How big is a cord of wood?

A cord is 128 cubic feet of wood, bark, and air - a stack 4 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 8 feet long, ranked and well-stowed. That figure is the legal unit of sale under NIST Handbook 130, adopted by statute in most states.

Which firewood produces the most heat?

Per pound, every species is close to the same: USDA Forest Service figures put Southern hardwood stemwood at about 7,827 BTU per ovendry pound and loblolly pine stemwood at about 8,600. Heat per cord differs because a cord is a fixed volume, so denser wood puts more pounds in the same 128 cubic feet. Hickory runs about 28.0 million BTU per cord and red maple about 18.7.

How long does firewood take to season?

Six to twelve months for most species, split and stacked off the ground with the top covered and the sides open. The target is a moisture content below 20 percent, measured on a freshly split face at the centre of the piece.

How do I tell a real cord from a face cord?

A cord is a 128 cubic foot stack - 4 feet high, 4 feet wide, 8 feet long, ranked and well-stowed - and that is the unit NIST Handbook 130 requires firewood to be sold in. A face cord is one row of that stack, as deep as the seller cut his pieces, so it runs anywhere from a quarter to a half of a cord. Rick, rack, truckload, and pile have no defined size at all. Stack the load, measure height by width by length in feet, and divide by 128.

Does burning pine cause creosote?

The Chimney Safety Institute of America names three drivers of creosote accumulation: restricted air supply, unseasoned wood, and cooler-than-normal chimney temperatures. Species is not on that list. Penn State Extension does still advise limiting conifers. Both agree on the controllable part: burn wood below 20 percent moisture and keep the flue hot.

Firewood

A cord is 128 cubic feet.Everything else is a word.

Almost every argument about firewood — which species is best, why one load felt like a swindle, whether pine will burn your house down — comes back to two numbers a seller rarely writes on the ticket: how many cubic feet you got, and how much water was still in it. This page is those two numbers, sourced.

A cord, by law: 128 ft³
Burn-ready moisture: under 20%
Seasoning time: 6–12 mo
Producers listed: 83

Find firewood producers How to measure a load

Firewood for sale on AXE USA

No member has firewood listed today, so there is nothing here to browse yet — and no county pages standing empty pretending otherwise. Firewood is free to list on AXE USA: post the load with its unit, say plainly how dry it is, give a delivery radius, and it appears here and on its county page immediately.

List your firewood free Firewood producers by state

Every species has about the same heat in it

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the key to the whole subject. Dry wood substance is dry wood substance. The USDA Forest Service, measuring Southern hardwoods with a bomb calorimeter, puts stemwood at an average of 7,827 BTU per ovendry pound, with the whole range across stemwood, bark, and branchwood falling between 6,840 and 8,123. Loblolly pine stemwood, in the same report, comes in at8,600 BTU per ovendry pound.

Read that again: per pound, the pine beats the oak. Pine carries more resin and lignin, and both burn hotter than cellulose. So if oak is the better firewood — and it is — the reason is not hiding in the chemistry.

It is hiding in the unit. A cord is a fixed volume, 128 cubic feet, and you buy it by the volume. Dense wood puts more pounds inside that volume, and pounds are what carry the BTU. A cord of hickory is worth more than a cord of red maple for exactly one reason: it weighs more. Species is a proxy for density, and density is a proxy for weight. That is the entire ranking — and it is the same reason hickory is the wood handle mills fight over.

What that means when you buy

A cord of hickory and a cord of red maple hold the same 128 cubic feet and roughly a 9 million BTU difference. Paying the same for both is the mistake, not burning the maple.
Light wood is not bad wood. It is less wood per cord. Softwood and low-density hardwood light easily, burn hot and fast, and are genuinely better for shoulder-season fires and for getting a cold flue up to temperature.
Where the wood is sold by weight instead, the species ranking mostly collapses. That is the honest version of “what burns best”.
Penn State Extension puts a cord of seasoned northern red oak at the heat equivalent of roughly 159 gallons of fuel oil. That is the number to hold a delivered price against.

Heat per cord, air-dried

Million BTU in one cord at 20% moisture content. Compiled by Hank Stelzer, University of Missouri Extension (2017), and published by Penn State Extension. Species that grow on Southern ground, highest first. A ton of anthracite coal produces 25 million BTU, which would place it between the white oak and red oak groups.

Energy value of one air-dried cord by species, in million BTU
Species	Botanical	Million BTU / cord
Osage orange	Maclura pomifera	30.7
Hickory - shagbark, bitternut, mockernut, pignut	Carya spp.	28.0
Honey locust	Gleditsia triacanthos	26.7
White oak group	Quercus spp.	25.7
Red oak group	Quercus spp.	24.0
White ash	Fraxinus americana	23.6
Hackberry	Celtis occidentalis	20.8
Black walnut	Juglans nigra	20.2
Black cherry	Prunus serotina	19.9
Maple - red and silver	Acer rubrum and saccharinum	18.7

Southern yellow pine, sweetgum, yellow-poplar, and the other common Southern species are missing from this table because the source does not publish a per-cord figure for them, and this page does not invent one. Use the density rule instead: heavier wood at the same moisture holds more heat per cord. Published heating values also differ between reports because of differences in method and in the individual trees tested — treat any table, including this one, as a ranking rather than a guarantee.

