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

Somebody has made you an offer on your timber and you have no way to judge it. Start here. The South Carolina Forestry Commission publishes a free quarterly timber price report at scfc.gov. It gives statewide average stumpage prices, meaning standing timber, what the landowner gets, in dollars per ton, for five product classes. Every past quarter back to 2020 sits on that same page as its own permanent link.

That page answers the question "what is timber selling for in South Carolina." It does not answer "what is my timber worth." Those are two different questions, and the rest of this article is about the distance between them.

Every figure below was read off the Forestry Commission's own pages on September 16, 2026. A new report comes out every quarter. Go look at the date on their page, not ours.

Where do the South Carolina numbers come from?

The Forestry Commission republishes data collected by Timber Mart-South, a private timber price reporting service. Timber Mart-South gathers the sales. The Commission posts the South Carolina statewide summary for free.

Getting to it takes one extra click that trips people up. The timber prices page links to the current report through an acknowledgement screen, a disclaimer you have to read and click past before the table appears. That screen is not an obstacle. It is the most useful paragraph on the whole site, and it is quoted in full further down.

Two things about that page are better than what most states offer. The current-report link never changes, so one bookmark always shows you the newest quarter. And the archive is real: each past quarter has its own permanent page. The 2026 1st quarter report, the 2025 4th quarter report, and so on back to 2020. You can build a trend line yourself in ten minutes.

Clemson Extension Forestry and Wildlife also posts quarterly commentary on South Carolina stumpage trends on its timber market blog, worth reading for market context. It is not the primary source. Checked on September 16, 2026, its most recent price post covered the fourth quarter of 2025, two quarters behind the Commission's own page.

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

Your woods are not one commodity. Two trees standing next to each other can be two different products at two very different prices, and the report is split that way. The size ranges below come from the Forestry Commission's understanding timber page. DBH means diameter at breast height: the trunk measured about four and a half feet off the ground, where a forester puts the tape.

Class	Size, DBH	What happens to it
Pulpwood	6 to 9 inches	"Pulpwood trees are chipped into small pieces, chemically treated, and made into paper"
Chip-n-saw	10 to 13 inches	Chipped on the outside, sawn into small dimension lumber in the middle
Sawtimber	14 inches and up	"Trees are cut into lumber. Waste material is converted into chips for fuel or paper production"
Veneer	16 inches and up	Peeled on a lathe "into continuous sheets of thin wood" for plywood and furniture

The same page names two classes the price report does not cover. Superpulp, or canterwood, is pulpwood-sized pine big enough to yield a single 2x4. Palletwood, or skrag, is low-grade hardwood that will not make lumber but will make pallet slats. If a buyer uses either word, no published average applies.

An offer of "so much a ton" means nothing until you know which product it applies to. For how the units work, read how timber is measured. It is written from North Carolina sources, but tons, cords and log rules behave the same on both sides of the line. If your woods are mostly hardwood, are my hardwood trees worth anything covers why that changes the picture.

What do the last five quarters actually say?

Here are the South Carolina statewide average stumpage prices, in dollars per ton, as published by the South Carolina Forestry Commission from Timber Mart-South data, read off the Commission's current report and its quarterly archive pages on September 16, 2026.

Product	2025 Q2	2025 Q3	2025 Q4	2026 Q1	2026 Q2
Pine pulpwood	$5.55	$5.67	$5.08	$5.39	$5.27
Pine chip-n-saw	$16.26	$16.71	$15.17	$15.65	$15.69
Pine sawtimber	$21.87	$22.78	$18.46	$21.12	$21.91
Hardwood pulpwood	$6.30	$4.49	$6.32	$6.51	$5.73
Hardwood sawtimber	$16.27	$16.04	$17.43	$17.87	$18.72

Those numbers will be stale by the time you need them. That is why five quarters are printed instead of one. What the table gives you is not a price. It is a shape, and it has three lessons in it.

One quarter tells you almost nothing. Hardwood pulpwood fell from $6.30 in the second quarter of 2025 to $4.49 in the third, about 29 percent, then went back to $6.32 in the fourth, about 41 percent up. Nothing happened to the hardwood in anybody's woods in those six months. That is what an average of scattered sales does when the mix of sales changes.

