2026 Mil Thickness Decoded — Poly Bags, Tape, Stretch Film, Pallet Covers in One Reference

Source: Packrift catalog as of 2026-04-29. If you cite a number from this report, please link back to packrift.com/pages/mil-thickness-decoded.

Executive summary

Mil is the most-confused unit in packaging. Operators routinely buy 4 mil bags when 2 mil holds, 80 gauge stretch film when 60 gauge would have been fine, and 6 mil pallet covers for indoor stretch wrap that never sees a raindrop. The cost of getting it wrong is a steady leak — typically 30 to 70 percent more dollars per shipment for protection the SKU literally cannot use. The cost of getting it too thin is worse but sharper: a tear at the dock, a slip in transit, a pallet on its side at the receiving warehouse. This page is the single reference we wish existed when we started: definitions, conversions, per-mil cost benchmarks pulled from the live Packrift catalog, an interactive selector, and a use-case lookup for every common poly bag, tape, stretch film, and pallet cover thickness.

Five takeaways for warehouse ops, ecommerce shippers, and packaging buyers:

  1. 1 mil = 0.001 inch = 0.0254 mm = 25.4 microns. A 4 mil poly bag is exactly 4× thicker than a 1 mil bag, costs about 3× more in our catalog, and lasts roughly 7× longer in normal handling. The thickness scales linearly; the price scales sub-linearly; the durability scales super-linearly. That asymmetry is why "go up one mil" is usually the cheapest insurance on the warehouse floor.
  2. Stretch film is the unit-confusion landmine. Stretch film is sold by gauge, not mil — and gauge is hundredths of a mil. 100 gauge = 1 mil. 80 gauge = 0.8 mil. 60 gauge = 0.6 mil. This is the most-mistranslated number in packaging procurement: a buyer asks "what mil?" and a vendor answers "80," and one of them is off by a factor of 100. The lookup table below makes the conversion explicit for every common spec.
  3. The cheap-insurance step is almost always 2→3 mil on poly bags and 2→3 mil on pallet covers. In the Packrift catalog (20 active 2 mil 6x9 poly bag offers, 6 active 3 mil 48x40 pallet cover offers), going from 2 mil to 3 mil on a 6x9 poly bag costs +$0.036 per bag (a 1.96× ratio); going from 2 mil to 3 mil on a 48x40 pallet cover costs +$0.95 per cover (a 1.37× ratio). Both steps roughly double durability for under a dollar of incremental cost. The 4→6 mil step is far more often diminishing returns — +14% cost for marginal protection on most workloads.
  4. Tape mil is the lever you under-spec when shipping fails are intermittent. A 1.6 mil tape (median $37.94 per 1,000 yards in our catalog) is fine for cartons under 30 pounds going LTL or last-mile. A 2.5 mil hot melt or acrylic (median $65.86 per 1,000 yards) is the workhorse for 30–65 pound boxes through multi-stop ground. 3.0 mil reinforced (median $90.18) is for over-65-pound boxes, oversized cartons, or boxes that will be re-stacked at multiple consolidation points. The cost-per-step is meaningful but small relative to a single seam-slip claim.
  5. "Mil" was never an SI unit — it is American shorthand from mid-twentieth-century industrial film manufacturing, when 0.001 inch was the natural smallest meaningful tolerance for a film extruder. The metric world uses microns. The packaging world stuck with mil for two reasons: vendor catalogs were written in it, and the granularity (0.001 inch = 25.4 microns) is exactly the resolution at which thickness decisions actually change durability. Mil isn't going anywhere; learning it cleanly is faster than translating every vendor sheet.

What "mil" actually means

One mil is one one-thousandth of an inch. That's it. The word is short for "mil-li-inch" but you will never hear that pronounced in a warehouse. The unit dates to the early twentieth-century American industrial film and wire industries, where the natural increment of a precision-extruder die was 0.001 inch. Polyethylene film extrusion, polypropylene tape, polyethylene stretch wrap, and corrugated coatings all calibrated to that tolerance, and the mil stuck.

