October 18, 2026

How to Price Lumber

Knowing how to price lumber is the difference between a sawmill that pays and a sawmill that stays busy. Mill your own boards and you own a product with no price tag on it: price too low and you have sold skilled work, blade wear and drying time for less than the big-box store gets for worse wood; price too high against a number nobody can verify and your stacks sit while the bills do not. The method below prices lumber the way the trade actually does it — by the board foot as the base unit, adjusted by species and grade, checked against what sawing services charge in your market — with worked examples you can copy.

When your stacks are priced and ready, the selling side is simple: list your lumber and equipment for sale on Lumber Lookup puts it in front of buyers who already shop by species and board foot, and the Lumber Lookup pricing page shows what it costs to sell there.

How to Price Lumber Starts With the Board Foot

Every lumber price in North America is built on the board foot: a volume unit equal to a board 1 inch thick, 12 inches wide and 12 inches long — thickness in inches, times width in inches, times length in feet, divided by 12. If the maths is new to you, our guide to how to calculate board feet works the formula with charts and examples, including the nominal-versus-actual trap that quietly under-prices home-milled stock.

Decide three board-foot rules before you quote anyone. First, measure your lumber the way buyers expect: rough-sawn green lumber is usually tallied at sawn size, while surfaced lumber is tallied at nominal size — state which, in writing. Second, set a minimum: small orders carry the same handling as large ones. Third, price in tiers: a single board, a full stack and a wholesale lot are three different prices, and your sheet should say so.

Price by Species: What the Market Already Believes

Species is the strongest single price lever you control. Buyers arrive with a value ladder already in their heads, built by every lumber yard they have ever visited: construction softwoods and low-grade hardwoods at the bottom, furniture hardwoods in the middle, figured and wide stock at the top. Your prices move with that ladder whether you plan them or not.

Useful anchors from the service side of the market show the spread. Wood-Mizer's guide to charging for sawing services puts custom sawing in 2026 at roughly $0.35–$1.00 per board foot for standard work, with specialty cuts reaching $1.00–$2.00 or more — that is the service alone, before the value of the wood itself. When you sell lumber you milled from your own logs, your price has to recover the log, the sawing, the drying and the handling. A practical build-up many small mills use: start from your local retail price for the same species and grade at a lumber yard, then position your rough, air-dried or kiln-dried stock at a deliberate discount to it — you are selling direct, without the yard's surfacing, grading stamp or returns counter, and the discount is what makes a buyer drive to you.

Price by Grade: The Same Log, Three Prices

Grade is where inexperienced sellers leave the most money. One log produces clear, wide boards from its best faces and knotty, narrow boards from its edges, and those are different products. The hardwood trade grades by the proportion of clear cuttings a board yields — the top grade, FAS, requires about 83⅓% clear material — and while a small mill will not stamp grades formally, pricing in grade tiers captures the same value. Sort every stack into at least three piles: clear and wide (your premium price), sound with character knots (your standard price), and utility stock (priced to move, for fencing, formwork and farm use). Buyers respect the sorting — it tells them you know what you have — and the premium pile routinely carries the margin for the whole log.

Drying multiplies grade value. Air-dried stock sells as a project material; the same boards kiln-dried to furniture moisture levels sell into a different market at a different price, which is why the drying decision in our kiln drying lumber guide belongs in your pricing plan, not after it.

Worked Examples: How to Price Lumber in Practice

Example 1 — rough pine construction stock. You mill 500 board feet of 2x6 pine from your own logs for local builders. Lumber-yard retail for surfaced pine in your area sets the ceiling; you price your rough, green boards at a clear discount per board foot, in full-stack quantities only, buyer loads. The discount is the product: straight, full-dimension stock that framing crews cannot buy at a yard.

Example 2 — air-dried oak furniture boards. You saw 300 board feet of red oak, air-dry it a year, and sort it. The clear, wide third prices at your premium tier — positioned against yard prices for graded oak, discounted modestly because it is air-dried rather than kiln-dried. The standard tier prices 25–35% below it. The utility third sells at softwood money to farm customers. One log, three prices, and the blended return beats any single flat rate you could have set.

Example 3 — the sawing-service cross-check. A customer asks what you would charge to saw their logs instead of selling them yours. The published 2026 service benchmarks — $0.35–$1.00 per board foot or $75–$155 per hour, per the Wood-Mizer guide, with blade-damage fees and minimum charges standard — give you a defensible quote in one line, and they also tell you what your own milling time is worth inside your lumber prices. Long-running operator discussions collected in Woodweb's custom milling rates archive show those structures — per-board-foot pricing, minimums, blade fees — have been the trade's norm for years.

Minimums, Terms and the Prices You Do Not Publish

Three details on the sheet protect the prices on it. First, a minimum order or a handling fee for small lots: the customer buying two boards for a repair should pay for the twenty minutes of your time their order takes, or politely buy elsewhere. Second, terms: lumber is a cash business at small scale — deposit on custom orders, payment on pickup, and a firm number of days you will hold a stack before it goes back on sale. Third, delivery: quote it as a separate line, per mile or per load, never folded invisibly into the board-foot price where it eats the margin on your nearest customers and subsidises your farthest ones.

Keep two numbers off the public sheet. Your floor — the price below which a stack earns more as your own project stock than as a sale — is a negotiating fact, not an advertisement. And your discount for a buyer taking an entire species or a whole season's utility grade is a conversation, because publishing it trains every retail buyer to ask for it. Everything else belongs on the sheet, in the open: customers trust a seller whose prices they can read before they drive out.

Conclusion: A Price Sheet Is How to Price Lumber

Learning how to price lumber is really learning to keep a price sheet and trust it. The sellers who make money do not price board by board from memory — they keep a one-page sheet: board-foot rates by species, three grade tiers, a drying premium, quantity breaks and a minimum order. Build yours from your local yard prices and the published service rates, review it each season, and sell from it without apologising. When the stacks are priced and sorted, put them where the buyers are: sell your lumber on Lumber Lookup, and check the pricing page first so your margins already include what selling costs you.