What is a MEWP?

The term, and where it comes from

MEWP stands for Mobile Elevating Work Platform. It's the technical, standards-body term for a family of machines most people know by a more casual name: boom lift, scissor lift, cherry picker, man lift. If you've heard AWP or EWP used instead, they mean the same thing; MEWP is simply the term used in the international standard (EN 280) and by bodies like IPAF, so it's the one you'll see on a datasheet or a hire company's paperwork.

What actually makes something a MEWP rather than, say, a crane or a hoist, is the combination of a platform designed to carry a person, a mechanism to raise that platform, and a base that's mobile enough to be repositioned around a site without needing to be craned in and out.

It's worth separating that from the operator side of things too. MEWP describes the machine; IPAF's category system describes what an operator is trained and certified to run, and the two don't map onto each other one-to-one.

The main families

Scissor lifts move straight up, with a large deck and no meaningful sideways reach. They're the default choice when the work is directly overhead. Vertical masts do something similar at a much smaller footprint, trading deck size for the ability to fit through a standard doorway.

Articulating booms use a jointed arm to reach up and over obstructions, which is what you want when there's a wall, a pipe run or a piece of plant in the way. Telescopic booms skip the joints in favour of one long straight section, which usually buys more outright height and horizontal reach at the cost of some manoeuvrability.

Spider lifts add tracks and stabiliser legs, so they can be walked through a gate or a narrow corridor and then set up on ground a wheeled machine couldn't cross. And truck-, van- and trailer-mounted platforms trade some of that flexibility for the ability to drive between sites on the public road, which matters when a job involves several short visits rather than one long stay.

What actually decides which one you need

Working height gets quoted first because it's the easiest number to compare, but it's rarely the number that decides the job. Outreach at the load you're actually carrying, the width of the access route, the machine's weight against the ground or floor it'll stand on, and whether it needs to work indoors, outdoors or both all matter just as much. Our guide to choosing a MEWP walks through that process in order, starting from the work position rather than the machine.

None of this replaces a site-specific assessment by someone competent to make that call. The full catalogue is there for narrowing down candidates by spec; the final decision still belongs to whoever's responsible for the job.