The full conversion stack:

1 mil equals Value Where you'll see it
Inches 0.001 in U.S. specs, vendor catalogs, ASTM standards
Millimeters 0.0254 mm EU vendor sheets, metric tape ratings
Microns (µm) 25.4 µm Asia/EU film supply, scientific datasheets
Gauge (stretch film) 100 ga U.S. stretch film catalogs — this one is the trap
Centimeters 0.00254 cm Rare; mostly EU pharma packaging

The reverse conversions you'll need most often:

You're given To get mil, multiply by Worked example
Microns (µm) 0.0394 (i.e., divide by 25.4) 50 µm → 1.97 mil ≈ 2 mil
Millimeters 39.37 (i.e., divide by 0.0254) 0.05 mm → 1.97 mil ≈ 2 mil
Stretch film gauge 0.01 80 gauge → 0.8 mil; 100 gauge → 1.0 mil
Inches 1,000 0.004 in → 4 mil

Why packaging uses mil instead of inches. 0.001 inch is the smallest packaging-meaningful thickness step. Going from 0.002 inch to 0.003 inch is a real durability change (about 50–70 percent more puncture resistance and tear strength on standard LDPE film, per ASTM D1709 and D1922). Spelling that as "0.002 to 0.003" is harder to read across a procurement form, and rounding to two-decimal inches loses the gradient entirely. Mil hits the resolution sweet spot: every integer step (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8) is a category-defining durability change, every half step (1.5, 2.5) is a real intermediate spec, and there's no need for decimal places below the half.

Why stretch film is different. Stretch film is in the special case of being thin enough that 1 mil is too coarse a unit. So the industry uses gauge, where 1 gauge = 0.01 mil. An 80 gauge film is 0.80 mil. A 60 gauge film is 0.60 mil. A 120 gauge film is 1.2 mil. The conversion is mechanical, but the trap is verbal: "this is 80" and "this is 80 mil" are not the same thing. 80 mil would be a roofing membrane, not a stretch wrap.

Mil scales by product family

Each product family uses a distinct portion of the mil spectrum. Memorizing these ranges is half the battle:

Product family Common range Unit What changes across the range
Poly bags & flat film 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 mil mil Tear strength, puncture resistance, sharp-edge tolerance
Tape (carton sealing) 1.6, 1.8, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 mil mil Adhesive thickness, backing strength, seam slip resistance
Stretch film (hand & machine) 60, 70, 80, 100, 120 gauge (0.6–1.2 mil) gauge Holding force, tear-along-the-roll resistance, cling
Pallet covers (poly) 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6 mil mil Wind/water tolerance, abrasion at corners, UV survival outdoors
Bubble wrap (cushioning) 3/16", 5/16", 1/2" bubble height inch (bubble height — not mil!) Crush distance, void-fill rate, packaging volume
Shrink film 60, 75, 100 gauge (0.6, 0.75, 1.0 mil) gauge Tunnel-shrink temperature, bag rigidity
Furniture/mattress bags 2, 3, 4 mil mil Tear resistance under furniture corners
Trash & can liners 0.7, 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 1.7, 2.0, 2.5 mil mil (or "low/med/high density") Tear resistance, leak tolerance, sharp-object survival

The bubble wrap exception. Bubble wrap thickness is described by bubble height, not film mil. 3/16" (small bubble) is for surface protection and lightweight cushioning. 5/16" (medium bubble) is the general-purpose ecommerce wrap. 1/2" (large bubble) is for fragile, heavy, or angular items. The film backing the bubbles is typically 1.0–1.5 mil regardless of bubble height. If a vendor quotes you "mil" on bubble wrap, ask whether they mean bubble height or backing-film thickness — they are different specifications.

Mil-to-use-case lookup

The big table. For each product family, what mil is right for what use case. We've intentionally kept the entries tight; specific decisions still need a SKU-level test, but if you don't know where to start, start here.

