How to Look Up What Timber Is Actually Selling For in North Carolina

A buyer left a number on your kitchen table, and you have no way to judge it. Start here. NC State Extension publishes a free North Carolina Standing Timber Price Report four times a year. It gives statewide average standing timber prices, in dollars per ton, for six product classes, and you can download it at forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/forestry-price-data. That page is the answer to "what is timber selling for in North Carolina."

What it is not is the answer to "what is my timber worth." Those are two different questions, and the rest of this article is about the gap between them.

This page was last checked on August 15, 2026. A new report comes out every three months. Go look at the date on their page, not ours.

Where do the real North Carolina prices come from?

NC State Extension publishes the quarterly report under an agreement with Timber Mart-South, a private timber price reporting service. Timber Mart-South collects the raw market data. NC State posts the North Carolina statewide summary for free.

The report page sets the schedule: the price report "will be available to download by the end of the month following the last day of the quarter." So the January through March numbers show up by the end of April. Read it mid-quarter and the newest report is already months behind the market. That lag is not a flaw. Somebody has to collect the sales, tally them and publish them.

There is also a historic prices page at forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/historic-prices, updated March 4, 2026 at last check, with annual prices back to 1976. More on why that one matters below.

What are the product classes, and why do they matter?

Your woods are not one commodity. The same truck can carry two products that sell for very different money, and the report is split that way.

The definitions in the middle column come from NC State Extension's landowner glossary, publication WON-26, dated August 21, 2018.

Line in the report	What that wood is	Where it goes
Pine pulpwood	Small pine. Pulpwood is "wood used in the manufacture of paper, fiberboard, or other wood fiber products"	Paper and fiber mills
Pine chip-n-saw	Mid-sized pine. The glossary defines chip-n-saw as a cutting method for trees between 6 and 14 inches DBH	Mills that chip the outside and saw the core
Pine sawtimber	Big pine. A sawlog is "a log or tree that is large enough (usually 10 to 12 inches in diameter) to be sawed into lumber"	Sawmills, for lumber
Hardwood pulpwood	Small or poor-form hardwood	Paper and fiber mills
Mixed hardwood sawtimber	Larger hardwood of mixed species	Sawmills
Oak sawtimber	Larger oak, reported on its own line	Sawmills, and the better logs go further

DBH means diameter at breast height, "measured in inches at breast height, a standard 4.5 feet above the ground." When a forester walks your stand with a tape, that is where they measure.

One wrinkle. The glossary calls chip-n-saw a cutting method. The price report uses it as a product class. Both are true. It is pine too big for pulpwood and too small for a good sawlog, and the price sits in between.

Why this matters: an offer of "so much a ton" means nothing until you know which product it applies to. Oak sawtimber and pine pulpwood are not in the same neighborhood. For how the units work, read how timber is measured. If your woods are mostly hardwood, are my hardwood trees worth anything covers why that changes the picture.

How do I read a line in the report?

Open the current report. You will see a table by quarter, one row per product class, with the price, the previous quarter's price, and the percent change.

Here is an example, using numbers that are stale on purpose so you go get the current ones. In the second quarter of 2026, the North Carolina statewide average standing timber price for oak sawtimber was $48.96 per ton, and for pine pulpwood it was $7.02 per ton, per NC State Extension's North Carolina Standing Timber Price Report.

Read that sentence again and count what it carries. The quarter. The year. The product. The unit. The region. The source. A price without those six things is decoration.

Two more things to catch when you read the table:

• These are standing timber prices, not delivered prices. The gap between what the mill pays and what you get is cutting, skidding, loading and hauling. What stumpage value is breaks the list out. If somebody shows you a delivered price and calls it your price, that is the wrong number.
• Everything is in tons. If your offer is in cords or thousand board feet, you will have to convert. The report publishes its own conversion factors for that. On the 2026 report page, pine sawtimber converts at 7.0 tons per 1,000 board feet and pine pulpwood at 2.68 tons per cord.

Why isn't the statewide average my price?

Because an average is made out of tracts that are nothing like yours.

On its "What Is My Timber Worth, and How Do I Sell It?" page, the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station writes that "even though statewide or regional prices can provide a taste of the level and trends of prices, what your timber is worth is somewhat dependent on local market conditions." It then names what moves the local number:

1. How close you are to mills. Many mills bidding against each other is a different market from one mill forty miles away.
2. Species, size and quality. Grade earns a premium. Defect earns a discount.
3. How much you are selling, and how. Bigger sales tend to bring more per unit. Cutting selected trees costs more per tree than taking everything.
4. Getting to the wood. Distance to a road, slope, wet ground, whether a stream needs a temporary bridge. Every one of those is an expense, and it comes off your price before anybody mentions it.
5. Rules where you are. Restrictions near streams or on equipment change what the job costs to run.

