How Much Does a Cord of Wood Cost? What to Memorize and What to Look Up

A full cord of split, seasoned hardwood delivered to a US home costs $275 to $400 in 2026, with a national span from about $150 for softwood to $575 or more for premium hardwood bought in midwinter; half a cord runs $180 to $280. A full cord is 128 cubic feet of wood ranked and well stowed, stacked 4 feet high by 4 deep by 8 long, and that figure is fixed by weights-and-measures law in most states. Delivery adds $25 to $75 per load, or roughly $2 per mile beyond a seller's free radius, and stacking adds $20 to $80 per cord. A "rick" or "face cord" at $120 to $200 is not a legal unit of sale and can hold a quarter to half a cord depending on how long the pieces are cut.

The two numbers to memorize: 128 and 20

Two figures are fixed and portable. Everything else about firewood pricing is local, looked up fresh every autumn.

The first is 128. A cord is 128 cubic feet of wood "ranked and well stowed," the phrase in Section 2.4 of NIST Handbook 130, the Uniform Regulation for the Method of Sale of Commodities, adopted into statute by most states. The volume counts wood, bark and the air between pieces, which is why a load tipped loose into a heap cannot be measured and a stacked one can. Between 70 and 90 cubic feet of the 128 is solid wood, depending on how straight the splits are.

The second is 20. Firewood burns properly below 20 percent moisture content, the threshold the EPA's Burn Wise program used throughout its run and the number state air-quality agencies still repeat. Burn Wise operated from 2009 to 2025, and the EPA stopped updating the site on October 30, 2025; the pages stay up as a historic record. The figure did not stop being true when the program closed, but no live federal firewood authority replaced it.

Price per cord, species availability, delivery radius, stacking fee, your state's rules on moving wood: all local, all look-up.

The unit decides what you paid. The species only decides how well it burns. That distinction stuck with me because grafting has the same shape: rootstock decides the tree, and the scion only decides the fruit.

What 128 cubic feet buys, and what a rick does not

Handbook 130 requires firewood to be sold by the cord, by a fraction of a cord, or by the cubic meter; packaged wood under 0.45 cubic meters, an eighth of a cord, must declare volume in liters. "Truckload," "rack," "pile," "face cord" and "rick" are not permitted units of sale, and state weights-and-measures offices including Arizona's and Washington's say so on their consumer pages.

Sellers use the words anyway, and not always dishonestly: a rick is a real object, just not a fixed quantity. A face cord is a stack 4 feet high and 8 feet long, one piece deep, so its volume depends entirely on how long the pieces were cut, and row depth runs from 12 to 32 inches.

| Unit sold | Stacked volume | Share of a full cord | Typical 2026 price | Price per full-cord equivalent | |---|---|---|---|---| | Full cord | 128 cu ft | 1.00 | $275–$400 delivered | $275–$400 | | Half cord | 64 cu ft | 0.50 | $180–$280 | $360–$560 | | Face cord, 12-inch pieces | 32 cu ft | 0.25 | $120–$200 | $480–$800 | | Face cord, 16-inch pieces | 42.7 cu ft | 0.33 | $120–$200 | $360–$600 | | Face cord, 24-inch pieces | 64 cu ft | 0.50 | $120–$200 | $240–$400 |

The 12-inch and 24-inch rows are the whole problem: two sellers quoting an identical price for a "rick" can deliver loads that differ by 100 percent.

A worked example, from Texas listings I checked in September 2026. North Texas Firewood delivers post oak inside 40 miles of the American Airlines Center in Dallas, lists an 8-by-4-foot stack at $399 with delivery included, and gives its log length as 17 to 19 inches. At 18 inches that stack is 48 cubic feet, or 0.375 of a cord, putting the wood near $1,064 per full-cord equivalent. Shift the log length two inches either way and the figure moves between $1,008 and $1,127. The seller publishes everything needed; the multiplication is left to you.

Werner Firewood, selling Texas post oak in Houston and Austin, lists volumes in cubic feet: 12, 24, 45 and 90. The word "cord" appears nowhere on the page. The 90-cubic-foot option is $795 including delivery and stacking, and 90 cubic feet is 0.70 of a cord, about $1,131 per cord equivalent. Publishing cubic feet is better practice, and still leaves you dividing by 128.