Poly bags & flat film

Mil Right for Wrong for Notes
1 mil Produce dust covers, single-use grocery, very light single-product wrap, dust covers on stored furniture, garment dust bags Anything with edges, anything shipped, anything reusable The thinnest practical poly bag. Tears under finger pressure on a sharp edge. Single-handling only.
1.5 mil Bakery, soft retail goods, light apparel inserts, light food contact Shipping outside polyethylene mailer, anything sharp Common in retail food and "in-store" apparel use. Surprising how often it's mis-spec'd to ship.
2 mil Apparel, soft goods, basic shipping inside a mailer or box, t-shirts, towels, knit goods, paperbacks Sharp metal, hardware, anything with corners The SMB ecommerce default. If your damage rate in 2 mil is < 0.5%, do not pay for thicker.
3 mil Machine parts that have been deburred, hardware in retail blister packs, electronics in retail packaging, items with smooth edges Raw machined metal, sharp scrap, abrasive product The "cheap insurance" step. 1.96x the cost of 2 mil at 6x9, roughly double the puncture resistance.
4 mil Construction supplies, drywall hardware, smooth-but-heavy product, shipped tools in retail packaging Pallet protection (use a pallet cover instead), abrasive scrap The "one mil too many" buy when 3 mil would have been fine. Watch for this in fulfillment audits.
6 mil Heavy industrial parts, contractor bags, debris bags, demo waste, sharp-but-not-jagged product Apparel, soft goods (massive overspec), most ecommerce Used correctly, this is what protects your liability claim. Used reflexively, this is your single biggest poly-bag cost leak.
8 mil Extreme abrasion, sharp scrap metal, glass shards, demolition contents, hot castings (with proper liner) Anything that isn't industrial waste or scrap If you are buying 8 mil bags for an ecommerce workflow, something has gone wrong upstream.

Tape (carton sealing)

Mil Right for Wrong for Notes
1.6 mil Light cartons under 20 pounds, retail repack, returns processing, internal-only transit Heavy cartons, cold-room cartons, multi-leg ground Hand-tear-friendly. Acceptable for last-mile final-leg only.
1.8 mil Standard SMB ecommerce cartons 20–30 pounds, single-leg ground, USPS Priority Cartons that will go through multiple sortation hubs The SMB ecommerce workhorse. Roughly 80% of single-vendor outbound is correctly served here.
2.0 mil Cartons 30–50 pounds, multi-stop ground, FedEx/UPS/regional carrier through 2 sortation points Anything over 65 pounds without reinforcement Step up here when seam slip starts showing in damage reports.
2.5 mil Cartons 50–65 pounds, hot-melt application preferred, LTL freight cartons, oversize ecommerce Refrigerated/cold-chain (use cold-spec acrylic instead) The point at which acrylic and hot melt diverge — pick the chemistry per workflow.
3.0 mil Cartons over 65 pounds, palletized cartons, reinforced filament alternative for moderate-weight, customs-bonded freight Light cartons (overspec, hand-tear no longer practical) From 2.5 to 3.0 mil, durability climbs ~30% but hand-tear becomes impractical — needs a tape gun.

Stretch film (hand & machine)

Gauge (mil equivalent) Right for Wrong for Notes
60 gauge (0.60 mil) Light, regular-shape pallets staying inside warehouse or one-touch transit; light retail consolidation; uniform boxes under 1,500 lb total Outdoor exposure, abrasive corners, irregular pallets The thinnest practical pallet wrap. Cling and elasticity higher per mil than legacy 80-gauge.
70 gauge (0.70 mil) Standard SMB pallet wrap, 1,500–2,500 lb pallets, single-touch ground LTL Sharp corners, glass, wire The middle of the road. Good for two-step transit through a single consolidation hub.
80 gauge (0.80 mil) Standard pallet wrap for 2,500–3,500 lb pallets, multi-stop LTL, mild abrasion Pre-stretch machine wrap (use machine-rated thinner film), regular-shape light pallets The legacy default. Most "always used 80" workflows are actually overspec for current loads — try 70 first.
100 gauge (1.00 mil) Heavy pallets 3,500–5,000 lb, sharp-edge product (hardware, metal stock), multi-leg LTL Light or regular-shape SMB pallets Step up here when corner-puncture appears in damage reports.
120 gauge (1.20 mil) Very heavy pallets > 5,000 lb, irregular oversized loads, unitized non-palletized loads, export/bonded Standard SMB workflow Often replaced by strapping + 80 gauge for cost. Check whether strapping eliminates the need for 120 gauge in your workflow.

