Lockers: Steel, Welded & Wire

The three kinds of locker

Pick the family first. Everything else follows from it.

Most locker mistakes happen before any dimension is chosen, because the buyer priced the wrong family. The three families solve different problems and sit at very different price points.

What this guide does not cover

Enclosed storage cabinets, modular drawer cabinets and flammable liquid cabinets are a separate decision with their own specification logic. See the Cabinets & Modular Drawer Storage guide for those. To browse what is in stock, see lockers, steel and wire.

Reading a Hallowell model number

Six characters describe the whole locker. Learn them and you can compare any two quotes.

Hallowell model numbers are not arbitrary. Each position encodes a dimension, and the number after the dash is the tier count. Once you can read it, a quote stops being a list of codes and becomes a specification you can check.

The codes

Why the height code matters twice

The height digit gives two numbers: the locker body and the overall frame. A -8 locker is 72 in. of locker on a 78 in. frame, because the standard 6 in. legs sit underneath. A -6 is 60 in. on a 66 in. frame. When you are checking a ceiling, a soffit, a duct run or a sprinkler head, the frame height is the number that matters, and it is the one buyers most often forget.

Choosing the tier configuration

Tier count is a headcount decision, not a storage-volume decision.

Tier is how many openings stack in one column. It sets both how many people a run serves and what each of them can put inside. In a 72 in. locker the arithmetic is simple: one tier gives one 72 in. opening, two tiers give 36 in. each, three give 24 in., six give 12 in.

Wardrobe and box lockers latch differently

This is a real durability difference that rarely appears on a quote. Wardrobe lockers (1, 2 and 3 tier) use a multi-point latch with a recessed handle and gravity-lift latching. Box lockers (4, 5, 6 and 16 tier) use a projecting single-point friction catch pull. The friction catch is simpler and cheaper, and it is also the part that wears in heavy-turnover installations. If a box locker bank will see hundreds of open-and-close cycles a day, plan on it as a wear item.

Width, depth and frame height

Three dimensions, and only one of them is usually chosen well.

Width

Published widths are 12, 15 and 18 in. per opening. Twelve inches is the default and it is adequate for a coat and a bag. Fifteen inches is the upgrade that makes a locker comfortable rather than tolerable, and it is the right call anywhere people change clothes daily. Eighteen inches is for bulky gear, turnout equipment, helmets and cold-weather outerwear.

Lockers are sold as single units or as three-wide banks. A three-wide bank is one factory assembly sharing side panels, which is cheaper per opening and faster to install than three singles. Order banks wherever the run allows and use singles only to finish an odd end.

Depth

Published depths are 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 in., though the deeper options are not offered on every line. Depth is where money gets wasted, because it is easy to assume deeper is better. It is not: depth is the least accessible dimension in a locker, and anything at the back of a 24 in. locker is out of sight.

Twelve inches suits box lockers and personal effects. Fifteen inches is the general-purpose choice. Eighteen inches and deeper is for gear, boots and equipment that genuinely needs the floor area.

Frame height and the 6 in. legs

Standard Premium lockers ship on 6 in. legs, which is why a 72 in. locker occupies 78 in. and a 60 in. locker occupies 66 in. The legs raise the locker off the floor so the room can be cleaned underneath, which matters more than it sounds in food, healthcare and industrial settings.

Door style and ventilation

The door decides airflow, sightlines and how hard the locker is to defeat.

Door style is not cosmetic. It governs whether wet clothing dries, whether staff can see contents without opening every door, and how much abuse the locker takes.

Across the Hallowell wardrobe and box lines carried here, doors are published as louvered, polycarbonate or perforated rather than solid. If you need a fully solid door for privacy or containment, that points toward the all-welded lines in Section Ten.

Knock-down, ready built or all-welded

The single biggest driver of installed cost, and it is decided three different ways.

Buyers routinely compare a knock-down price against an assembled price and conclude the assembled locker is expensive. The comparison is wrong, because it leaves out the labor. What matters is the installed cost, and how the choice is expressed differs by line.

How to actually choose

Knock-down makes sense for a large run in an accessible room where you have labor available and freight cost matters. Ready Built makes sense for small quantities, awkward access, occupied buildings, and any job where assembly labor is billed at contractor rates. Ready Built II makes sense when you were going to add a slope top and closed base anyway, since buying them fitted removes both the parts and the fitting.

Locks and access control

Including the one compatibility trap that catches people every time.

Lockers ship without locks unless the line states otherwise, and the lock is a separate decision from the locker. There are three published Zephyr options plus padlock-provision hardware.

Assigned or unassigned

This decision drives the lock type more than security level does.

• Assigned lockers. One person, one locker, long term. Built-in combination locks work well because there is nothing to hand out and nothing to return. Keep a master record of combinations.
• Unassigned or shift lockers. Different people daily. User-supplied padlocks on a hasp are simplest, since the facility issues nothing and manages nothing. The cost is that abandoned padlocks accumulate and get cut off.
• Managed issue. Built-in key locks, with the facility holding the master. Right where lockers must be opened on demand for inspection or when someone leaves.

