What is a skid in shipping?

A skid is the basic unit of commercial freight: a low platform, most often wood, that goods are stacked on and secured to so the whole thing can be lifted and moved as a single piece. Slide a pallet jack or forklift into it, and a thousand pounds of cartons becomes one object that loads in under a minute. If you ship anything between businesses in Ontario beyond parcel size, sooner or later it goes on a skid.

What a skid actually is

Physically, a skid is deck boards fastened across supports — either long wooden rails called stringers, or blocks at the corners and centre. The supports create openings on the sides, and those openings are the whole point: they are where forklift tines and pallet jack forks slide in to lift the load.

Wood is the default material because it is cheap, repairable and strong for its weight, but plastic and metal versions exist for specialized work — plastic where washdown or export rules matter, metal under extreme loads. Strictly speaking, a skid is the platform alone; once freight is stacked, wrapped and strapped onto it, the whole loaded unit is also just called “a skid” — as in “we have three skids going to Hamilton.”

Why freight moves on skids

Skids exist to solve one problem: handling speed and safety. Loose cartons are loaded by hand, one at a time, by someone climbing in and out of a trailer. The same cartons on a skid are loaded in a single forklift movement. Multiply that across a truck, a dock, a day, and skids are the difference between freight that flows and freight that queues.

They earn their keep in other ways too:

• Unitization — the freight travels as one secured block, so pieces cannot wander off individually or get separated in transit.
• Protection — the platform keeps cartons off wet trailer floors and gives the load a defined footprint that other freight stacks against, not into.
• Compatibility — docks, trailers, racking and lift equipment across the industry are all built around palletized dimensions, so a skid moves through any commercial facility without improvisation.
• A clean count — three skids is an easier number to verify at delivery than ninety loose cartons, which keeps the proof of delivery simple.

Standard skid sizes in Canada

The workhorse footprint in Canada and the US is 48″ × 40″ (about 1.2 m × 1.0 m) — the size trailers, docks and racking assume by default. You will also encounter 48″ × 48″ for drums and square products, 42″ × 42″ in some industries, and custom decks built for long or oversized product like doors, glass or fabricated metal.

Two practical notes on size. First, the pallet’s footprint is only the starting dimension — carriers measure the loaded skid at its widest points, so freight overhanging the deck makes the shipment bigger than the pallet. Second, height and weight matter as much as footprint, because they determine which vehicle can take the load. Getting all of it accurate is what makes a quote accurate.

One more sizing wrinkle worth knowing: if your freight will eventually cross a border, wood packaging is regulated. Solid-wood pallets used in international shipping generally must be heat-treated and stamped under the ISPM 15 standard so pests don’t travel with the wood. Domestic Ontario freight doesn’t carry that requirement, but if a skid you’re building today might ship abroad later, starting on a stamped pallet saves repalletizing down the road.

Skid or pallet — which word is right?

Both, in practice. Ontario dispatchers, drivers and dock staff use skid and pallet for the same object, often in the same sentence, and no one will misunderstand you either way. There is a narrow technical distinction — a true skid has no bottom deck boards, while a pallet has a top and bottom deck — but it almost never matters when booking freight. If you want the fine print, our answer on the difference between a skid and a pallet lays it out.

How a skid moves through a shipment

The lifecycle is consistent across nearly every B2B shipment. The shipper stacks freight on the pallet, wraps it to the deck, and labels it. At pickup, a forklift loads it from a dock — or, where there is no dock, a tailgate (lift-gate) truck lifts it from ground level. It rides secured in the truck, and at the destination the process runs in reverse, finishing with a pallet jack rolling it to its spot and a signature on the POD.

Building the load well is its own skill — stacking pattern, wrap technique, strapping — and it determines how the freight arrives. Our walkthrough on how to ship a skid across the GTA covers the full process from pallet prep to proof of delivery.

What this means when you book freight

When a carrier asks “how many skids?”, they are really asking three things: how much deck space the shipment occupies, how much it weighs, and what equipment is needed at each end. Have the loaded dimensions (length × width × height), the loaded weight, and the loading situation at both addresses ready, and the booking takes minutes.

Skids and pallets are the core of what Sonic Transport does — roughly 60% of our deliveries involve them, moving through our skid and pallet service across the GTA, Golden Horseshoe and Southern Ontario, same-day direct or next-day. If you have a skid ready to move, request a quote with the dimensions and weight, and a real person will put the right truck on it.