Pallet covers (poly)

Mil Right for Wrong for Notes
1.5 mil Indoor dust cover, in-warehouse transit, retail back-of-house Outdoor staging, dock loading, anything in wind or rain The "is anyone going to touch this in the next 4 hours" cover.
2 mil Standard outdoor dock staging up to 24 hours, ground LTL with shrink-wrapped pallets, mild rain Multi-day outdoor staging, sharp-corner load, abrasive pallet SMB workhorse. Most ecommerce-out-of-3PL workflows are correctly served here.
3 mil Multi-day outdoor staging, sharp-corner loads (hardware, metal stock, palletized printer/electronics), light wind Pure indoor (overspec) The cheap-insurance step for outdoor staging. +37% cost vs. 2 mil for roughly double the wind & abrasion tolerance.
4 mil Outdoor staging with significant wind, transitioning between climate-controlled and ambient, pallets with corner-board protection Indoor (massive overspec), short-staging windows under 24 hours +12% cost vs. 3 mil. The marginal-step where ratio starts to fall off.
6 mil Ocean container shipping, multi-week outdoor staging, harsh climate, demolition / hazmat consolidation, irregular abrasive loads Standard SMB outbound (3x cost for protection the load doesn't experience) The "we always used 6 mil" reflex is the single most common pallet-cover overspec in SMB warehousing.

Per-mil cost benchmarks (Packrift catalog, 2026-04-29)

Per-each (or per-1,000 unit) median cost from active SKUs in the Packrift catalog. Where a mil bucket has fewer than 3 offers we mark it directional only.

Poly bags 6x9 by mil

Mil Min Median Max Offers Confidence
1 mil $0.0121 $0.0121 $0.0121 1 Directional only
1.5 mil $0.0172 $0.0268 $0.0604 7 Robust
2 mil $0.0225 $0.0376 $0.0920 20 Very robust
3 mil $0.0338 $0.0738 $0.1683 3 Directional
4 mil $0.0435 $0.0726 $0.1508 9 Robust
6 mil $0.0645 $0.0826 $0.1362 3 Directional
8 mil $0.1659 $0.1659 $0.1659 1 Directional only

The 2 mil bucket (n=20) is the most reliable benchmark on the page; treat the others as directional. The crossover between 3 mil and 4 mil medians ($0.074 vs. $0.073) is real and reflects that 4 mil 6x9 is a more commoditized SKU than 3 mil 6x9 — there are simply more 4 mil 6x9 offers competing for shelf, while 3 mil 6x9 sits in a niche dominated by reclosable specialty variants. If you can use 4 mil instead of 3 mil at the same per-unit cost, do so for the durability headroom; if your damage-rate data says 2 mil is enough, stay there.

Carton-sealing tape per 1,000 yards by mil

Mil Min Median Max Offers Confidence
1.6 mil $18.03 $37.94 $231.53 23 Robust
1.8 mil $18.57 $36.10 $62.52 39 Very robust
2.0 mil $22.69 $90.49 $1,477.36 37 Robust (high tail dominated by specialty acrylic)
2.5 mil $28.64 $65.86 $435.58 61 Very robust
3.0 mil $29.12 $90.18 $339.45 13 Robust

Tape per 1,000 yards is a more useful unit than per-roll because tape rolls come in radically different lengths (110 yds, 1,000 yds, 1,500 yds). The median for 1.8 mil ($36.10/1,000 yds) actually sits below the median for 1.6 mil ($37.94) in the catalog, because 1.8 mil is the largest commodity bucket (39 offers) and pricing has converged downward. The 2.0 mil bucket has a wide tail because specialty acrylic and machine-grade hot melt tapes get spec'd here; the floor at $22.69 is the unbranded standard. Use the median as the realistic SMB price; if you are quoted near the floor on a stock SKU, that's a good quote.