Why one Texas cord costs $390 and another costs $1,100

Same state, same month, close to a threefold spread. Two things drive it.

The first is what the wood is for. Post oak in Texas is barbecue fuel, priced against smoker demand rather than propane. Woody's Tree Service, north of Dallas, sells Texas ash at $391.40 per cord including sales tax, pickup only, customer loads. That is heating wood at a heating price; the post oak figures above are cooking wood, delivered and stacked. Different markets sharing a unit.

The second is density. A pound of oven-dry hardwood yields about 8,600 BTU whatever the species, a figure from University of Missouri Extension guide G5450, with resinous softwoods around 9,050. Species does not change the energy in a pound of wood. It changes how many pounds fit inside 128 cubic feet.

| Species | Million BTU per cord | Percent of green ash | Dry weight per cord | |---|---|---|---| | Red oak | 24.6 | 123% | 3,528 lb | | Green ash | 20.0 | 100% | 2,880 lb | | American elm | 20.0 | 100% | 2,872 lb | | Ponderosa pine | 16.2 | 81% | 2,336 lb | | Engelmann spruce | 15.0 | 78% | 2,070 lb |

Read the heat and weight columns together and the mechanism shows: red oak carries 23 percent more heat per cord than green ash because it weighs 23 percent more per cord. Utah State University Forestry Extension publishes these in Table 1 of its Wood Heating fact sheet by Michael Kuhns and Tom Schmidt, scaled against green ash as the 100 percent baseline. The same table puts white oak at 29.1 million and osage-orange at 32.9.

Treat any BTU table as a ranking rather than a guarantee. Published values for one species differ across sources by 10 to 20 percent, because laboratories disagree about how much solid wood a cord holds and because they sampled different trees. The EIA uses a rough national average of 20 million BTU per cord, roughly the raw energy in 144 gallons of heating oil.

Delivery, distance and the stacking fee

Delivery runs $25 to $75 per load nationally, or around $2 per mile, with $25 to $100 typical beyond 15 miles, per 2026 cost surveys from HomeGuide and Angi. Stacking adds $20 to $80 per cord.

Published tiers make that concrete. Werner Firewood includes delivery and stacking inside 12 miles of its Houston warehouse, then charges $25 for 12 to 20 miles, $45 for 20 to 35, and $100 for 35 to 55; its Austin radius is 10 miles with the same surcharges. Ask for the free radius before the price. It often decides which sellers are worth calling.

Distance is not only an economic question. The Don't Move Firewood campaign, run by The Nature Conservancy, sets 50 miles as the outer limit for moving untreated wood and prefers under 10; the National Park Service uses the same pair. Michigan advises against moving wood more than 10 miles from where it was cut unless heat treated, and Washington bars out-of-state firewood without a heat-treatment label. Emerald ash borer, spotted lanternfly and oak wilt all travel in wood that looks clean, and some borers survive in split wood for over three years. A seller 90 miles out with a good price may not be a legal option where you live.

Pay the stacking fee for the measurement it buys. Weights-and-measures guidance is consistent that a load tipped into a pile cannot be measured afterward, while a stacked one takes about a minute. Twenty to eighty dollars to make a delivery verifiable is the cheapest line on the invoice.

Hauling it yourself

A 2026 Ford F-150 with the 8-foot box carries 77.4 cubic feet level with the rails, 60 percent of a cord. Weight arrives before volume. Utah State puts a cord of dry red oak at 3,528 pounds and a green cord at 4,888. Sixty percent of the dry figure is about 2,130 pounds, which suits only the highest-rated half-tons: Ford quotes a maximum payload near 2,445 pounds for a regular-cab 4x2 with the long box, and a hybrid PowerBoost tops out at 1,775. Green oak at that volume runs roughly 2,960 pounds, over every half-ton rating. Read your own door-jamb sticker and plan on a third to a half cord per trip.

The delivery-day check

All of that is preparation for ten minutes on delivery day.

1. Have the load stacked, or stack it yourself, before you sign anything.
2. Measure the stack in feet, height by width by depth, multiply, and divide by 128. That is your cord count.
3. Split one piece from the middle of the load and press the moisture meter pins into the fresh inner face.
4. Repeat on pieces from the top, middle and bottom of the stack.
5. Keep a receipt showing the seller's name and address, the species, and the quantity in cords or fractions of a cord.