Electronic and small-item lockers

The cell phone and tablet line encodes locking in the model number rather than as an accessory: -PL is a padlock provision for a user-supplied lock, -K-PL is an individual key lock, and -E-PL is a DigiTech electronic keypad. The price gap between them is substantial, since the electronic version runs several times the padlock version, so decide what the application actually needs.

At the high-security end, the emergency response line uses a three-point cremone locking system, and the all-welded industrial lockers in Section Ten use three-point locking with a padlock-ready hasp as standard.

Bases, tops and fillers

The parts that turn a row of lockers into a finished installation.

A bare locker run has three problems: an open gap under the legs that collects debris, a flat top that collects debris, and untidy gaps where the run meets a wall or turns a corner. Each has a published part.

Closed bases

Standard lockers sit on 6 in. legs, leaving an open recess. Closed bases fill it with 16 gauge cold-rolled steel, 6 in. high. Order a front base sized to the locker width and a side base sized to the locker depth for the ends of a run.

Sloping tops

A flat locker top becomes a shelf for anything anyone wants to put down, and in food, healthcare and cleanroom settings it becomes a dust ledge. Sloping tops are published at an 18 degree pitch in three forms.

• Individual slope tops (KISTT), one kit per locker, sized by width and depth, for example KISTT1218 for a 12 by 18 in. locker.
• Three-wide slope top kits (SLST), three tops per kit, matching a three-wide bank.
• Continuous slope tops (CST), 18 gauge, supplied in 72 in. lengths, each including a splice cover and three rear supports. The right choice for a long unbroken run, because it reads as one continuous line rather than a row of separate caps.

Both individual and continuous versions need end closures to cap the exposed triangle at the end of a run: KISE for individual tops, CSE for continuous.

Fillers and slip joints

Fillers close the gaps between the locker run and the building. Front fillers (KFSF) come in 6 and 12 in. widths at both 66 and 78 in. heights, matching the two frame heights. Slip joints (KG66, KG78) join runs. Flat top fillers (KFTF) and corner fillers (FTC) close the tops, and both are published for knock-down lockers only.

Coat rods and benches

Single-tier lockers include a hat shelf, a double-prong ceiling hook and two single hooks as standard. Coat rods are extra, published in 12, 15, 18 and 24 in. lengths (KCR12 through KCR24) and designed for knock-down lockers. Benches are assembled from pedestals (steel, cast iron, aluminum, stainless or adjustable height, all 16-1/4 in. tall) plus a maple top sized from 36 to 144 in.

Matching material to environment

Where standard painted steel will not last, and what replaces it.

Standard lockers are painted cold-rolled steel. In a dry, heated, indoor room they last decades. In damp, washdown, coastal or chemically active environments they rust from the inside of the seams outward, and no amount of repainting fixes it. Four alternatives are published.

Colors

Locker product pages publish Dark Gray, Tan, Marine Blue, Black and Light Gray. Accessory pages use a different set, Parchment, Hallowell Gray and Marine Blue, with additional colors on request. That mismatch matters: if you want bases, slope tops and fillers to match the lockers, confirm the accessory color against the locker color before ordering rather than assuming the names line up.

All-welded industrial lockers

When the door being pried open is the actual risk.

Strong Hold lockers are a different product from formed sheet lockers, and the specification reads differently. Published construction across the line is 12 gauge all-welded steel with 7 gauge welded 6 in. legs, three-point locking with a padlock-ready hasp, and 14 gauge adjustable shelving where shelves are fitted.

For comparison, a Premium knock-down locker has a 24 gauge body. Lower gauge numbers mean thicker steel, so 12 gauge is dramatically heavier material, and the whole assembly is welded rather than bolted. A 54 in. wide six-door vented unit is published at 684 lb; a 12-compartment unit at 1,018 lb; a 36-compartment bank at 1,568 lb.

The configurations

Overall height and slope tops

Strong Hold lockers publish both a locker height and an overall height, and the gap is the 6 in. welded legs: a 72 in. locker is 78 in. overall. Adding a slope top increases it further. One published two-tier slope top model is 72 in. of locker at 85 in. overall. As with the knock-down lockers, the overall height is the number to check against the ceiling.

What it costs

All-welded lockers run several times the price of knock-down steel per opening, and they weigh enough to change how they are delivered and placed. That premium buys steel thickness, welded joints and three-point locking. Specify it where tools are stored, where theft is a live problem, or where the room sees genuine abuse. In a clean office or school, it is money spent on a risk that is not there.

Wire tenant and bulk storage lockers

Sized in feet, not inches, and specified as a run rather than as units.

Wire lockers solve a different problem: giving a resident or tenant a lockable space large enough to walk into. WireCrafters tenant lockers are published at 7 ft 6 in. high in widths of 3, 4 and 5 ft and depths of 3, 4 and 5 ft. The product listings publish the mesh specification as 10 gauge wire in a 2 in. by 2 in. welded wire mesh, welded into a 1-1/4 in. by 1-1/4 in. 13 gauge roll-formed angle.

