What Is Stumpage Value? How Timber Is Priced on Your Land

Somebody handed you a price for your trees, and it sits a long way below what you thought lumber was worth. That gap has a name.

Stumpage is what a buyer pays you for trees still standing. Not lumber, not logs on a truck, and not what the mill will eventually get for the boards. The South Carolina Forestry Commission puts it in one line on its landowner page (last updated July 15, 2021): "The price paid for standing timber is called 'stumpage.' This is the amount the landowner is paid in a timber sale."

What the wood brings at the mill is a different number with a different name, the delivered price. The money that goes missing between your stump and that mill gate is cutting, skidding, loading and hauling, plus somebody's profit for taking the job on. Understanding that gap is most of what you need to judge an offer.

What are you selling when you sell stumpage?

The right to cut. West Virginia University Extension says stumpage "refers to the price a timber buyer will offer a landowner for their trees standing 'on the stump'" (Ben Spong, last updated May 2018).

Stumpage is quoted per unit of wood, not per acre and not per tree. Dollars per ton. Dollars per cord. Dollars per thousand board feet. Which unit shows up on your offer depends on the product and the buyer, and mixing them up is how two offers stop being comparable. How timber is measured walks through tons, cords and board feet, and why three different board-foot rules exist.

Your total is the volume of each product multiplied by the stumpage price for that product, added up. Pine pulpwood at one price. Pine chip-n-saw at another. Sawtimber at another. That is why a stand and a check are two different conversations, and why a number without a volume behind it means nothing.

What stumpage is not

• It is not the value of the lumber. Boards are what somebody makes after your trees have been cut, hauled, sawn and dried. You are being paid several steps upstream of that.
• It is not a per-acre figure. Any site that tells you timber is worth some number of dollars an acre is describing land somewhere else.
• It is not what the mill pays. That is the delivered price.
• It is not a posted price. NC State Extension's planning guide for landowners (Bardon, published June 2, 2015, revised March 25, 2025) says it directly: "there are no daily market price reports for standing timber (stumpage), nor are there any government support prices."

Stumpage versus delivered price: where the money goes

One piece of arithmetic explains almost every disappointing offer.

West Virginia University Extension gives the formula as: "stumpage = 'mill delivered price' - cutting - skidding - loading - hauling - other fixed costs - variable costs." University of Missouri Extension states the same relationship from the other end: stumpage plus cutting, skidding, loading, hauling, fixed costs and variable costs equals the mill-delivered price.

Every item on that list is work somebody pays for before a dollar reaches you.

• Cutting. A feller-buncher and an operator, on your ground, all week.
• Skidding. Dragging the wood from where it fell to the landing.
• Loading. A knuckleboom loader sorting product and stacking trucks.
• Hauling. Diesel, drivers, insurance and miles, every load, both directions.
• Moving in and moving out. Lowboys hauling equipment to your place and away again, a cost that does not care how small your tract is.
• Fixed costs. Equipment payments, maintenance, workers' compensation, liability insurance, a shop, a bookkeeper.
• Risk and profit. Rain shuts a job down for a week. A mill fills its wood yard and stops taking loads. Nobody carries that for free.

Two of those line items move with your tract and nothing else. Move-in is the same bill whether you have 12 acres or 120, so on a small tract it lands on fewer tons. Hauling is the same load hauled farther. Neither one is negotiable and neither one shows up on your offer as a line. They show up as a lower number per ton.

The University of Missouri page makes the point that loggers have to move a minimum volume of wood every day to cover what the equipment costs them, and that plenty of logging businesses have failed when the margin was not there. A buyer who bids more than the job can carry does not pay you more. They walk off the job, or they cut corners on your land.

Why your neighbor got a different price for the same species

Two tracts of the same species, in the same county, in the same quarter, can bring different stumpage. That is normal, and here is what moves it.

Distance to a mill. The USDA Forest Service's Southern Research Station lists market proximity first among the things that determine local timber value. Mississippi State Extension's publication on sawtimber stumpage prices (Bhattarai and Lamichhane, August 2025) states that "mills prefer timber sourced within 75-100 miles to minimize transportation costs." That is a Mississippi State statement about mill preference, not a North Carolina rule, but the mechanism is the same everywhere: every mile is fuel and hours off your side of the ledger.