Step three is the one people skip and the one that decides the question. The outside of a split dries and rewets constantly. Light snow has been falling here all morning and melting as it lands, and I have watched it start twice; a split lying in that reads wet at noon and dry by evening while its core has not moved since August. Readings on bark or old end grain are close to meaningless.

Two details about the meter. Bring the wood near room temperature first, because cold wood reads drier than it is on any meter without temperature compensation, and a January delivery is very cold. Pin orientation is genuinely contested: most firewood guidance says parallel to the grain, several say across it, and I have found no controlled comparison settling it. Take several readings per face and trust the highest.

The verdict on a load arrives late, which is the part people underestimate. I cut four hundred whip and tongue unions in February and learn in June how many took, and the pin meter on my grafting bench guards the opposite failure, since scion sticks that dry out will not take. Firewood runs on the same delay: you buy in September and find out in January.

"Seasoned" is a marketing word with no legal content behind it. The EPA's guidance was to season at least six months, split, stacked off the ground, top covered only, since covering the sides traps moisture in. Softwood generally reaches 20 percent in six months, dense hardwood in twelve, oak often eighteen to twenty-four. Green wood is 50 percent or more water by weight before that begins.

"Kiln-dried" is unregulated too. It usually does mean dry wood and commands a real premium, but it certifies nothing about pests. The term that does is "certified heat treated": USDA APHIS schedule T314-a requires a core temperature of 60°C (140°F) held for 60 minutes at a facility certified by APHIS or a state agriculture official, relaxed from 71.1°C for 75 minutes once the evidence supported it. Crossing a quarantine line, the stamp counts, not the word "kiln."

What to look up before you call anyone

• Your state's firewood movement rule and any county quarantine, from the state department of agriculture rather than a retailer.
• Two local prices per full cord, quoted as cords or fractions. A seller who will not convert a rick into a cord fraction has answered a different question.
• The free delivery radius and the surcharge past it.
• Whether stacking is included, and its cost if not.
• Which species your sellers carry, then the BTU figure for that species rather than for the oak you read about.
• Whether they will let you split and meter a piece before you pay.

New Hampshire's Department of Energy publishes a state cordwood average and notes the figure covers unseasoned log-length wood delivered, with cut and split running about twice that. Every "average cord price" describes a specific product. Check which one before comparing it to a quote.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average cost of a full cord of wood?

Split, seasoned hardwood averages $275 to $400 per cord delivered in 2026, according to HomeGuide and Angi cost surveys. Softwood runs $150 to $300. Premium hardwood bought in January can pass $600. Delivery beyond the seller's free radius adds $25 to $100, and stacking adds $20 to $80.

Can a pickup truck hold a cord of wood?

No. A 2026 Ford F-150 with the 8-foot bed holds 77.4 cubic feet level with the rails, about 60 percent of a cord, and a cord of dry red oak weighs 3,528 pounds. Weight limits you before volume does. Plan on a third to a half cord per trip.

How much wood is a full cord?

A full cord is 128 cubic feet of wood ranked and well stowed, the definition set in NIST Handbook 130 and adopted by most states. Stacked 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long, it contains roughly 70 to 90 cubic feet of solid wood; the remainder is bark and air.

How long does half a cord of firewood last?

Half a cord of red oak carries about 12.3 million BTU. A stove at 70 percent efficiency delivers roughly 8.6 million of that, near 430 hours at an average 20,000 BTU per hour. Run continuously as primary heat, that is about 18 days. As five-hour evening fires, a full casual season.

What does a cord of wood cost near me?

Call two local sellers and ask each for a price per full cord, not per rick or truckload. Expect $275 to $400 delivered for seasoned hardwood in most markets, less where hardwood forests are local, more in January and more than 15 miles outside a seller's free delivery radius.

What is the price of a half cord?

A half cord, 64 cubic feet, runs $180 to $280 delivered in 2026. That works out to $360 to $560 per full-cord equivalent, so buying by halves costs 30 to 40 percent more per cubic foot than a full cord. Sellers usually charge the same delivery fee either way.

How should firewood moisture be measured at delivery?

Split a piece from the middle of the load, press the meter pins into the fresh inner face, and read it at room temperature. Cold wood reads drier than it is. Repeat on pieces from the top, middle and bottom. Anything above 20 percent needs more drying before it burns clean.