The cord is the only unit with a legal definition

NIST Handbook 130 — the model regulation most states adopt by statute — defines the cord in its Method of Sale rules for fireplace and stove wood: 128 cubic feet, ranked and well-stowed. Four feet high, four feet deep, eight feet long. That volume includes the wood, the bark, and the air between the pieces, which is why stacking style matters and why a loosely thrown pile is not a cord.

The regulation also says how it must be sold: by the cord or a stated fraction of a cord. Rick,face cord,rack, truckload, and pile have no defined size anywhere. A face cord is one row deep, and Penn State Extension notes that row runs anywhere from 12 to 32 inches — so a “face cord” is somewhere between a quarter and a half of a real cord, depending entirely on how long the seller cut his pieces. Two sellers quoting the same price per rick can be 100% apart on wood delivered.

States enforce this. The Texas Department of Agriculture inspects advertised firewood against the Handbook 130 method of sale; California adopts the same section by reference in its own regulations. If a seller will not put a cord figure on the ticket, the problem is not that he uses local words.

Work out what you actually got

Stack it, measure it in feet, and divide:

height × width × length ÷ 128 = cords

4 × 4 × 8 ft — one full cord, the legal unit.
4 × 4 × 4 ft — half a cord, 64 cubic feet.
4 ft × 16 in × 8 ft— a typical face cord: 42.7 cubic feet, or one third of a cord.
A pickup bed — Penn State Extension puts a standard bed at roughly 1.5 cords of cut wood, but a short-bed half-ton loaded level is a fraction of that. Measure it; do not take the truck as a unit.

Water is the other half of the price

A freshly felled tree is closer to a bucket than a fuel. University of New Hampshire Extension puts green wood between 50% and more than 100% moisture content — and at 100%, half the weight of what you just paid to have hauled is water. University of Tennessee Extension puts green oak at about 75%. Penn State Extension puts freshly cut northern red oak at 60–80%.

Every drop of that has to be boiled off before the wood fibre itself can burn, and the energy to do it comes out of the fire. That is why wet wood feels cold, smokes, hisses, and leaves the stove black. The target every extension service names is the same: below 20% moisture content, and Tennessee's bulletin adds the part people get wrong — there is no such thing as over-seasoned. Drier is better, full stop.

Step one

Split it first

Bark is the tree's own waterproofing and it works just as well after felling. Splitting opens the face that actually dries. Penn State Extension puts useful firewood at 14–16 inches long and split 2–6 inches wide; a round left whole can sit two years and still be wet in the middle.

Step two

Stack it loose, cover the top only

Sun and wind do the work, so a stack should be just tight enough not to fall over, up on pallets or pipe so the ground cannot wick into the bottom row, in the open rather than tucked against a wall. Roof it with tin or sheeting. Never wrap the sides in a tarp — that builds a tent that holds the moisture in and rots the pile.

Step three

Give it six months at least

Six to twelve months is the range Penn State and Maryland Extension both give; Cornell explains why the tail end drags — the loose water leaves easily and gets you to 25–30%, but the water bound inside the cell walls is what the last stretch is fighting. Cut by April, split at once, stacked by May, burning in the winter is the schedule that works.

How to tell, rather than hope

Buy a moisture meter — a basic one runs under $30 — and use it the way University of Maryland Extension says to: split a random piece and read the freshly exposed face at the centre. The outside of a piece that has sat in the weather reads dry no matter what is behind it. Without a meter, the field signs are checks — the small radial cracks that open in the end grain as wood dries — loose bark, a light feel for the size, and a hollow knock rather than a dull thud when two pieces are struck together. None of those beat the meter.

Creosote, and where the story outruns the record

Creosote is the condensed, unburned fraction of wood smoke, laid down on the flue wall as tar, flakes, or a hard glaze. It is highly combustible, and a chimney fire is what happens when enough of it accumulates and the flue gets hot enough to light it.

The Chimney Safety Institute of America names three conditions that accelerate the buildup, and it is worth reading what is on the list and what is not:

Restricted air supply. Glass doors closed, the damper not opened far enough, air inlets shut down too soon. The longer the smoke's residence time in the flue, the more of it condenses.
Unseasoned wood. So much of the fire's energy goes into driving water out of the cells that the resulting smoke stays cooler than it would over dry wood.
Cooler-than-normal chimney temperatures. Cool smoke condenses. Overloading a firebox to stretch a burn does the same thing.

