Reading the numbers
What is an MBF?
MBF means one thousand board feet, the unit both lumber and standing timber are measured and priced in, and a board foot is a piece of wood an inch thick and a foot square. State timber sells by the MBF and Forest Service timber by the CCF, a hundred cubic feet, two units this site never averages together.
Updated Oct 12, 2026
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MBF means one thousand board feet, the standard unit for measuring and pricing both lumber and standing timber. A board foot is a piece of wood one inch thick, twelve inches wide and twelve inches long: 144 cubic inches, or a twelfth of a cubic foot. The M is the Roman numeral for a thousand, so an MBF is exactly 1,000 board feet and an MMBF is a million.
On a public timber sale the price per MBF is the headline stumpage number. For a live figure, green sawtimber at Oregon Department of Forestry auctions has sold for a volume-weighted $596/MBF across the sales on the Oregon page, a price for trees still standing, not for sawn lumber.
How many board feet are in an MBF?
Exactly 1,000, so 2.5 MBF is 2,500 board feet and 3,697 MBF is 3,697,000. The board feet in one piece follow from its size: thickness in inches times width in inches times length in feet, divided by 12. Oregon State University Extension's guide to measuring timber products works a plank 2 inches by 8 inches by 24 feet: (2 x 8 x 24) / 12 = 32 board feet, so it takes 31.25 of those planks to make one MBF.
MBF in lumber and in timber
The same three letters price two different things. In lumber, MBF counts boards that have already been sawn. In timber, it is an estimate of the lumber standing or cut logs should yield, made with a log rule before a board exists. A lumber price per MBF and a stumpage price per MBF share a unit but not a product: one is finished wood, the other is trees on the stump, before any logging, hauling or milling cost.
Log scale is not lumber tally
A board foot of standing timber and a board foot of finished lumber are not the same thing measured twice. Standing and bucked logs are estimated by a log rule, a table that predicts how many boards a log of a given small-end diameter and length should yield. The lumber tally is what the mill actually cuts. The two rarely match, because a log rule has to guess at saw kerf, slabs, edgings and taper before a single board exists. In the Pacific Northwest the rule is the Scribner Decimal C, which rounds each log to the nearest ten board feet and drops the last digit. West of the Cascades scalers use a long-log version built for forty-foot logs, east of the crest a short-log version for twenty. Same species, different scale, a slightly different board foot. Pennsylvania's state forests cruise on the International 1/4-inch rule instead, which gives a different board-foot count for the same log, so Pennsylvania DCNR's timber sales sit on their own page and are never averaged with the Pacific Northwest sales.
MBF and CCF measure different things
The Forest Service does not use MBF. It scales national-forest timber in CCF, a hundred cubic feet of solid wood, and quotes its prices per CCF. Cubic scale measures the wood itself, board-foot scale predicts the lumber inside it, so the two are genuinely different measures and a price in one cannot be set beside a price in the other. If you need a rough bridge, one MBF runs on the order of two to two and a fifth CCF, which puts a federal per-CCF rate a bit under half the equivalent per-MBF number, but that ratio shifts with species and log size. Treat it as back-of-envelope only. The board never blends the two, it labels every price with its unit and leaves them apart.
Weight is a third unit
Some public timber is sold by the ton instead, weighed on a scale rather than measured in board feet, and Montana DNRC prices its sales that way. Timber price per ton vs per MBF covers how to read a per-ton rate next to a per-MBF one.
Worked example
Each row on the board above carries its volume and its price in one unit: MBF and dollars per MBF for most Washington and Oregon sales, tons for Montana's. Take Coyote, a Washington DNR sale in Skagit County auctioned in June 2026 and listed on the Northwest Region page: 3,697 MBF sold for a winning bid of $2,153,757. Its price per MBF is $2,153,757 / 3,697 = $582.57, the $583/MBF the site shows. In board feet that is 3,697,000 board feet at about 58 cents each, since $582.57 / 1,000 = $0.58. A Forest Service row reads differently: its volume is in CCF and its price in dollars per CCF, a different unit for the same physical wood, so the two prices are never set side by side. Read the unit before you read the number.
For the money side of that number, see what is stumpage, and for the full vocabulary the board uses, see the glossary. To put a volume on a common footing yourself, the MBF to CCF converter takes a factor you set. The site reports volumes and prices as the agencies scale them.
Try it
There is no single exact MBF-to-CCF factor. MBF is a board-foot log-scale measure (a board foot is nominally a 12 by 12 by 1 inch piece), while CCF is a cubic measure (100 cubic feet of wood), so converting between them depends on how many board feet a log scales per cubic foot. That recovery falls with log size and differs by scaling rule: for Pacific Northwest sawtimber it commonly runs about 4 to 6 board feet per cubic foot, so roughly 2 CCF of log scale is near 1 MBF. The geometric solid-wood figure is 12 board feet per cubic foot, but a saw log never recovers all of it, which is why the factor here is editable and the result is an estimate. State and BLM volumes are published in MBF and Forest Service volumes in CCF; the two are not directly comparable, and this tool does not price either or advise what to bid.
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Common questions
What does MBF mean?
MBF means one thousand board feet. The M is the Roman numeral for a thousand, and a board foot is a piece of wood one inch thick and a foot square. It is the standard unit for both lumber and standing timber, and a public timber sale's price per MBF is its headline stumpage number.
How many board feet are in an MBF?
Exactly 1,000. An MBF is a thousand board feet, so 3.5 MBF is 3,500 board feet, and an MMBF is a thousand MBF, or a million board feet.
What does MBF mean in lumber?
A thousand board feet of sawn lumber. A board's board feet are its thickness in inches times its width in inches times its length in feet, divided by 12, so a plank 2 inches by 8 inches by 24 feet holds 32 board feet. In timber the same unit is an estimate of the lumber in logs, made with a log rule.
What is a board foot?
A board foot is a piece of wood one foot by one foot by one inch, a hundred and forty-four cubic inches, or a twelfth of a cubic foot. For logs it is an estimate from a log rule, not a measured board.
What is the difference between MBF and CCF?
MBF is a thousand board feet, the state and BLM unit. CCF is a hundred cubic feet, the Forest Service unit. Board-foot scale predicts the lumber inside a log, cubic scale measures the wood itself, so the two are not directly comparable and are never blended.
What is the Scribner Decimal C log rule?
It is the log rule used across the Pacific Northwest to estimate board feet from a log's small-end diameter and length. The Decimal C variant rounds to the nearest ten board feet and drops the last digit, and it comes in long-log and short-log versions for the two sides of the Cascades.