Shop pallet jacks on CasterHQ: Pallet jacks.
The new rule is this. Starting Dec. 17, 2026, the ordinary pallet jack is inside the U.S. safety standard for trucks a person walks behind. The 2019 public description of that book named only the tall stacker. The 2025 edition names the pallet jack too, and the scissor-lift pallet truck that raises a load a little higher. That is the change that is actually printed.
The rule exists so those trucks are built, used, and kept to one standard. A pallet jack lifts a pallet a few inches so a person can walk it down an aisle. If the jack is built wrong, used wrong, or left with a bad wheel or a failed lift, the person walking behind it is the one who gets hurt. The Industrial Truck Standards Development Foundation writes the book. It does not build the trucks. It was formed in 2005. A committee drafts the standard. The foundation signs off. The American National Standards Institute recognizes it as a U.S. standard.
What the 2025 document says it covers, in the foundation’s own sentence, is the safety requirements for design, operation, and maintenance of manually propelled low-lift, scissor-lift pallet, and high-lift industrial trucks, controlled by a walking operator, on a level floor. “Low lift” is the foundation’s name for the pallet jack. The page does not use the words “pallet jack.”
Those three words are the new standard as far as the public page goes, and they land on three people. Design is the manufacturer: how the forks, the lift, and the wheels are supposed to be built. Operation is the person who walks the jack, and the employer who assigns that work: how the truck is supposed to be used. Maintenance is the shop that keeps it. Before this edition, that published sentence did not name the low-lift jack. A maker, a warehouse, and an operator of high-lift walking stackers were already in the 2019 description. The pallet jack was not.
The numbered rules inside the book are not on the website. The foundation will send a free copy if asked, and it asks that the copy not be sold. So this article cannot list a new brake test, a new nameplate line, or a new stability number and call it a 2025 change. Those clauses were not published with the listing. The cover title did not change. It is still “Manually Propelled High Lift Industrial Trucks.” The standard number is B56.10. This is not an OSHA order. Whether OSHA has adopted the 2025 edition was not checked. A truck that drives itself is a different book, B56.5, effective Dec. 16, 2025.
For manual pallet jacks, browse pallet jacks on CasterHQ. This article is about the safety book. It does not say any jack on that page was built to the 2025 edition.
Limits
The 2019 and 2025 descriptions, the design, operation, and maintenance sentence, and the Dec. 17, 2026 date are from the foundation’s public list, retrieved Sept. 9, 2026. The 2025 book was not posted and was not read, so no numbered clause is quoted as a new rule. OSHA adoption was not checked. The shop link is a catalog, not a certification.
Sources
- Industrial Truck Standards Development Foundation, B56 standards list: itsdf.org/cue/b56-standards.html
