How the PSCI™ is built.

The Pallet Solutions Cost Index™ (PSCI) tracks what it costs to make a pallet: wood, lumber, diesel, labor and corrugated. A 1% rise in PSCI means roughly 1% upward pressure on pallet prices, all else equal.

It is a reference index. Not an investment product, not a contract, not a regulated benchmark. The data is public, so anyone can rebuild it from this page.

Weights sum to 100% and are fixed. Changing them takes a new methodology version and 90 days' notice.

Each input is set to January 2024 = 100. Monthly BLS series hold their latest print for the weeks after release; weekly EIA diesel uses that week's value. Each input's index is its value divided by its January 2024 value, times 100.

The five are combined as a weighted geometric mean:

PSCI_t = (PPI_pallet^0.40) × (PPI_lumber^0.20) × (Diesel^0.20) × (Wages^0.15) × (OCC^0.05)

Geometric, because the inputs are themselves indices that compound, and it keeps one fast-moving input from swamping the rest.

PSCI also publishes six US regions. Same formula, same weights. Only diesel changes: each region uses its own EIA PADD diesel series. Wood, lumber, wages and corrugated stay national, because the federal series aren't published by region.

Each region is rebased to its own January 2024 = 100. West Coast covers California and the Pacific Northwest because EIA publishes one PADD 5 series. Per-region wages and a separate Pacific Northwest read are roadmap, not current. The headline PSCI and the Tuesday Read stay national.

All five inputs come straight from BLS and EIA public APIs (api.bls.gov, api.eia.gov, api.census.gov). Federal data is public domain: no fees, no permission needed, and every value is cited with its agency and series ID. FRED is used for research only and never in a published number.

Paid industry sources (DAT, Cass, ATA, ISM, Random Lengths, Fastmarkets RISI, CBRE, JLL, Cushman, Bloomberg) are named and linked, never ingested, stored or republished. Building only on public data is what lets anyone check the index.

• PSCI: every Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, on the prior week's data. The Tuesday Read sends after the federal data drops.
• One file: the Tuesday Read and the regional reads publish from the same data/psci_latest.json. No second pipeline.
• Shown as: the headline to two decimals, the weekly change to one, every input linked to its agency's page.
• BLS PPI: typically the 11th to 14th of each month.
• EIA diesel: Mondays, 5:00 PM ET.
• PSPI: second Friday of each month, 10:00 AM ET (see the appendix).

PSCI publishes every week, from the latest print each source has released. A publisher running late is not a failure to calculate. Nothing is ever estimated to fill a gap.

An input is carriedwhen its publisher missed a scheduled release, not when its data is old. A monthly BLS series is routinely 30 to 70 days old on a Tuesday and still current. Lateness is measured against each source's own calendar: jobs data the first Friday of the month, producer prices mid-month, diesel weekly. This rule was first applied on May 19, 2026, when BLS had not yet released April warehouse earnings.

How loudly it is disclosed depends on how much weight is carried:

• Under 20%: a footnote, plus the flag in the published JSON.
• 20% to 40%: named in the written read.
• Over 40%: the headline carries the caveat.

An input more than twice its normal publication interval late moves the disclosure up one tier. A 15% input one month late is routine; three months late is named on its own. Every snapshot carries the full check in freshness_audit: each input's print date, age, expected release and disclosure tier.

PSCI stops only if a source is discontinued outright, and then says which one. The old weight threshold, age limit and the term “indeterminate” were retired in v1.6 (August 4, 2026).

Published values are final. If BLS or EIA revises a number, the correction goes out as its own publication, never a silent edit:

Values before PSCI's first live week are marked “computed retrospectively.” The weights were chosen in 2026 knowing that history, so treat those values as direction, not as live publications.

Alongside PSCI we publish a 30-day projection with an 80% band. It is a timing signal. It does not change PSCI, it does not predict pallet prices, and it is not a substitute for a quote.

Each of the five inputs is projected 30 days out with TimesFM 2.5, Google Research's open-source forecasting model (about 200M parameters, Apache 2.0), run unchanged through BigQuery's AI.FORECAST. The projections are combined with the same weights. Anyone with BigQuery can rerun it and get the same range, within minor model noise (typically under 0.1%).

