Greater Houston's Pallet Racking Experts

We serve the full metro across Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Waller, Chambers and Brazoria counties — Houston itself, the Ship Channel and petrochemical belt through Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte and Baytown, the I-10 West corridor through Katy and Brookshire, the Northwest and US-290 corridor through Cypress, the SH-249 corridor through Tomball, I-45 North through Spring and Conroe, the IAH air-cargo district around Humble, the Southwest market through Stafford and Rosenberg, and SH-288 south into Pearland. That includes TGS Cedar Port at Baytown, which sits in Chambers County rather than Harris.

Yes, and the first question on any Houston project is which jurisdiction you are actually in, because Texas has no statewide commercial building-code enforcement agency. Inside Houston city limits, the Houston Permitting Center reviews the work and the 2021 Houston Fire Code requires an operational permit for more than 2,500 square feet of high-piled combustible storage including aisles. In unincorporated Harris County, the Harris County Fire Code sets that threshold at 500 square feet, requires a construction permit as well as an operational one, and the operational permit is renewed annually or whenever the pathway through the building changes. Every other incorporated city in the metro runs its own building department. Our permit packages include stamped engineering drawings, ASCE 7 load calculations, and the IFC Chapter 32 high-piled combustible storage documentation the fire official will ask for.

The floor. Greater Houston sits on the Beaumont Formation — high-plasticity, montmorillonite-rich clay that swells when saturated and shrinks in drought. That seasonal movement is differential, meaning one part of a slab lifts while another settles, and pallet rack is unusually good at revealing it: frames go out of plumb in a pattern that follows the floor rather than following forklift damage. It changes what we do on a survey, because measuring plumb on a single upright tells you nothing — we shoot elevations across whole rows and compare the out-of-plumb pattern against the slab. It also changes anchor specification, because a base plate that is working seasonally is not the same fastening problem as one that is static.

New rack costs more than quality-certified used inventory but comes with full manufacturer warranties and standard engineering drawings. Used rack inspected to ANSI/RMI MH16.1 is safe for permitted installations and typically available in weeks rather than months. Houston's scale works in your favour here: with roughly 871 million square feet across about 30 submarkets, tenants move constantly, so good teardown inventory circulates through this market far more reliably than it does in a thinner one. We carry inspected used rack in stock and can quote both options for any project.

It depends on beam capacity, height, bay count, whether the system is new or quality-certified used, and how much engineering and permitting the building needs — so we do not publish a per-position number we would not stand behind. What we can tell you is what moves it: tall-clear buildings cost more per position in material but less per pallet stored, because you are buying cube instead of floor; certified used rack cuts material cost substantially; and an unverified slab adds coring and sometimes a repair detail before anchors can be specified. We provide a fixed written quote after a site visit.

Greater Houston Pallet Racking is a dedicated pallet racking specialist serving Houston and the surrounding metro as a division of Alliance Material Handling, which has equipped warehouses for over 70 years. We handle the full scope in-house: engineering, permits, installation, inspection, and used-rack supply, with specific experience in Ship Channel and petrochemical-corridor buildings, resin and plastics storage where the high-hazard commodity classification changes the fire code, I-10 West and Grand Parkway Class A distribution, and older oilfield-service stock inside Beltway 8. Every install is OSHA and ANSI/RMI MH16.1 compliant.