Forklift classes are a North American convention, used by the Industrial Truck Association and adopted by training and safety material across the industry. They group trucks by what powers them and where they work, which makes them a useful shortlist filter and a poor way to compare two specific machines.
The seven classes
- Class I – Electric motor rider trucks. Battery-powered counterbalance trucks, sit-down or stand-up, on cushion or pneumatic tyres. The indoor workhorse where exhaust is unacceptable.
- Class II – Electric motor narrow aisle trucks. Reach trucks, order pickers, turret trucks. Built to work in aisles a counterbalance truck cannot enter.
- Class III – Electric motor hand trucks. Powered pallet trucks and walk-behind stackers. The operator walks or rides a platform rather than sitting.
- Class IV – Internal combustion, cushion tyres. Engine-powered trucks on solid cushion tyres, for smooth indoor floors with ventilation.
- Class V – Internal combustion, pneumatic tyres. The outdoor yard truck: diesel or LPG, on air or solid pneumatic tyres, for uneven ground.
- Class VI – Electric and internal combustion tractors. Tow tractors and tuggers. They pull trailers rather than lift.
- Class VII – Rough terrain forklift trucks. Large pneumatic tyres, high ground clearance, usually four-wheel drive, for construction sites and unmade ground.
Where the classes stop being useful
A class tells you the family. It does not tell you whether a machine fits your aisle, your racking or your loads, and two trucks in the same class can be completely different purchases.
Class II is the clearest example. A reach truck and an order picker are both Class II, and they do different jobs: one stacks pallets at height, the other lifts the operator to pick individual cases. Class V contains both a 1.5 tonne LPG truck and a 10 tonne diesel machine.
Once you are down to two or three candidates, the class has done its work and the specification sheet takes over: capacity at your load centre, lift height, overall width, and the aisle width the truck needs to stack at right angles.
How this maps onto the categories here
This site groups machines by power type and body style rather than by class number, because that is how the manufacturers’ own documents are organised and because it is what the specifications actually differ on. The translation is straightforward:
- Our electric forklifts are Class I.
- Our reach trucks are Class II.
- Our LPG and diesel forklifts are Class IV or Class V, depending on whether the truck is specified on cushion or pneumatic tyres. The tyre row on each model page tells you which.
One thing the class does decide
Operator training in the United States is certification by truck type, not a single licence: an operator signed off on one class is not automatically signed off on another. If you are changing class – moving from counterbalance trucks to reach trucks, for instance – that is a training cost, and it belongs in the purchase decision rather than being discovered afterwards.