Stretch film per 1,000 ft by gauge

Gauge Mil equiv Min Median Max Offers
60 ga 0.60 mil $9.24 $10.06 $10.78 6
70 ga 0.70 mil $11.63 $13.69 $32.46 9
80 ga 0.80 mil $3.81 $14.37 $43.03 61
100 ga 1.00 mil $7.19 $7.82 $12.73 5
120 ga 1.20 mil $8.55 $21.84 $49.40 16

The 80 gauge bucket is by far the largest (61 offers) because it's the legacy default for SMB pallet wrap. The 100 gauge median ($7.82/1,000 ft) sits below the 80 gauge median ($14.37) — that's not a unit error, it's a market-mix artifact: 100 gauge is dominated by machine-stretch film sold in long rolls at wholesale pricing, while 80 gauge is dominated by hand-stretch consumer rolls sold at retail markup. If you can shift a workflow from hand to machine stretch wrap (often as small as a 50–100-pallet/day breakeven), the per-1,000-ft economics flip in your favor at 100 gauge.

Pallet covers 48x40 by mil

Mil Min Median Max Offers
2 mil $1.42 $2.61 $3.68 5
3 mil $2.54 $3.56 $3.86 6
4 mil $3.37 $4.00 $4.63 2

1.5 mil and 6 mil pallet covers exist in the catalog but at sample sizes too thin to publish a median (n < 2 in the 48x40 footprint). Expect 1.5 mil 48x40 around $1.20 and 6 mil 48x40 around $5.50 directionally. The 2→3 mil step ($2.61 to $3.56, +$0.95, 1.37× ratio) is the cheap-insurance step on pallet covers; the 3→4 mil step (+$0.44, 1.12×) is more nuanced and depends on outdoor exposure.

Cost-per-mil-step

What does going up one mil actually cost? This is the question that lives or dies on the warehouse-floor decision. Per-step deltas, in dollars and ratio, from the catalog medians above:

Family / step Cost delta Cost ratio Verdict
Poly bag 6x9: 1 → 2 mil +$0.0255 per bag 3.11× Worth it for any shipped bag — 1 mil is single-use only
Poly bag 6x9: 2 → 3 mil +$0.0362 per bag 1.96× Cheap insurance — the step where doubt should default to "yes"
Poly bag 6x9: 2 → 4 mil +$0.0350 per bag 1.93× Worth it if SKU has any sharp edge or corner
Poly bag 6x9: 4 → 6 mil +$0.0100 per bag 1.14× Cheap if you actually need 6 mil; mostly diminishing returns
Tape: 1.8 → 2.0 mil +$54.38 per 1,000 yds 2.51× Largest tape step — reflects the move from commodity to spec tape
Tape: 2.5 → 3.0 mil +$24.32 per 1,000 yds 1.37× Worth it for cartons over 65 lb or palletized freight
Stretch film: 60 → 70 gauge +$3.63 per 1,000 ft 1.36× Cheap upgrade for slightly heavier or more irregular pallets
Stretch film: 100 → 120 gauge +$14.03 per 1,000 ft 2.79× Justified only for > 5,000 lb or sharp-corner pallets
Pallet cover 48x40: 2 → 3 mil +$0.95 per cover 1.37× Cheap insurance for any outdoor staging
Pallet cover 48x40: 3 → 4 mil +$0.44 per cover 1.12× Worth it only with significant outdoor exposure or wind

The pattern is consistent across all four families: the cheapest insurance is almost always the second step up from the floor (1→2 then 2→3 on poly, 1.6→1.8→2.0 on tape, 60→70 on film, 2→3 on pallet covers). The most overspec'd steps are also predictable: 4→6 mil on poly bags is a 14% cost bump for marginal benefit on most SKUs; 100→120 gauge stretch film is a 179% cost bump that only pays off on sharp or oversized pallets.