Which mills are near you, and what they buy. Pine pulpwood and pine sawtimber are separate markets riding on the same truck. A stand of small pine near a mill that buys pulpwood is a sale. The same stand two counties from anything that buys it may not be.

Volume per acre and tract size. The Southern Research Station says that often, the larger the sale, the higher the price per unit of wood that can be offered, because the fixed cost of moving in gets spread across more tons. Mississippi State says the same about larger, accessible tracts.

Access and ground. A hard set costs more to log. Steep ground, soft bottoms, a stream crossing, a landing that has to be built from nothing, a lane a loaded truck cannot use in the wet months. The Southern Research Station lists distance to the road, slope and soil wetness among the site conditions that change removal cost.

Size and quality of the trees. Bigger, straighter, cleaner logs cut into higher-grade lumber. Mississippi State describes high quality timber as having "greater size and density, is straight with minimal taper, and is free of knots and excessive branching." A big tree with a hollow butt, a wire scar or a bad fork is not a big-tree price. What that means for oak, poplar and pine is covered in are my hardwood trees worth anything.

The market that week. Mississippi State notes that when mill "inventory levels are full, mills may reduce or stop purchasing wood," and that wet weather limits logging and dry weather increases supply. Prices move. Your neighbor sold in a different month.

How a real stumpage number gets made for your land

Somebody has to measure the wood. A timber cruise is a measured estimate of what is standing on your land, by species, size and product. How to sell timber on your land covers where it fits in the sequence.

Penn State Extension's "Valuing Standing Timber" (updated June 18, 2020) sets out the rule this whole business turns on: "Timber should never be sold unless its owner has an independent estimate of its worth. That estimate should not be made by the buyer."

A buyer who walks your woods for twenty minutes and names a number has done an estimate for their own side of the table. They may be entirely straight with you and still be the only person in the deal who knows what is standing there. If you want somebody measuring on your side, start with whether you need a forestry consultant.

How to sanity-check a stumpage offer

You do not need to become a forester. You need four things.

1. Get the offer broken out by product. Ask for the volume and the price per unit for each product: pine pulpwood, chip-n-saw, pine sawtimber, hardwood pulpwood, oak and mixed hardwood sawtimber. One number for the whole tract tells you nothing you can check.
2. Make sure everybody is quoting the same units. The South Carolina Forestry Commission gives a clean example: "an offer of $200 per thousand board feet on the Scribner rule usually returns more money than $200 per thousand board feet on the Doyle rule." Same dollars, different wood. The same page says timber owners should insist that any pulpwood quote is based on standard cords or tons rather than an undefined "unit."
3. Read the state's own report. NC State Extension publishes quarterly standing timber price reports for North Carolina, under an agreement with Timber Mart-South, covering pine, oak and mixed hardwood sawtimber, pine chip-n-saw, and pine and hardwood pulpwood. The historic data goes back to 1976 for standing timber and to 1988 for timber delivered to mills, so you can look at both sides of the gap. How to look up North Carolina timber prices shows how to read one.
4. Take more than one bid. The N.C. Forest Service recommends a minimum of three bids on a clearly defined boundary of timber (Selling Your Timber page, last modified January 9, 2025), and how to sell timber on your land covers how that sale is run. Three bids on a cruised tract tell you what your stumpage is worth better than any report can, because those numbers are for your wood and nobody else's.

A statewide average is not your price. The Southern Research Station says published averages give only a sense of the level and trends, and cannot account for local market conditions. Use the report to find out whether your offer is in the neighborhood, not to set a number in your head you refuse to move off.

What stumpage does not cover

The price is for the standing wood. It is not payment for anything that happens afterward.

Replanting is a separate cost unless the contract says the buyer handles it. Read who pays to replant after a timber harvest before you sign anything. Road damage, ruts and a torn-up landing are likewise contract questions, not price questions.

How you sell also changes what you can check afterward. On a pay-as-cut sale, also called a per-unit sale, G.S. 14-135.1 requires the buyer to furnish you a load ticket for every load, and lump sum sales are exempt from that law. Load tickets and what left your land works through the statute.

The two questions to send your buyer

Take whatever offer you were given and write two questions on it.

"How many tons, cords or thousand board feet of each product are you buying?" and "What is your price per unit for each of those products?"

Send it to the person who made the offer, in writing, and wait for the answer. A buyer who will put that on paper is somebody you can compare against two other bids. A buyer who will not has told you something too.