Species is not on that list. Every driver CSIA names is about moisture, air, and temperature — three things the person running the stove controls.

The honest state of the pine question

The popular claim is that pine sap causes creosote and hardwood does not. The named authorities do not line up neatly behind either answer, and this page is not going to pretend they do.

CSIA's own list of causes is moisture, air supply, and flue temperature — not species. Penn State Extension, on the other hand, still advises limiting conifers in a heating stove, on the grounds that they carry secondary compounds that can coat a chimney with tar and soot. Both are named, citable sources, and they are pointing in different directions.

What they agree on is the part that is actually actionable, so that is what to do: burn wood below 20% moisture, give the fire enough air to run a hot flue, and have the chimney inspected and swept on a schedule. A Level 1 inspection is defined in NFPA 211, the standard covering chimneys, fireplaces, vents, and solid fuel-burning appliances — ask for it by name.

One thing carries no disagreement at all: never burn treated, painted, or stained wood, plywood, or any of the poison ivy and sumac group. Those release genuinely dangerous compounds.

Buying firewood for sale, without getting shorted

Most firewood for sale is advertised in words that have no size behind them — a rick, a rack, a truckload, a “face cord”. Telling a real cord from a face cord is arithmetic, not judgement: a cord is a 128 cubic foot stack, and a face cord is one row of it, deep as the seller cut his pieces, so it can be anywhere from a quarter to a half of what you paid for. Measure it the way the regulation defines it before the load is tipped.

Five things, all of them done before the money moves. None of them require you to know a thing about wood.

01
Get the cord fraction in writing
A price for “a load” or “a rick” is a price for an undefined quantity. Ask for the number of cords or the fraction of a cord on the ticket before delivery, which is the unit NIST Handbook 130 requires the sale to be made in.
02
Measure the stack before it is dumped
Height times width times length in feet, divided by 128, is your cord count. Once a load is tipped into a pile it cannot be measured, and you have lost the argument.
03
Meter a fresh split, in the middle
University of Maryland Extension is specific about this: split a random piece and read the freshly exposed face at its centre, not the weathered outside of a round. The middle is what tells you whether it is seasoned.
04
Do it before the truck unloads
The same Maryland guidance, and it is the practical half. Once the wood is on the ground the seller has no reason to negotiate.
05
Buy it close to where you will burn it
Emerald ash borer, Asian longhorned beetle, and oak wilt have all travelled in firewood. Penn State Extension puts the limit at a few miles from where it was cut.

Firewood producers by state

83 businesses carry the firewood designation in the state forestry agency directories behind the AXE USA mill directory. Each link opens that state's directory with the firewood filter already applied.

What this list is, and what it is not

These are public agency records, not recommendations. AXE USA does not check any producer's licence, insurance, ability, or whether it is still trading, and the agency documents do not say who is selling right now, what they charge, whether the wood is seasoned, or how far they will deliver. Confirm all of that with the producer. Alabama and several other states run no firewood designation in their agency directory at all, so an absent state means an absent record rather than an absent industry — in those states, work from the sawmills and mulch yards in your county.

Sell firewood on AXE USA Read the species pages

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of these. Where two of them disagree, the page says so rather than choosing.

National Institute of Standards and Technology
NIST Handbook 130, Uniform Regulation for the Method of Sale of Commodities, §2.4 Fireplace and Stove Wood
The cord as a legal unit: 128 cubic feet, ranked and well-stowed. Adopted by state statute across most of the country.
Penn State Extension
Heating with Wood: An Introduction
Energy per cord by species (tabulated from Hank Stelzer, University of Missouri Extension, 2017), cord and face-cord measurement, seasoning schedule, stacking and drying method.
University of Tennessee Extension
Moisture Content of ‘Seasoned’ Firewood (W179)
The below-20% target, green oak moisture content, and the finding that wood cannot be over-seasoned.
University of Maryland Extension
Measuring Wood Moisture & Drying Time for Hardwood Tree Species (FS-1074)
Split-stack-cover drying, how to take a moisture reading, and measuring a delivery before it is unloaded.
Cornell Cooperative Extension, Warren County
Storing and Drying Firewood
Bound versus unbound moisture, and why the last stretch of drying takes the longest.
University of New Hampshire Extension
Drying Firewood
Green, air-dried, and kiln-dried moisture ranges.
Chimney Safety Institute of America
Preventing Chimney Fires
The three documented drivers of creosote accumulation, and why unseasoned wood cools the smoke.
USDA Forest Service
Energy Production from Hardwoods Growing on Southern Pine Sites
Heat of combustion per ovendry pound for Southern hardwoods and for loblolly pine.

This page is about measuring and drying firewood. It is not advice on installing, operating, or maintaining a stove, fireplace, or chimney. Follow your appliance manufacturer's instructions, your local code, and a qualified chimney professional.