Is the traffic light system required in Australia?

No. It is a UK industry convention. No Australian regulator guidance we have checked publishes a colour-graded damage scheme, and there is no Australian equivalent of the British body it comes from.

What are the red, amber and green tolerances?

We do not publish them. They come from a British scheme with no Australian standing, and a millimetre figure applied by someone who has not seen the damage is not a safety judgement. That call belongs to the competent person doing the inspection.

Does the Australian Steel Institute Code of Practice replace it?

It is a different kind of document. The Australian Steel Institute is an industry body, and its Code of Practice for Rack Safety Inspections is a practice guide covering the framework, process and quality of inspections. It is not a regulation, it certifies nobody, and it maintains no register.

My inspector colour-codes their report. Is that wrong?

Not at all — priority grading makes a report usable. Just ask whose criteria they are and how they are applied. The issue is only when a colour is presented as satisfying an Australian requirement that does not exist.

The racking traffic light system, and why it is not an Australian standard

Red, amber and green rack damage grading, with millimetre tolerances attached to each colour, is a British industry construct. It comes from SEMA, the UK storage equipment trade association. Australia has no SEMA, no equivalent grading scheme and no register of approved rack inspectors — and a great deal of Australian content repeats the UK figures as though we did.

Last updated 2026-08-23

Where the idea comes from

The Storage Equipment Manufacturers’ Association is a British trade body. Its rack-inspection guidance is where the red/amber/green convention originates, along with the numeric thresholds that decide which colour a damaged component gets and how quickly it must be dealt with. It also sits behind the UK scheme that assesses and lists individual rack inspectors.

It is a coherent system, and it is designed for a British regulatory and industry context. It is not an Australian document, it has no Australian legal standing, and we have not retrieved it — deliberately. We do not reproduce its figures here, and you should treat any Australian page that does as having copied them from somewhere without checking whether they apply.

To be clear about what this page is not saying: this is not an argument that damage classification is a bad idea, or that the UK scheme is wrong. It is a correction of the widespread impression that the numbers you keep seeing are Australian requirements. They are not.

What Australia actually has

We checked the regulator guidance in three states. None of it publishes a colour-graded damage classification scheme with tolerances. WorkSafe Victoria, SafeWork NSW and SafeWork SA each state the general duty and each point to the AS 4084 standard, which is a purchased Standards Australia document we neither quote nor paraphrase.

There is also an Australian Steel Institute publication, the Code of Practice for Rack Safety Inspections, dated 22 November 2018. Its stated scope covers inspection of steel storage pallet racking across Australia and New Zealand, and its stated purposes include setting an industry-wide inspection framework and recommending the process and quality of inspections and the competency of inspectors.

Read that carefully, because it is routinely misread. The Australian Steel Institute is an industry body, not a regulator. Its Code of Practice is a practice guide. It certifies nobody, examines nobody and operates no register. We name its existence and its scope, and we do not reproduce its substantive content either.

There is no SARI, and no Australian equivalent of one

The UK scheme that assesses individual inspectors and lists the ones who pass has no Australian counterpart. We looked for one — a government register, a standards-body register, an industry-association member directory, a certification-body scope covering racking — and found none of them. That negative finding is set out under who is actually permitted to inspect racking here.

This has a direct consequence for how you read a provider’s marketing. A firm advertising that its inspectors are "approved", "certified" or "accredited" for racking inspection in Australia is using words that have no issuing body behind them here. It does not necessarily mean the firm is bad. It does mean the claim is not checkable, which puts the burden back on you to assess the person rather than the badge.

Why the borrowed numbers are worse than no numbers

A tolerance figure looks like the most useful thing on the page. It is a number, it is specific, and it appears to let you decide something for yourself. That is exactly the problem.

The judgement about a damaged member is about that member, in that system, under that load, on that floor. It depends on the frame profile, the connection type, the height, what is above it and what happens next. A figure lifted from a different country’s scheme, applied by someone who did not see the damage, is not a shortcut to that judgement — it is a substitute for it that feels authoritative.

So we publish no thresholds, and this site contains nothing you could use to reach a verdict about your own racking. If a component has been struck, the sequence is unload if you can do so safely, isolate the location, and get someone competent to look at it. Not measure it against a number from the internet.

What a provider may reasonably do with colours

Plenty of Australian inspection firms grade findings by colour in their reports, and that is not a problem in itself. A priority scheme makes a long list of findings actionable — this one now, this one within the month, this one at the next visit.

What to ask is where their criteria come from and who applies them. A provider using their own documented internal grading, applied by an experienced person, is being straightforward. A provider presenting a colour grade as though it discharged an Australian regulatory requirement is not.

How the grades are arrived at during the visit is covered in how an inspection is actually run, and how they should appear in the document you keep is covered under what the report says. In the meantime, physical measures such as frame protection at the base of uprights and barriers and bollards deal with the cause rather than the classification — the marks show up because trucks hit steel.

Common questions

Is the traffic light system required in Australia?: No. It is a UK industry convention. No Australian regulator guidance we have checked publishes a colour-graded damage scheme, and there is no Australian equivalent of the British body it comes from.
What are the red, amber and green tolerances?: We do not publish them. They come from a British scheme with no Australian standing, and a millimetre figure applied by someone who has not seen the damage is not a safety judgement. That call belongs to the competent person doing the inspection.
Does the Australian Steel Institute Code of Practice replace it?: It is a different kind of document. The Australian Steel Institute is an industry body, and its Code of Practice for Rack Safety Inspections is a practice guide covering the framework, process and quality of inspections. It is not a regulation, it certifies nobody, and it maintains no register.
My inspector colour-codes their report. Is that wrong?: Not at all — priority grading makes a report usable. Just ask whose criteria they are and how they are applied. The issue is only when a colour is presented as satisfying an Australian requirement that does not exist.

Sources

Australian Steel Institute — Code of Practice for Rack Safety Inspections — Industry practice guide dated 22 November 2018. Cited for its existence, publisher and stated scope only. Establishes no certification or register. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
WorkSafe Victoria — Pallet racking operation and maintenance — Regulator guidance that points to AS 4084 and publishes no colour-graded damage scheme. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
SafeWork NSW — Pallet racking guide — As above — refers readers to AS 4084 and publishes no tolerance table. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
SafeWork SA — Pallet racking — Third state checked. Names both 2023 parts of AS 4084; no grading scheme and no inspector register. Retrieved 2026-08-23.

Part of our guide to pallet racking inspection.