Mil thickness selector (live)

Plug in your product family, use case, and exposure. The selector returns the recommended mil, the rationale, and the median cost from the Packrift catalog. Defaults are pre-loaded; numbers update on every change.

Determines unit (mil vs. gauge vs. bubble height)
How rough is the product itself on the packaging?
Where will the package live before it reaches the customer?
Used to translate per-unit cost into monthly & annual
Recommended spec
–
Median cost / unit
–
Monthly cost
–
Annual cost
–

How the selector decides. The recommendation is a lookup over (family, use case, exposure) triples, calibrated to the per-mil cost and durability data above. Every recommendation maps to a specific row in the lookup tables earlier on this page; the calculator surfaces the cost number and the "why" sentence so you can sanity-check the decision before placing the order. The cost figures are catalog medians at standard sizes (poly bag 6x9, pallet cover 48x40, tape per 1,000 yards, film per 1,000 feet); your actual cost will move with size, branding, and pack quantity.

Failure modes when you under-spec mil

The damage stories follow predictable patterns. If you're seeing one of these in your warehouse damage reports, the fix is almost always a one-mil step up:

  1. Under-spec poly bag → tear at handling. The signature is a clean rip along an item's corner, usually visible at the dock or in the customer's hands. Most common at 1 mil for any shipped product, and at 2 mil for hardware or sharp-cornered SKUs. Fix: 2 mil for soft goods, 3 mil for smooth-cornered medium goods, 4 mil for sharp or angular goods.
  2. Under-spec tape → seam slip in transit. The signature is a partly-open box at the consolidation point with the tape still adhered to one flap. Tape did not fail; it just couldn't hold the seam. Most common when 1.6 or 1.8 mil tape is used on cartons over 30 pounds, or when 2.0 mil acrylic is used on a refrigerated lane (cold-failure on adhesive). Fix: 2.0 mil for 30–50 lb, 2.5 mil for 50–65 lb, 3.0 mil reinforced for over-65 lb.
  3. Under-spec stretch film → load shift on pallet. The signature is a leaning pallet at the carrier hub, often photographed in the carrier's exception report. The film is intact but the holding force was insufficient. Most common at 60 gauge for > 1,500 lb pallets or any sharp-corner load. Fix: 70–80 gauge for 1,500–3,500 lb, 100 gauge for > 3,500 lb, 120 gauge or strapping for sharp corners.
  4. Under-spec pallet cover → tear from rough surface or wind. The signature is a pallet cover with a hole at one corner, water staining, or a missing cover entirely (wind tore it off the pallet). Most common at 1.5 or 2 mil for outdoor staging beyond 24 hours, especially in coastal or high-wind regions. Fix: 3 mil for multi-day outdoor staging, 4 mil for wind exposure, 6 mil for ocean container or multi-week.
  5. Under-spec bubble wrap → crush damage to corners. The signature is a dented box with the bubble wrap collapsed flat — the bubbles popped during transit and the void didn't refill. Most common at 3/16" for items over 5 pounds or with hard corners. Fix: 5/16" for general ecommerce 5–15 lb, 1/2" for fragile or angular goods.

The pattern across families: failure is almost never the material itself failing; it's the spec being one step under what the workflow demands. The cost of the next mil up is in every case smaller than the cost of one damage claim and the operational cost of the resulting RMA.

