or interlocked stacking

A single-carton pallet can be stacked in two basic ways, and the choice changes how strong and how stable the build is.

Column stacking repeats the same layer pattern all the way up, so every carton sits corner-over-corner on the one below. Corrugated cartons carry most of their load through their corners and vertical edges, so lining them up keeps the most compressive strength. The weakness is that each column stands on its own: nothing ties one stack to its neighbour, and a column can lean or come away from the build in transit. Stretch-wrap and corner boards are what hold a column-stacked pallet together.

Interlocked stacking changes the pattern on alternate layers - rotated or mirrored, like brickwork - so each carton bridges the seam between two below it. The layers tie each other together, which makes the build more stable. The cost is strength: a carton’s corners now land partway along the panels of the cartons below rather than on their corners, so the stack can take less weight before the bottom layer starts to give.

The right choice depends on the carton and the journey. A heavy, rigid product that fills its carton and sits in racking for weeks may favour columns. Light cartons that get shunted around a trailer may favour the interlock. Both are legitimate - what matters is choosing for this carton, rather than inheriting whatever the last product was built as.

The worked examples above show a trade-off that rarely gets mentioned: whether you can interlock at all depends on the Ti. The 8-per-layer build of the 400 × 300 carton covers the deck exactly, and there’s only one way to lay eight of them on it. There’s no second pattern to alternate with, so interlocking that pallet means giving up cartons on alternate layers. The 6-per-layer build of the 500 × 300 carton has room to spare, and mirroring it on alternate layers moves both the seams and the gap - an interlock that costs no cases, though some cartons then sit partly over the gap in the layer below.

In practice, interlocking is what customers ask about most, and it usually works straight away. It tends to come up in the first demo; we build pallets from their own data, and the result meets the standard they need. I can’t remember anyone being surprised by the pallets that came back, and that makes sense. A company that interlocks a product has usually built it many times and settled on a pattern that works. So the question they bring isn’t really “can you find us a better pallet?” It’s “can you model the build we already use?” - so they can put it behind a customer portal that calculates orders through the API, or connect it to their ERP and give the sales team reliable container counts and freight costs.

What can take weight, and how much

Where the hand calculation breaks down

The formulas above hold for one carton type, two orientations and a single limit. They stop being reliable when:

• The best layer mixes orientations. The 500 × 300 example has an obvious mixed pattern. Most cartons have several, and finding the best one by hand is trial and error.
• More than one limit applies. Height, pallet weight, a customer weight cap and a layer limit on the bottom carton each give a different Hi. The lowest one wins, and it changes as soon as the carton weight or the order quantity does.
• The pallet isn’t full. An order of 33 cases doesn’t fill an 8 × 5 pallet. Whether the top layer is partial, or the pallet is built lower and wider, is a decision the Ti-Hi doesn’t make.
• The pallet isn’t the end of the plan. A pallet built to 1600 mm then goes into a trailer or container, and the height that suits the racking may not suit the trailer. How many pallets fit is its own calculation - see how many pallets fit in a truck.

The last two tend to turn up together. Most of the order goes on standard builds, and then there’s a remainder: the order comes to four and a half standard pallets, and that half pallet needs to be combined with other cargo. I once ran a demo for a manufacturer in exactly this spot. They knew their carton sizes and their standard pallet dimensions, and their plan was to enter the standard pallets as cargo, build the leftover mixed pallets by hand, measure those and add them too, and only then plan the container. That’s a lot of manual work, and none of it can start until the pallets physically exist - so it can’t tell you much in advance. Instead, we set up their standard builds in Cargo-Planner and let it put the leftover cartons on mixed pallets and plan the container around the lot, before anything left the shelf. As a bonus, anyone on their planning team can now run it, not only the people with the warehouse experience to do it by hand.

Working it out in Cargo-Planner

For a single carton on a standard pallet, the free pallet calculator gives you the answer straight away: enter the carton and it shows how many fit, in 3D.

For real orders, Cargo-Planner builds the pallets as the first step of the load plan. You mark which cargo goes on pallets and pick the pallet types, and the cartons go onto pallets before the pallets go into the trailer or container. The layer pattern, mixed orientations included, is worked out from the carton dimensions and the limits you give it:

• Height and layers. Each item can have a maximum number of layers and a maximum load on top, and a max stacking height caps the build as a whole. Items marked not stackable carry nothing.
• Pallet-only rules. Pallets get their own load settings, so they can be built layer by layer with stricter overhang and height limits than the trailer they ride in.
• Stability. Prioritising pallet stability builds in layers rather than towers, trading a little utilisation for a steadier pallet.
• Your own pallets. Anything that isn’t in the library can be set up with its own dimensions and limits. One gotcha: a custom pallet’s max height starts at 0, which means a single layer, so set it to your real build height.

If you build the same product to a fixed Ti-Hi - common for manufacturers and anyone shipping the same goods regularly - bundling is usually the way to go. A bundle describes what a full pallet of the product looks like, so full pallets are built to your standard and only the remainder is palletised from scratch. Keep the product, its bundles and settings like max layers in the cargo library, and it’s there next time without re-entering anything.

Master cartons and full pallets

Mixed orders, palletised and loaded in one plan