ISPM 15 Marking Requirements: What the Stamp Must Show

ISPM 15 marking requirements come down to four small elements inside one rectangle, and getting any of them wrong can park your container at the border while the buyer watches the delivery date slide. The stamp is not paperwork your pallet supplier quietly handles for you. It is a phytosanitary claim burned into the wood, and plant-health inspectors read that rectangle the same way in every country that applies the standard.

Here are the questions exporters actually ask about it, answered from the text of the standard rather than from a crating vendor's sales page.

What do the ISPM 15 marking requirements actually require?

ISPM 15 is the International Plant Protection Convention standard that regulates solid wood packaging moving across borders, and its mark certifies that the wood was debarked and treated by an approved method under the supervision of a national plant protection organisation (NPPO). Annex 2 of the standard lists exactly four required components:

Component	What it looks like	Rule from the standard
The IPPC symbol	The wheat/ear graphic	Must closely resemble the published design and sit to the left of the other components
Country code	Two letters, e.g. CN, VN, DE	Must be the ISO two-letter country code, separated from the producer code by a hyphen
Producer / treatment provider code	e.g. 000123	A unique code assigned by the NPPO to the producer or treatment provider
Treatment code	HT, DH or MB	Must appear after the combined country and producer codes, on a separate line or hyphen-separated

The whole thing must be rectangular or square, inside a border line, with a vertical line separating the symbol from the codes. And this is the line most people miss: "No other information shall be contained within the border of the mark." Your logo, the buyer's PO number, a batch date — all of it belongs outside the box, not inside it.

The mark is not proof that the wood was treated. It is a traceable claim that one specific, audited producer treated it. That is exactly why a hand-drawn version is worth nothing at a border.

What does the ISPM 15 stamp mean, line by line?

Read a real stamp left to right, then top to bottom:

Symbol — this shipment's wood packaging is inside the ISPM 15 system at all.
XX — the country whose NPPO authorised the producer. Not necessarily where your goods were made.
000 — the producer or treatment provider. This is the audit trail; if pests turn up, this code is who gets investigated.
YY — the treatment. HT, DH or MB, and nothing else is a valid treatment abbreviation in the mark.

Where it sits matters as much as what it says. The standard requires the mark to be legible, durable and non-transferable, and "placed in a location that is visible when the wood packaging is in use, preferably on at least two opposite sides of the wood packaging unit." A crate marked once, on the face that ends up against the container wall, is a crate an inspector has to break down to verify.

One more colour rule that costs people money: red and orange should be avoided, because those colours are reserved for dangerous-goods labelling.

Which wood packaging is exempt from ISPM 15?

The standard exempts six categories outright as low risk:

wood packaging material made entirely from thin wood, 6 mm or less in thickness
wood packaging made wholly of processed wood material — plywood, particle board, oriented strand board or veneer created using glue, heat or pressure, or a combination
barrels for wine and spirit that have been heated during manufacture
gift boxes for wine, cigars and other commodities made from wood processed or manufactured so it is free of pests
sawdust, wood shavings and wood wool
wood components permanently attached to freight vehicles and containers

Everything else in the scope list is in: crates, boxes, packing cases, pallets, box pallets, pallet collars, cable drums, spools and reels — plus dunnage, the loose wood you throw in to stop the load shifting. Dunnage is the single most common blind spot, because nobody thinks of an offcut as packaging.

Note what is not on the exemption list: kiln-dried lumber, "new" wood, wood that has been painted, and wood that is only travelling one leg of the journey. Low risk in your judgement is not the same as low risk in the standard.

HT, DH or MB: what counts as treated?

Code	Method	Parameters required by the standard
HT	Conventional steam or dry kiln heat chamber	Minimum 56 °C for a minimum of 30 continuous minutes throughout the entire profile of the wood, including its core
DH	Dielectric heating (e.g. microwave)	Minimum 60 °C for 1 continuous minute throughout the entire profile including the surface; wood must not exceed 20 cm across its smallest dimension, and the temperature must be reached within 30 minutes
MB	Methyl bromide fumigation	Concentration-time (CT) product over 24 hours per the standard's dosage table; the IPPC recommends replacing or reducing methyl bromide use

Debarking is not a treatment option — it is a precondition for all of them. The standard allows only small remnants of bark: pieces less than 3 cm wide regardless of length, or wider pieces whose individual surface area is under 50 square cm.

The KD trap. A "KD" or "KD-HT" mill stamp on lumber is a commercial kiln-drying claim about moisture content. It is not the IPPC mark, and heat-treated boards do not become compliant packaging until the assembled unit is marked by an authorised producer. Buying HT lumber and building your own crate in the yard produces an uncertified crate.

The six stamps that fail at customs

Each of these is a real failure mode, and each maps to a specific sentence in Annex 2 or section 4.3.