Over-spec waste: when more mil is throwing money away

The opposite mistake is more common in our experience and bigger in dollar terms. Five over-spec patterns we see at SMB shippers regularly:

  1. 6 mil poly bag for apparel. A 5 mil polypropylene retail bag is enough for any soft-goods ecommerce SKU. Buying 6 mil 6x9 ($0.083 median) instead of 2 mil ($0.038) is a 2.20× cost premium for protection the SKU can't use. At 5,000 shipments/month with 30% in 6 mil unnecessarily, that's roughly $810 a year in pure overspec. Multiply by 12 months and you have a recurring annual leak.
  2. 4 mil pallet cover indoors. If the pallet doesn't leave the dock for more than 24 hours and never sees rain, 1.5 or 2 mil is correct. 4 mil at $4.00 per cover vs. 2 mil at $2.61 is a 1.53× premium. At 200 covers/month for indoor staging, that's ~$3,300 a year in overspec. The fix is one-line: tag every pallet on its way out as "indoor" or "outdoor" in the WMS and pull the cover from the right rack.
  3. 120 gauge stretch film for regular-shape pallets. 120 gauge ($21.84/1,000 ft median) costs 2.79× the price of 100 gauge ($7.82) and is justified only on heavy or sharp-corner loads. At 40 pallets/day × 200 ft/pallet × 22 working days = 176,000 ft/month × the $14/1,000 ft delta = ~$30,000 a year in pure overspec, before accounting for film usage savings from machine-stretch (which can cut total film consumption by 30–50%).
  4. 3.0 mil tape for SMB ecommerce cartons. 3.0 mil tape ($90.18/1,000 yds) is reinforced filament alternative; 1.8 mil ($36.10) is the SMB ecommerce workhorse. Using 3.0 mil reflexively on 25-pound cartons is a 2.50× cost premium for grip strength the carton doesn't need. At 6 yds/carton and 5,000 cartons/month, the gap is ~$1,950 a year.
  5. 1/2" bubble wrap for non-fragile ecommerce. 1/2" bubble ($0.32/linear ft) at 1.78× the price of 3/16" ($0.18) is correct only for fragile, heavy, or angular goods. Soft goods, paperbacks, and apparel in 1/2" bubble are wasting volume in the box (which means a bigger box, which means DIM-weight surcharge on top of the bubble-wrap cost itself).

Five common mistakes

  1. Translating gauge as mil. "I need 80 mil stretch film" is a request that gets a confused look from any vendor: 80 mil is roofing membrane, not pallet wrap. The intended spec is 80 gauge = 0.80 mil. The fix: when in stretch film conversation, use gauge; when in any other film conversation, use mil. Never mix the two in the same sentence without specifying.
  2. Conflating bubble wrap thickness with bubble height. 3/16", 5/16", and 1/2" are bubble heights, not film thicknesses. The film backing is typically 1.0–1.5 mil regardless of bubble height. If a vendor quotes "5 mil bubble wrap," ask whether they mean the backing film (almost certainly) or the bubble height (almost certainly not 5 mil — that would be a 0.5 inch pad). Spec on bubble height for cushion type, mil for backing-film durability separately.
  3. Buying the same mil for every SKU. A single-mil purchasing policy ("we always order 4 mil") is the easiest way to overspec on light SKUs and underspec on sharp ones simultaneously. The fix is a SKU-mil mapping in the WMS or Shopify metafield: shipping_mil with values pulled from the lookup tables on this page.
  4. Buying retail pack quantities of mil-spec'd film. 25-bag retail packs of poly bags carry a 60–100% premium per bag over 1,000-count cases. 6-roll retail bundles of stretch film carry a 30–50% premium over the 4-roll case. The fix is a 90-day forecast and a case order, not a retail order.
  5. Defaulting to 80 gauge stretch film because "we always have." 80 gauge has the largest catalog presence (61 offers in our data) and the inertia of being the SMB default for fifteen years. But thinner-film technology has improved: 60 and 70 gauge films from current manufacturers have holding force that 1990s 80 gauge couldn't match. The test: order one case of 70 gauge from your current vendor, run it for two weeks on standard pallets, and look at the carrier exception rate. If it's the same as 80 gauge (as it is in roughly 80% of SMB workflows we've seen), you've just freed up roughly 12% of your stretch film budget.

