Used plastic pallets in North Carolina

North Carolina in numbers

A pallet moves wherever a warehouse does, and North Carolina has 590 of them by the BLS establishment count, with 54,551 jobs between them and 92.5 per site on average.

• Mecklenburg County: 12,290 warehousing jobs, 23% of North Carolina and 0.65% of the country, 1.9 times Wake County.
• Wake County: 6,635 warehousing jobs, 12% of North Carolina and 0.35% of the country, 54% of the size of Mecklenburg County.
• Guilford County: 4,160 warehousing jobs, 7.6% of North Carolina and 0.22% of the country, 34% of the size of Mecklenburg County.

North Carolina against the country

Read across: what North Carolina has, what the whole country has, the slice North Carolina takes, and where that puts it in the state ranking when a rank exists.

What the ratios say

Small counties in North Carolina are hidden by BLS disclosure rules, so read the 54,551 state figure as the total and the county lines as a floor.

• The three largest warehousing counties hold 42% of North Carolina's jobs in the line.
• At 92.5 jobs per establishment against 81.5 across the US, North Carolina's warehouses run larger than the national average by 14 percent.
• Food manufacturing employs 1.13 people for every warehousing job in North Carolina; across the US the ratio is 0.93.
• North Carolina holds 3.5% of the nation's food manufacturing jobs and 2.9% of its warehousing jobs, so food is the heavier of the two lines here.
• Pharmaceutical manufacturing adds 26,998 jobs, 7.7% of the US total, enough to make sanitisable pallets a real part of local demand.
• The metro below accounts for 34% of the state's warehousing jobs, counting disclosed counties only.
• Mecklenburg County's 12,290 warehousing jobs are more than the whole state total of 14 other states, the largest being Nebraska at 8,246.
• Illinois runs warehouses of nearly the same size, at 92.7 jobs per establishment against 92.5 here.
• For food manufacturing, New York is the closest match at 60,316 jobs, 1,125 below North Carolina's 61,441.
• The smallest county the BLS shows for North Carolina is Guilford County with 4,160 jobs; the largest has 3.0 times as many.
• If warehousing jobs were split evenly across 50 states, each would hold 2.0% of the total; North Carolina holds 2.87%, which is 1.44 times an even share.
• New York sits above North Carolina with 820 more warehousing jobs, and Tennessee sits below with 1,124 fewer.

Where North Carolina ranks

North Carolina and the 10 states above it hold 61% of the country's 1,901,976 warehousing jobs between them. The median state has 23,211, so North Carolina is 31,341 jobs above it; California, the largest, has 236,923, or 4 times as many.

Who buys pallets in North Carolina

Measured against the national share of employment, pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing is the most concentrated pallet-using line in North Carolina, at 2.4 times the national figure. Pharma shippers want pallets they can sanitise, with papers on resin and colour; some prefer polypropylene because it takes sterilisation.

• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing: 26,998 jobs in North Carolina, 7.7% of the 350,886 across the US, or 0.49 for every warehousing job in the state.
• Meat and poultry processing: 35,715 jobs in North Carolina, 6.4% of the 556,647 across the US, or 0.65 for every warehousing job in the state.
• Chemical manufacturing: 47,758 jobs in North Carolina, 5.4% of the 892,426 across the US, or 0.88 for every warehousing job in the state.
• Plastics product manufacturing: 27,700 jobs in North Carolina, 4.8% of the 575,006 across the US, or 0.51 for every warehousing job in the state.

The ladder around North Carolina

Sorting all 50 states by warehousing jobs puts North Carolina 11th. The rows around it show how close the next states are.

Metros we list in North Carolina

One metro in North Carolina has a page with ZIPs, counties and corridors.

Labelling stacks

• Put a card on each stack with footprint, grade and the date it was sorted.
• Use one colour of tape for repaired pallets and another for held ones.
• Keep labels at fork-truck eye level, not on the lowest pallet.
• Update the card when a pallet is removed, so the count stays true.
• Retire old cards instead of writing over them.

Asking for a lot in North Carolina

USDA published no refrigerated warehouse figure for North Carolina in its October 2025 count, so this page makes no cold-storage claim.

• Footprint: 48 x 40 in or a square footprint
• Grade: like new
• Quantity: a band, from a few pallet-loads to a truck
• ZIP: the North Carolina receiving ZIP

Other states

• Connecticut
• Iowa
• Mississippi
• New York
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia

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