Texas timber prices

What are my trees worth in Texas?

A price list cannot answer that on its own, and any site that tells you otherwise is guessing. Three things decide what an acre brings, and only you can see them: how big the trees are, how thickly they are growing, and what species they are.

Size matters more than anything else on that list. In Texas the best sawtimber on this page tops out at $38.98 while pulpwood tops out at $6.19 — the same tree, grown on, is worth several times more. That is the whole argument for knowing what you have before anybody makes you an offer.

Our free timber value calculator asks those three questions and works an estimate from Texas's own published prices, the ones in the table on this page. It gives you a range rather than a single figure, because a range is the honest shape of the answer. It takes about a minute and it does not ask for your email to show you the number.

Worth knowing about the Texas market

Texas timber is concentrated in the Piney Woods of East Texas. Texas A&M runs its own price survey rather than licensing a regional one, and its archive goes back to 1984.

How much forest Texas has, and who owns it

Texas has nearly 12 million acres of timberland in East Texas, the commercial timber region, out of 63.2 million acres of forestland statewide. In East Texas private owners control 92% of the timberland.

The wood itself: Loblolly and shortleaf pine (41% of East Texas timberland), oak-hickory (24%); mesquite and juniper in Central and West Texas. Species is one of the three things that decide what your acre is worth, and it is the one you cannot change.

Buying bare land and planting pines does not get you the Texas timber tax break — the tract must have been dedicated principally to timber production for five of the preceding seven years, so a new owner of converted land faces a five-year wait at full market-value taxation.

Sources: tfsweb.tamu.edu · tfsweb.tamu.edu

Do I need a permit to cut timber in Texas?

Texas has no statewide permit and no notification to harvest timber on your own land. The Texas A&M Forest Service's own guidance for selling timber runs from identifying your boundaries to closing out the sale without a permit, a licence or a notice to any agency at any step. What state law does require is between you and your buyer: it is unlawful in Texas to sell or buy a wood product without a written bill of sale documenting who owns it, so the contract is where your protection lives. Forestry Best Management Practices here are genuinely voluntary rather than voluntary-with-an-asterisk — the Forest Service calls its BMP programme non-regulatory and completely voluntary in its own words — though following them is still what keeps a harvest clear of water quality trouble, and taking state cost-share money makes them a condition of the money. On local rules, Texas is unusual twice over. State law counts silviculture as an agricultural operation, and a city's ordinance does not apply at all to an agricultural operation outside its city limits and applies inside them only on a narrow showing. Counties are weaker still, because Texas counties do not have zoning authority. But this is not blanket protection: a county requirement that was already in effect before your operation began does apply to you, so check with the county before work starts. One last thing worth knowing before you sign: Texas does not register or license foresters, so a forester's credentials here are professional rather than statutory, and the accreditations you see — Texas Accredited Forester, SAF Certified Forester, ACF, Texas Pro Logger — are voluntary programmes rather than a state licence.

Source: tfsweb.tamu.edu

Property tax on Texas timberland

Qualifying timberland is appraised on its productive capacity rather than market value — but the land must already have a five-year timber-production history before it qualifies.

Source: tfsweb.tamu.edu

What the Texas A&M Forest Service will do for you, free

Technical advice and forestry education, and the My Land Management Connector tool that matches a landowner with consulting foresters and land-management vendors in their area.

Worth taking. A state service forester does not bid on your timber and does not take a commission, so the advice comes without a stake in the outcome. They will not run your sale for you — that is a consulting forester's job — but they will tell you what you have before anybody makes you an offer.

Source: tfsweb.tamu.edu

Getting the best price for your timber

The single biggest lever is competition. One buyer who turns up and makes an offer has no reason to bid against himself. A sealed-bid sale, run by a consulting forester who invites several buyers to price the same marked timber, routinely moves the final number by a wide margin — and it costs you a share of the sale rather than money up front.

Before any of that, have the timber cruised. A cruise is a forester walking your land and measuring what is actually standing, so you are selling a known quantity instead of taking somebody's word for it.

Because Texas timber is sold by weight, the load tickets are your receipt. Every truck that leaves is weighed at the mill, and those tickets are what your payment is calculated from. Ask to receive copies as the job runs rather than a single figure at the end — a sale you cannot check is a sale you have to take on trust.

And put the terms in writing before anybody starts: what gets cut, what stays, what the land looks like when they leave, and when you get paid.

TimberClear lists 1019 Texas foresters, buyers, loggers and mills. Every listing is free and complete, including the phone number the business already publishes. We have not vetted, verified or endorsed any of them — the listing tells you who they are and what counties they cover, and the choosing is yours.