The hand-drawn mark. "The mark must not be hand drawn." A marker-pen copy of a real stamp is treated as no mark at all.
The one-sided mark. Visible when in use, preferably on two opposite sides. One stamp on the underside of a pallet that is loaded and strapped is not visible.
The crowded box. A producer logo, a batch number or a "FUMIGATED" word squeezed inside the border breaks the "no other information" rule. Put extra marks adjacent to the border, outside it.
The red stamp. Red or orange ink invites confusion with dangerous-goods labelling and should be avoided.
The repaired pallet wearing its old mark. More on this below — a repair with untreated boards leaves a compliant-looking unit that is not compliant.
Unmarked dunnage. The standard is explicit that shippers must ensure all dunnage is treated and marked, and that "small pieces of wood that do not include all the required elements of the mark should not be used for dunnage."

Repaired or remanufactured: when does the mark have to be re-applied?

This is where reused pallets quietly break compliance, and the standard sets clear thresholds:

Situation	Definition in the standard	What you must do
Reused, unaltered	Not repaired, remanufactured or otherwise altered	Nothing. No re-treatment or re-marking for the service life of the unit
Repaired	Up to approximately one third of components removed and replaced	Repairs must use ISPM 15-treated wood or exempt processed wood, and each added component must be individually marked
Remanufactured	More than approximately one third of components replaced	Treated as a new unit: previous marks permanently obliterated, unit re-treated, mark applied anew

Where there is genuine doubt about the origin or treatment of components, NPPOs are told to require re-treatment, destruction, or removal from international trade. A pallet carrying three different country marks is not three times as compliant; it is a unit an inspector cannot trace.

What happens when the wood packaging fails inspection?

The consequences are administrative, expensive, and land on the exporter. UK guidance spells out the costs you may be told to cover: repackaging of the goods, treatment and marking of the wood packaging to meet ISPM 15, destruction of the wood packaging, and return of the wood packaging and the goods inside it. In plain terms — your packaging may be rejected or destroyed, and you will need to move the goods another way.

The lead-time damage usually exceeds the fine. A held container means a missed delivery window, a missed retail set date, and a buyer who now has a documented reason to renegotiate.

Put the packing spec where the buyer and the inspector both look

Most disputes I have seen are not about treatment at all. They are about a buyer who never saw what was actually coming — crate size, mark position, gross versus net weight — until the truck arrived. A packing diagram fixes that in one image: external crate dimensions, the face carrying the ISPM 15 mark, the sling or forklift entry points, and the stacking limit. If you are building that reference from scratch, start from the standard wooden crate dimensions and the standard pallet sizes your market actually uses, then annotate your own unit.

The practical fix is not "take a better photo of the crate." It is locking the real, measured dimensions onto the image where both your buyer and your forwarder look — snap the measurement to the crate edge so the number matches the tape, then export the diagram at the size your buyer's document template expects. An AI-generated packaging render will produce a number that looks plausible and is wrong by 40 mm; a measured annotation will not. That is also why the same diagram survives being forwarded to a customs broker: it carries evidence, not decoration.

If the mark placement is a recurring argument with your packer, treat it like any other stencil on the box. Our breakdown of export carton shipping marks covers what belongs on the outside of a carton and in what order, and export pallet dimensions covers how the pallet footprint decides your container fit before any of this matters.

Pre-shipment ISPM 15 checklist

Run this before the truck is loaded, not after. Every line maps to one of the ISPM 15 marking requirements set out above:

Every solid-wood unit in the load — crates, pallets, collars, cable drums, dunnage — carries a mark
The mark has all four components: symbol, ISO country code, producer code, treatment code
The treatment code is HT, DH or MB, and nothing invented
Nothing extra sits inside the border; extra marks are outside it
The mark appears on at least two opposite sides and stays visible when the unit is loaded
The mark is stencilled or branded, not hand drawn, and not red or orange
No repaired unit carries an old mark alongside untreated replacement boards
Dunnage offcuts each carry a complete mark, not a fragment of one
The packing list and the packing diagram show the same external dimensions as the crate itself

FAQ

Does plywood need ISPM 15 treatment?

No. Wood packaging made wholly of processed wood material — plywood, particle board, oriented strand board or veneer created using glue, heat or pressure — is exempt from the standard. The catch is the word "wholly": a plywood box on a solid-wood skid is a composite unit, and the solid-wood component still has to be treated and marked.

Is a heat-treated lumber stamp the same as an ISPM 15 mark?

No. A mill's HT or KD-HT stamp is a claim about the boards. The ISPM 15 mark is applied to the finished packaging unit by a producer authorised by the NPPO, and only that mark satisfies the standard. Building a crate from HT boards without authorisation gives you an uncertified crate.

Do pallets inside a sea container still need the mark?

Yes. The standard covers wood packaging that may serve as a pathway for pests in any consignment, including consignments that would not normally be subject to phytosanitary inspection. Being inside a container does not exempt the pallet under it.

Can I apply the ISPM 15 mark myself?

Only if your NPPO has assigned you a producer or treatment provider code and authorised you to apply it. The producer code is the entire audit trail behind the mark, which is why the standard makes it unique and NPPO-assigned rather than something a shipper prints.

What is the difference between repaired and remanufactured wood packaging?

The threshold is roughly one third of components. Up to about one third replaced counts as repaired, and each new component must be individually marked. More than about one third replaced counts as remanufactured, which means old marks are obliterated, the unit is re-treated, and the mark is applied fresh.

ISPM 15 Marking Requirements: 6 Stamps That Fail at Customs