What is stumpage?

Stumpage is the price of standing timber, the trees as they stand on the stump before anyone cuts them. It is not the price of a log on a truck and not the price of finished lumber. It is what the wood is worth where it grows, and in a public timber sale it is the number the whole auction turns on.

For a current figure: Oregon Department of Forestry sales have run a volume-weighted $594/MBF for green sawtimber across the record this site tracks. That is a state-forest auction average for one agency rather than a national stumpage price, and no such national number exists, because every agency sells on its own units, species mix and terms. Oregon timber prices carries it by district and the public timber board ranks every agency's recent results together.

Stumpage definition

The plain stumpage definition is the price paid for standing timber, the trees as they stand, sold on the stump. University extension foresters word it the same way, the value of timber as it stands uncut in the woods, and the word is literal. A stump is what a felled tree leaves behind, and stumpage is what the wood is worth while it is still attached to one. That is the whole stumpage meaning: a price for standing trees, paid before anyone cuts them.

Two things follow from it. Stumpage is a price and not a volume, so it is quoted per unit of wood, dollars per MBF on a state or BLM sale and dollars per CCF on a Forest Service sale. And it is paid to whoever owns the ground the trees grow on, a state agency, a federal agency or a private landowner, in exchange for the right to cut the timber and haul it out.

Stumpage, delivered log, lumber: three prices

A tree carries three different prices on its way to a house. Stumpage is the first, the standing timber. The delivered-log price, sometimes called pond value, is what a mill pays for that same wood once it is felled, bucked and hauled to the log yard. Lumber is the last price, the sawn board that leaves the mill. Each is larger than the one before it, because each has more work and more cost baked in. The delivered-log price is always above stumpage, by the cost of the logging and the haul that stand between a standing tree and a mill deck.

Who pays whom

In a public sale the direction of the money surprises people. The buyer pays the agency. Washington DNR, the Forest Service or BLM appraises a tract, sets a minimum, advertises it, and sells the right to cut it to the high bidder. The buyer, usually a mill or a logging outfit, then carries every cost after that, the falling, the yarding, the trucking, and takes the risk that the logs are worth what they hoped. Stumpage is the price of the standing timber and nothing more. The costs of turning it into delivered logs are the buyer's to bear.

How stumpage is figured

Stumpage is a residual number, worked backward from the mill. Extension foresters write it as a plain subtraction: take what the mill will pay for the delivered logs, then subtract falling, yarding, loading, hauling and the buyer's other costs and margin, and what is left is what the standing timber can bear. That is why the same species carries very different stumpage in two places. A long haul to the nearest mill eats the residual, a short haul leaves more for the timber. It is also why stumpage moves with lumber markets but never matches them dollar for dollar.

Reading it on the board

The board above is stumpage, sale by sale. Each row is one public auction: the tract, its offered volume, the minimum the agency appraised, the winning bid, and the price per unit that bid works out to. Read the price column as the stumpage the winner agreed to pay for the standing timber, in dollars per MBF for a state or BLM sale and dollars per CCF for a Forest Service sale, two units this site never blends. The premium column shows how far that price ran over the appraised floor. A high premium is competition for the tract, not a richer forest.

Stumpage reports what public timber sold for. It does not forecast prices or tell anyone what a tract is worth to bid. For the unit the price is quoted in, see what is an MBF, and for the vocabulary the board uses, see the glossary.

Stumpage appraisals

A stumpage appraisal is an estimate of what standing timber is worth before it is sold. The appraiser starts from a cruise, the field survey that estimates the tract's volume by species and grade, and folds in the quality of the wood, the logging system the ground demands, the haul distance to the mills that would buy the logs, and what those mills are currently paying for delivered logs. Then it is the same subtraction the market runs: the delivered-log value, less the cost of getting the timber from the stump to the mill deck, is what the standing trees can bear. The result is an appraised value for the tract, in dollars per MBF or per CCF depending on who is selling.

Who does the appraising depends on whose timber it is. Before a public auction, agency foresters at Washington DNR, the Forest Service or BLM appraise the tract, and that appraisal becomes the minimum bid, the floor below which the agency will not sell. On private land the same work is done by consulting foresters, who cruise and appraise a woodlot so the owner knows what the standing timber is worth before taking offers. The arithmetic is the same residual either way. Only the seller changes.

On the board this site tracks, the appraisal is the quiet half of every row. The minimum column is the appraised value, and the premium column is how far the winning bid ran above it. A premium near zero means the appraisal and the room agreed. A wide premium means buyers saw more in the tract than the appraiser's desk did, usually because mills were competing for the logs. The appraisal sets the floor, the auction finds the price, and the gap between them is the competitive heat the site measures.