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.

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.