Products move independently. Between the third and fourth quarters of 2025, pine sawtimber fell from $22.78 to $18.46, about 19 percent, while hardwood sawtimber rose from $16.04 to $17.43, about 9 percent. Same state, same three months, opposite directions.

And some things barely move. Across all five quarters, pine pulpwood stayed inside a 59-cent band, $5.08 to $5.67. If you were hoping to time a pulpwood thinning on price, that band is your answer.

How do I read one line without fooling myself?

Each quarterly page frames itself this way: "Stumpage prices below are the statewide averages for the products and time periods indicated. They are reported here to provide a general idea of the current prices and price trends of these products."

So one line, written out honestly, reads: in the second quarter of 2026, the South Carolina statewide average stumpage price for pine sawtimber was $21.91 per ton, per the South Carolina Forestry Commission, from Timber Mart-South data.

Count what that sentence carries. The quarter. The product. The unit. The fact that it is stumpage and not delivered. The state. The publisher. A price missing any of those is decoration.

Two traps. Stumpage is not the delivered price. Stumpage is what you are paid for the tree standing on your land; the delivered price is what the mill pays at its gate, and the difference is cutting, skidding, loading and hauling, which is someone else's cost and someone else's profit. There is no fixed ratio between them, so do not convert one into the other. 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. And everything in the report is per ton, so an offer in cords or thousand board feet has to be converted before you can compare it.

How do I convert tons to cords or board feet?

The Forestry Commission publishes its own factors, on the timber prices page and on the understanding timber page. Use theirs, not a rule of thumb from a buyer.

From	To	Factor
Pine, $/ton	$/cord	multiply by 2.68 (stated as 2.675, or 5,350 lbs per cord, on the understanding timber page)
Pine, $/ton	$/thousand board feet	multiply by 7.5 (stated there as 7.50 to 7.75 tons per MBF)
Hardwood, $/ton	$/cord	multiply by 2.90 (5,800 lbs per cord)
Hardwood, $/ton	$/thousand board feet	multiply by 8.75

A standard cord is "a stack of wood measuring 4' x 4' x 8' (128 cubic feet)." A ton is 2,000 pounds of raw wood, bark included, weighed green. Board feet are estimated with a log rule, and the convention on the same page is Scribner for pine and Doyle for hardwood. For hardwood sawtimber it also gives 1,000 board feet as roughly 3 cords.

Run the second quarter of 2026 through those factors and pine pulpwood at $5.27 a ton is about $14.12 a cord, pine sawtimber at $21.91 a ton is about $164 per thousand board feet on Scribner, and hardwood sawtimber at $18.72 a ton is about $164 per thousand board feet on Doyle. That arithmetic is ours, applying the Commission's published factors to the Commission's published prices. It is the same statewide average restated in another unit. Not a delivered price, and still not your tract.

The rule matters as much as the number. The Commission puts it plainly: "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." It also tells landowners to "insist that any pulpwood quote is based on standard cords or tons." A buyer who quotes a "unit" and will not define it has told you something.

One more figure, because it makes the scale concrete. An 18-wheeler hauls about 25 tons, roughly 9.3 cords of pulpwood or 3.3 thousand board feet of sawtimber. At the second quarter of 2026 average, the stumpage on a full load of pine pulpwood is about $132. On a load of pine sawtimber, about $548. Trucks leaving your land all look the same. They are not.

Why isn't the statewide average my price?

Because the average is built out of tracts that are nothing like yours, and the Forestry Commission says so before it will even show you the table.

Here is the acknowledgement screen: "The prices contained in this report reflect average stumpage prices for the quarter from timber sales of all sizes spread across a variety of ownerships and a large geographic area. These reports should be used as a general guide for price and price trends only and should not be used to substitute for a professional appraisal." It adds that the price on a given sale "might be considerably higher or lower than the prices in this report due to differences in timber volume, timber quality, accessibility, and effects of local supply and demand."

Read that again. The agency publishing the number is telling you not to price your land with it.

The USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station says the same from the other direction. Statewide and regional prices "can provide a taste of the level and trends of prices," but what your timber is worth "is somewhat dependent on local market conditions." The factors it names are the ones that decide your check:

1. How close you are to mills, and how many are bidding.
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, and taking selected trees costs more per tree than taking everything.
4. Getting to the wood. Road access, slope, wet ground, a stream that needs a crossing. Each one is an expense, and it comes off your price before anyone mentions it.
5. Local rules. Stream buffers and equipment restrictions change what the job costs to run.

There is no honest dollars-per-acre figure for South Carolina timber. Anyone who gives you one without a date, a product class and a source is selling something. The only way to know what is standing on your land is to have it measured.

What affects the value of my timber goes through those factors one at a time.

What about the per-acre numbers the Commission publishes?

The Forestry Commission does publish per-acre figures for planted loblolly, on its loblolly returns page. Understand what that page is, because it looks like a price table and is not one.

The dollar columns are assumed prices spanning a range, $5 to $20 a ton for pulpwood and $20 to $50 a ton for a sawtimber final harvest. They are not observed market prices. What the page really contributes is yield: tons per acre of planted loblolly on site-prepared land, sorted by site index, a measure of how well trees grow on that soil. A 25-year pulpwood rotation runs roughly 62 tons an acre on a low site, 94 on a medium site and 139 on a high one. A 40-year sawtimber rotation gives a final harvest of roughly 51, 110 or 175 tons an acre across those same sites, after a first thinning of about 19 tons at age 15 to 18. The yields are credited to the USFS Field Forester Handbook and USFS Publication 50.

Multiply a tonnage from that page by a stumpage average from the quarterly report and you have a planning sketch for a stand that does not exist yet: planted, site prepared, grown to rotation, sold decades from now at a price nobody can know. Fair way to think about whether to plant. Not a valuation of standing trees. And note that the lowest column on that sawtimber table assumes $20 a ton, against a $21.91 statewide average in the second quarter of 2026: the optimistic columns sit a long way above today's market.

If you are looking at a thinning rather than a final harvest, when to thin a pine stand covers timing, and how many acres of timber is worth selling covers whether a small tract will draw bids at all.

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

Three routes, cheapest first.

Call the Forestry Commission. It offers free on-site assistance to landowners with 10 to 1,000 acres. A forester comes and looks at your property, and a written management plan "includes a map of the property, a description of your woodlands and recommendations." Of that standard assistance the landowner services page says: "it's completely free!" The same page lists "advice concerning the marketing of forest products, the advantage of competitive bids, providing buyers list, sample sales announcement forms." Use the county locator on scfc.gov to find your forester.

Get a timber cruise. A cruise is a measured estimate of what is standing on your tract, by species, size and product class. It is the only thing that turns "some pine out back" into so many tons of chip-n-saw and so many tons of sawtimber. A consulting forester does that work for a fee, and works for you rather than the buyer. The Commission keeps a searchable database of them, searched by ZIP code, and requires listed firms to employ a registered forester and follow the Society of American Foresters' Code of Ethics. It suggests the questions to ask, starting with "What is your fee schedule?" Whether you need a forestry consultant covers how they charge.

Then take bids, not an offer. The Commission also publishes a timber buyers list for tracts of about 8 acres and up, with a warning attached: "Inclusion in the listing does not constitute an endorsement of any particular buyer, and omissions are unintentional." South Carolina does not require timber buyers to be registered, though anyone offering forest management advice must be a registered forester or work under one. TimberClear lists timber businesses and routes introductions, and we have not vetted, verified or endorsed anybody on this site either. Our South Carolina directory holds those listings. Ask for references either way.

Three real bids on the same defined tract beat every average in this article, because those bids are for your trees. How to sell timber on your land covers the order to do things in, and how not to get ripped off by a timber buyer covers the pressure that arrives once word gets around.

Five reports, one sheet of paper

Open the Forestry Commission's timber prices page. Click through the acknowledgement to the current report, then open the four archive pages beneath it.

On one sheet of paper, write five rows: the quarter, and the statewide average for the products you think you have. If you do not know what you have, write "pine pulpwood" and "pine sawtimber" and fix it later. Do it again every three months. It costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes.

Then call your county Forestry Commission forester and ask them to walk the tract. Bring the paper, and ask one question: which of these product classes am I actually growing?

That answer is worth more than any price you will find online, including every number on this page.