Methodology appendix

Data sources. Packrift active SKU catalog, snapshotted 2026-04-29. We filtered to active priced products only (12,929 SKUs total). Pack quantities, mil/gauge specifications, and dimensions were parsed from product titles using regex; we manually spot-checked roughly 30 SKUs across each family to confirm parser correctness. Any SKU we couldn't reliably parse was excluded rather than guessed.

Mil parsing. Mil thickness was extracted with the regex (\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\s*[- ]?\s*Mil\b (case-insensitive). Gauge for stretch film was extracted with (\d{2,3})\s*Gauge\b. Parsed values were snapped to canonical buckets (poly bag: 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 mil; tape: 1.6, 1.8, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 mil; stretch film: 60, 70, 80, 100, 120 gauge; pallet cover: 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6 mil) within ±0.15 mil tolerance for mil and ±5 for gauge.

Size pinning. To compare per-mil cost like-for-like, we pinned poly bag analysis to 6x9 (the SMB ecommerce reference size; ±0.5" tolerance on both axes). Pallet cover analysis was pinned to a 48x40 base footprint, any height. Tape analysis was normalized to per-1,000-yards across all roll lengths and case quantities. Stretch film analysis was normalized to per-1,000-feet across all roll lengths, widths, and case quantities. Bubble wrap pricing in the calculator was set from category convention rather than the 289-SKU bubble cushioning bucket because mil isn't the relevant variable for bubble wrap.

Sample sizes. Bucket counts (n) are reported for every published median. Buckets with n < 3 are flagged as directional only. The most robust buckets in this report are: tape 2.5 mil (n=61), stretch film 80 gauge (n=61), tape 1.8 mil (n=39), tape 2.0 mil (n=37), tape 1.6 mil (n=23), poly bag 2 mil 6x9 (n=20), stretch film 120 gauge (n=16), tape 3.0 mil (n=13). Directional-only: poly bag 1 mil (n=1), poly bag 8 mil (n=1), pallet cover 4 mil (n=2). 1.5 mil and 6 mil pallet covers at the 48x40 footprint had n < 2 and were assigned directional estimates from product-family-wide medians.

Outliers. The high tail in tape 2.0 mil ($1,477.36 max) is a single specialty machine-grade hot-melt SKU not representative of the bucket; the next-highest is $435. The high tail in stretch film 120 gauge ($49.40) is dominated by anti-static and printed variants. We use medians, not means, to keep central tendency from being pulled by these specialty SKUs.

Caveats. Packrift is one supplier. The numbers describe what the Packrift catalog charges as of 2026-04-29 — not the median across the U.S. packaging industry. The cost-per-mil-step deltas reflect catalog mix as much as real durability cost; the directional take-aways (which steps are cheap, which are diminishing returns) hold across the broader market because they are anchored to material physics, but specific dollar deltas may move ±20% between vendors. Damage-rate language used in the failure-mode and selector logic is SMB-shipper convention drawn from public ecommerce post-mortems, not Packrift-customer telemetry.

What this report is not. Not a vendor-vs-vendor comparison (Packrift catalog only). Not a national-average price index. Not a damage-rate study. Not a substitute for testing on your specific SKU geometry — every recommendation here is a starting point for a SKU-level pull and review. Treat it as the reference page that gets you out of "I don't know what mil to spec" and into "let me run a 3-pallet test."

Citation request. If you cite a number from this report — in a blog post, a newsletter, a podcast, a deck, or an internal procurement document — please link back to packrift.com/pages/mil-thickness-decoded. We refresh the underlying numbers quarterly as the catalog updates.

Republish license. CC BY 4.0 — quote, screenshot, or adapt anything in this report as long as you credit Packrift and link back.

Related Packrift references

Source: Packrift catalog as of 2026-04-29. Methodology and per-bucket sample counts disclosed throughout. Questions or data requests: marketing@packrift.com.