Starters and add-ons

Wire lockers are quoted as a run, not as individual units, and the suffix tells you which part you are buying.

The D in the double models means double tier, two compartments stacked vertically in the same footprint, not a wider door. That doubles the number of tenants served per square foot of floor, at the cost of each compartment being roughly half height.

Hallowell bulk storage lockers

The BSL line is the industrial equivalent: welded wire mesh and reinforced steel frames with a full-height padlock hasp and welded door frame, published at 90 in. high in 36 and 48 in. widths and 36, 48 and 60 in. depths. The suffixes follow the same starter and add-on logic. 1S is a single-tier starter, 1A a single-tier add-on, 2S and 2A the double-tier versions. Optional backs, tops and floor panels are available.

Military and tactical gear

The WireCrafters TA-50 gear locker is published at 24 in. deep by 42 in. wide by 78 in. high, with custom sizes available. Construction is 1-1/2 in. square 10 gauge welded wire, or 1-1/2 in. 13 gauge expanded metal, on a 1-1/4 in. angle and channel frame, with a 16 gauge formed top, a 14 gauge formed bottom and a 20 gauge back. It includes a 16 gauge shelf, a hot-dip galvanized 3/4 in. schedule 40 pipe coat rod and three coat hooks, and uses a three-point cane bolt lock with a padlockable handle. It is available fully assembled or knocked down.

OSHA, ADA and layout

Two requirements that change what you order, and the clearances that make a room work.

OSHA change rooms

Where employees must wear protective clothing because of possible contamination with toxic materials, OSHA requires change rooms with separate storage for street clothes and for the protective clothing. The regulation reads:

In practice that means two separate lockers or two separate compartments per affected employee, not one locker with a divider. This is the requirement most often missed at specification stage, and it doubles the opening count for the affected headcount. Confirm which of your standards trigger it before you size the room.

ADA accessible lockers

The 2010 ADA Standards set both a quantity and a reach requirement.

The reach range is what makes this a specification decision rather than a layout decision. A usable opening has to fall between 15 and 48 in. above the floor, which rules out the upper tier of most stacked configurations. In a two-tier bank on 6 in. legs, only the lower opening is within reach range. That means your accessible lockers are effectively lower-tier openings, and the 5 percent applies to each type of locker you install, not to the total.

Layout and clearance

• Aisle width. Allow for an open door plus a person changing in front of it. A 12 in. wide door swings 12 in. into the aisle, and someone bending to a bottom tier needs more room than someone standing at a top one.
• Benches. If you are fitting benches, they consume aisle. Published bench pedestals are 16-1/4 in. tall; plan the aisle around bench plus seated person plus circulation, not around the locker alone.
• Anchoring. Tall locker banks should be secured to the wall or floor. A loaded 78 in. bank with an open top-tier door has a real tip-over geometry, and it is the kind of risk that is trivially cheap to remove at installation and expensive to address afterward.
• Cleaning. The 6 in. legs exist so floors can be cleaned underneath. If you specify closed bases for appearance, you give that up. In food, healthcare and industrial rooms, that trade usually goes the other way.

Common and costly mistakes

Twelve things that go wrong on locker orders.

1. Measuring to the locker height instead of the frame height. A 72 in. locker needs 78 in. of clear height on standard legs, and more again with a sloped top.
2. Choosing tier count from wall length alone. Work out the headcount, then check the opening actually holds what people bring. A three-tier locker will not take a winter coat.
3. Ordering built-in locks for single-point-latch doors. The built-in locks are published as not recommended for those doors. Confirm the latch before ordering locks.
4. Comparing knock-down against assembled on purchase price. The comparison that matters is installed cost, including labor.
5. Ordering knock-down-only accessories for Ready Built lockers. Coat rods and flat top fillers are published for knock-down lockers only.
6. Forgetting fillers. Measure the wall, subtract the locker run, and order fillers for the remainder on the same PO.
7. Buying louvered doors for wet clothing. Ventilation cannot be retrofitted. Specify the ventilated line at order time or plan on odor complaints.
8. Buying depth you cannot reach. Depth is the least accessible dimension. Twenty-four inches is for gear, not for general use.
9. Assuming accessory colors match locker colors. The two lists are published differently. Confirm before ordering bases, tops and fillers.
10. Quoting a wire locker run as all starters. One starter, then add-ons. Every add-on shares framing with its neighbor.
11. Missing the OSHA separate-storage requirement. Where protective clothing may be contaminated, street clothes and protective clothing need separate storage, which doubles the openings for that headcount.
12. Treating ADA as a layout afterthought. The 15 to 48 in. reach range makes accessible lockers lower-tier openings, and the 5 percent applies to each type installed.

Frequently asked questions

The questions that come up most often on locker quotes.

Quick-reference tables

Everything above, condensed.

Model number decoder

Tier to opening height

Construction by line

Accessory part numbers

Compliance quick reference

Specify-it checklist