The lumber prices that move your wood

Gold has one spot price everywhere on earth. Timber does not, and understanding why is the difference between reading this page usefully and misreading it badly.

An ounce of gold in London is interchangeable with an ounce of gold in New York, so one number prices the whole market. Wood is not interchangeable. A thirty-year-old southern yellow pine standing in Alabama is not the same product as a European spruce or a British Columbia douglas fir, and it cannot be substituted for either without changing what comes out of the mill.

Logs are also heavy, bulky, and expensive to move. That freight cost puts a hard wall around every local market. A mill two counties away sets your price; a mill six states away usually cannot, because the trucking eats the difference before the wood arrives.

No. The CME lumber contract tracks finished framing lumber delivered to a mill yard - sawn, dried, graded and hauled. It is not standing timber, and it is not what a landowner is paid at the stump.

Between that futures print and your check sit harvesting, hauling, milling, drying, grading and the buyer's margin. Read the futures price as the industry's temperature, not as your quote.

When US framing lumber prices run high and domestic mills are at capacity, European spruce and pine become worth shipping into East Coast and Gulf ports, and that added supply pulls US prices back down. A bark beetle outbreak in central Europe does the same thing for a different reason: salvage wood floods export markets cheaply.

New Zealand radiata pine sets the base cost of the clear trim, moulding and plywood sold through US retail - a part of the market that moves almost independently of framing lumber.

Because they are not ours to publish. TimberMart-South, Fastmarkets FOEX, Timber Exchange, the FEFPEB pallet index and AgriHQ's forestry reports are subscription products, and their values belong to the firms that build them.

This page names each benchmark, explains what it measures, and links to the publisher. For a regional stumpage number, TimberMart-South is the closest thing to a price for an Alabama landowner - buy it from the University of Georgia, or put your tract out for sealed bids and let the actual buyers answer.

Not on this page, and not on any free page. This board carries delayed quotes for a futures contract and for publicly traded companies. It is not a per-ton price sheet, and there is no national table of timber prices a landowner can look his county up in.

The closest published thing is a regional stumpage report - TimberMart-South for the South, sold by the University of Georgia - and even that is a regional average rather than your tract. The number that applies at your gate comes from buyers competing for a defined lot: mark it, cruise it, and take sealed bids.

Delayed by at least 15 minutes, and longer outside market hours. The quotes on this page came from Yahoo Finance at Aug 20, 2026, 11:01 PM CDT, and every price carries the time the provider says it was struck.

Nothing here is a live or tradable quote, and no price on this page is an offer. When the provider does not answer, the row says Unavailable rather than showing an older number as though it were current.