NC State's own report carries the same warning: timber prices "can vary considerably; therefore, these averages may not reflect specific stumpage" values for a given stand, and professional help is recommended for valuing your standing timber.

If a website hands you a dollars-per-acre figure for North Carolina timber without a date, a product class and a source, close the tab. Nobody can price your tract from a web page.

Is timber worth more in the mountains or down east?

The two ends of this state are two different markets, and the free data admits it, but only looking backward.

The quarterly report is statewide. One number per product, for all 100 counties. The historic prices page is where the split lives: annual standing timber prices for Western North Carolina, Eastern North Carolina, the state as a whole, and the Southeast, with stumpage data running from 1976 through 2025 and delivered data from 1988 through 2025.

So you can compare western oak to eastern oak by the year. You cannot do it for last quarter. No current regional breakdown appears anywhere on the free pages.

One caution on the old numbers. That page notes the quarterly series came from Forest-2-Market from the third quarter of 2005 through the fourth quarter of 2014, and from Timber Mart-South from the first quarter of 2015 on. Two outfits, two collection methods.

Should I look at one quarter, or several?

Several. Always several.

Look at what happened between the first and second quarters of 2026. Statewide, pine pulpwood went from $8.33 a ton to $7.02 a ton, down about 16 percent. In the very same quarter, pine sawtimber went from $27.05 a ton to $27.66 a ton, up about 2 percent. Same state, same three months, two products moving in opposite directions.

That is the lesson, not the numbers. One quarter tells you almost nothing. Four quarters start to tell you a direction. A mill shutting down, or a quota coming on, can move one product hard while nothing else budges.

Pull the last four quarterly reports and write the numbers for your product on one sheet of paper. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the most useful thing in this article.

How do I use the report to judge an offer I already have?

Carefully, and only as a sanity check.

Ask the buyer to break the offer down by product class and unit. Not one lump number. How many tons of pine sawtimber, at what price. How many tons of pine pulpwood, at what price. If they will not break it out, that itself is information.

Then compare each line against the current report. You are not looking for a match. You are looking for whether the offer is in the same conversation. An offer well under the statewide average can be fair for a small tract at the end of a soft dirt road. An offer well over it can be fair for good grade oak next to a mill.

Three real bids on the same defined tract beat any average, because those bids are for your trees. How to sell timber on your land covers how to run that. If offers are already coming at you, how not to get ripped off by a timber buyer covers the pressure tactics.

How do I get a real number for my own land?

Three ways, cheapest first.

Call your county ranger. The N.C. Forest Service has a ranger in every county. Call and ask what the ranger will come look at and what, if anything, that costs. NCFS publishes fees for written management and stewardship plans, $5.00 an acre at a rate that took effect August 1, 2016, but it publishes no fee for a site visit. What a ranger will and will not do for you is worked through in whether you need a forestry consultant.

Get a timber cruise. A timber cruise is a measured estimate of what is standing on your land, by species, size and product. That is the real answer for your tract: how many tons of each product you own. How to sell timber on your land covers where it fits in the sequence. A consulting forester does the work for a fee. NCFS publishes a county-by-county list at ncagr.gov. People apply to be on it. TimberClear lists timber businesses and routes introductions. We have not vetted, verified or endorsed anybody on this site. Our North Carolina directory holds those listings. Ask for references either way, and ask each forester for a registration number you can confirm.

See whether your county has a market at all. NC State posts county-level timber income estimates back to 2001 at forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/county-income-and-economic-data. It is estimated harvest income, not a price, but it tells you whether wood is moving where you live. If your tract is small, read how many acres of timber is worth selling next.

Four reports, one sheet of paper

Open forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/forestry-price-data and download the most recent quarterly report and the three before it.

On one sheet of paper, write four rows: the quarter, and the statewide average for the product classes you think you have. If you do not know what you have, write "pine sawtimber" and "pine pulpwood" and fix it later.

Then call your county forest ranger. Ask what they will come look at and what, if anything, that costs. If they will walk the tract, bring the paper and ask one question: which of these product classes am I growing?

That question is worth more than any price you will find online, including the ones on this page.