The band is model uncertainty. Wide band, uncertain model. A forecast published without its band breaks this methodology.

Regional projection

Since v1.5 (June 11, 2026) the projection is also published per region. The four national inputs are forecast once; each region's PADD diesel is forecast separately and combined by the same weights. The band is built the same way from each input's 80% bounds.

We tested forecasting each region's composite in one pass first. It missed its band too often and was discarded. The shipped method is the one that came closest:

The regional band hit 83.3% before the early-2026 cost run-up and 63.3% during it: right overall, softer when the market turns fast. So the regional band is labeled with its measured coverage, not 80%. The national band tested at 80% and is labeled 80%. Every cut point, forecast and actual is in the full backtest, updated as live weeks accumulate.

PSPI is a different thing: it tracks demand, not cost inputs.

• Budget setting. Year-over-year PSCI movement is a defensible input to next year's pallet spend.
• Timing. A move of more than 5% week over week, or 10% month over month, is a signal to revisit supplier agreements early.
• Checking a price increase. PSCI movement over the same period shows how much of the increase is input cost.
• Explaining a change to finance. A public, reproducible reason to cite.
• Comparing periods. Q1 2025 against Q1 2026, even as where you buy changed.

Not for

• Pricing a quote off the index. Get quotes from the yards near you, not from PSCI.
• Settling a pricing dispute. PSCI is not a market price.
• Forward contracts. PSCI is not tradeable and has no derivatives.
• Comparing across industries. Not directly comparable to single-input indices (Random Lengths, CME), commodity composites (Bloomberg Commodity Index, S&P GSCI) or trucking indices (Cass, DAT).

Prices you see will drift from PSCI. The usual reasons: demand (PSCI is cost only), local supply (yards mostly serve within about 150 miles), how full a yard is, fixed contracts against spot buying, and extras like heat treatment, ISPM-15 or food grade that the federal series don't capture.

We call PSCI “the only publicly-available pallet cost-input intelligence published at the individual region level.” That holds only if all four of these hold:

• Public. Value, components, weights, method and history are free. No paywall, no NDA. Fastmarkets RISI, Argus and Pallet Profile Weekly are subscription-only.
• A pallet cost-input composite. Five series chosen for a pallet maker's costs. Random Lengths lumber or EIA diesel alone cover one input.
• By region. Six US regions, each on its own PADD diesel and rebased to January 2024 = 100. Per-region wages and a California / Pacific Northwest split are roadmap, not current.
• Read, not just data. A plain-English read, source citations, late-data disclosure and a forecast, alongside the CSV.

Find a source that meets all four and email info@palletsolutionsusa.com. We will publish the correction in the next revision.

The weights come from the cost shares of wood pallet manufacturing (NAICS 321920) in BLS methodology and published industry cost studies. They are reasoned, not fitted to observed pallet prices. Until we publish that check against real prices, PSCI is a cost-input composite, not a validated price tracker. What makes it trustworthy today is that anyone can reproduce it.

This page revises faster than the locked index. A value published under an earlier version was computed under the rules recorded for that version, so every citation below still resolves.

• v1.6 · August 4, 2026

  Late-data rules rewritten. The 90-day carry-forward ceiling, the 30% stale-weight threshold and the “indeterminate” status are retired. PSCI publishes every week from each source's latest print; disclosure scales with the weight carried, and “carried” means a publisher missed an expected release. Only a discontinued source stops publication.

  The Tuesday Read of this date shipped citing “methodology v1.5”. It describes the rules recorded here as v1.6; this entry is the correction.

• v1.5 · June 11, 2026

  Regional 30-day projection added, labeled with its measured backtest coverage rather than a nominal band. Regional index composition unchanged.

• v1.4 · May 19, 2026

  Regional method formalized (diesel localized, each region rebased to its own January 2024 = 100), and the carry-forward rule first written down.

• v1.3 · April 30, 2026

  First public methodology. PSCI v1.3 weighting locked: wood pallet PPI 40%, softwood lumber 20%, diesel 20%, warehouse earnings 15%, paper containers 5%.

The Pallet Solutions Pressure Index is separate from PSCI. It tracks forward-looking demand pressure, not cost inputs, and publishes the second Friday of each month. If you are here to check PSCI, you can stop above.

See the method at work: this week's pallet prices, national and by region.