October 18, 2026

How to Price Firewood: Per Cord, Per Bundle and Delivered Pricing

Learning how to price firewood well is the difference between a busy yard that loses money on every load and a firewood business that actually pays for its splitter, its fuel and its winter labour. Price too low and you sell out in October with nothing left for the customers who pay best. Price too high, on vague terms like a "load" or a "pile," and buyers go elsewhere — or dispute the delivery. This guide works through the legal measure, the cord and bundle maths, seasoned versus green pricing, species premiums, and delivery and stacking fees, so you can set a price list you can defend.

If you are building the operation behind the price list, start with the right kit: browse firewood equipment listings on Lumber Lookup and, when you are ready to trade, sell on Lumber Lookup.

How to Price Firewood Starts With the Legal Cord

Every price in firewood is a price per unit of volume, so the unit has to be exact. Under the uniform method-of-sale rules published in NIST Handbook 130 and reproduced by the Washington State Department of Agriculture, a cord is "the amount of wood that is contained in a space of 128 cubic feet when the wood is ranked and well stowed" — pieces touching, parallel, and stacked in a compact manner. The same rules say firewood must be advertised and sold by the cord or fractions of a cord, and they prohibit terms such as "face cord," "rack," "pile" and "truckload" in advertising, because those terms have no fixed volume.

That does not mean you cannot sell smaller stacks customers ask for by those names. It means your invoice and your price list should translate them into cords and cubic feet. Montana State University Extension's firewood guide puts the standard stack plainly: a full cord measures 4 feet deep, 4 feet high and 8 feet long, totalling 128 cubic feet, though the solid wood inside is closer to 85 cubic feet once air between the splits is counted. Price from that stack, and every other unit is arithmetic.

A half cord is 64 cubic feet — the same 4-by-8 face, 2 feet deep, or three rows becomes two. A quarter cord is 32 cubic feet. If a customer measures your delivered stack and multiplies length by height by depth, the result divided by 128 should match the fraction you charged for. Build that check into your own loading: stack in measured racks at the yard, and you will never load short by accident.

Face Cords, Fractions and Bundle Maths

A face cord is the unit customers know best and misunderstand most. It keeps the 4-foot-high, 8-foot-long face of a full cord but is only one log length deep. At the common 16-inch log length, Montana State Extension notes, a face cord is one-third of a full cord — about 42.7 cubic feet. At 24-inch logs it is one-half of a cord, at 12 inches one-quarter. So a face cord has no single price: its price is the full-cord price multiplied by the fraction the log length creates. Always state the log length next to the price, and you remove the most common complaint in the trade.

Bundles work the same way, from the other end. A retail bundle is typically under 1 cubic foot of split wood, sold for campfires and occasional fires. Work backwards from your cord price: if a cord is 128 cubic feet, 1 cubic foot is 1/128 of the cord's wood — but a bundle should never be priced at that raw fraction, because bagging, netting, handling and retail display are most of the cost. Bundle pricing is convenience pricing. The maths matters for honesty about volume on the label, not for setting the shelf price by proportion.

How to Price Firewood by Published Cord Ranges

Anchor your list to the market, then adjust for your costs and your wood. HomeGuide's firewood cost guide, in its published ranges as of October 2026, puts a full cord of seasoned hardwood at $275–$400 for 128 cubic feet, a half cord at $180–$280, a face cord at $120–$200, and a bundle at $5–$10 for up to 1 cubic foot. Those ranges include local delivery up to about 15 miles in HomeGuide's figures, which is a useful reminder: when you quote, state whether delivery is in the number or on top of it.

Use the ranges as a sanity check, not a substitute for costing. Add up your stumpage or log cost per cord, cutting and splitting time, splitter fuel and maintenance, yard rent, and delivery miles. If your full cost sits above the local range, the answer is rarely to charge far above it — it is to sell a better-specified product (truly seasoned, premium species, stacked on delivery) that justifies the top of the range, or to fix the cost, usually processing speed. Our guide to starting the business itself, how to start a firewood business, covers that setup in full.

Seasoned Versus Green: Pricing the Wait

Seasoned wood costs more because time and yard space cost money, and because it is simply a better fuel. Green firewood can be 50 percent or more moisture; wood is generally considered seasoned and ready to burn efficiently below 20 percent moisture, a point HomeGuide also makes in its drying guidance, noting most species take six months to a year to get there. The University of New Hampshire Extension firewood guide reminds buyers to require a receipt stating species, volume and price — a standard your own invoices should meet without being asked.

In the same published ranges as of October 2026, HomeGuide puts green firewood at $150–$275 per full cord against $275–$400 for seasoned — a clear, defensible gap. Price green honestly as a buy-ahead product for next winter, discount it for the wait and the customer's own stacking and storage, and never sell green wood at a seasoned price on the strength of a few dry weeks in September. One mis-sold load costs more in reputation than a season of correct discounts. A moisture meter reading, taken on a fresh split in front of the customer, is the cheapest trust-builder in the business.

Species Premiums: Oak, Hickory and Mixed Hardwood

Species is the second price lever after dryness, because density is heat. Dense hardwoods burn longer and coal better, so they command the top of the market: HomeGuide's published ranges as of October 2026 put standard hardwood at $275–$400 per cord and softwood at $175–$275, with premium hardwoods such as oak and hickory reaching $400–$600 or more per full cord in tight local markets near winter. Mixed hardwood sits in the middle and is the honest volume product for most yards.

Set three tiers and hold them all season: mixed hardwood as the standard, a named premium species (oak, hickory, or your local equivalent) at a clear premium, and softwood or mixed softwood-hardwood as the budget and shoulder-season option. Name the species mix on the invoice, as the Handbook 130 identity rules expect a declaration within a stated accuracy. Vague "hardwood" claims are where underpricing and overclaiming both start.

Processing speed decides whether those tiers are profitable. A premium oak cord that takes twice as long to split needs the premium to be real, which is why splitter choice belongs in a pricing conversation: see our comparison of the best commercial log splitters before you set a price your current machine cannot sustain.

Delivery and Stacking: Price Them Separately

Delivered pricing should be built, not guessed. HomeGuide's published figures as of October 2026 put delivery beyond the local radius at roughly $25–$100, or about $2–$3 per mile, and stacking at $20–$80 per cord depending on carry distance. Treat those as the market frame: set a free or included radius that matches your quoted cord price, a per-mile or zoned fee beyond it, and a stacking fee that reflects the carry — a ground-floor rack beside the driveway is not the same job as a basement or a back-garden stack up steps.

Publish the three numbers separately: cord price, delivery by zone, stacking per cord. Customers accept fees they can see before the truck leaves; they resent a single inflated delivered price they cannot compare, and they argue about fees invented at the kerb. If you offer a stacked-and-delivered premium tier, say exactly what it includes.

Conclusion

To learn how to price firewood properly, start with the legal cord of 128 cubic feet ranked and well stowed, derive face-cord, half-cord and bundle prices from that volume, layer a seasoned premium over green, a species premium over mixed hardwood, and transparent delivery and stacking fees on top. Check your list against published market ranges, cost it against your own processing time, and hold it all season. Then put the business behind the prices: browse firewood equipment on LumberLookup.com and list your surplus kit to sell on LumberLookup.com.