Reference
Glossary
The terms the board uses, defined the way the timber trade says them.
- Stumpage
- The price paid for standing timber, the trees as they stand on the stump, before they are cut. A public timber sale sells stumpage: the buyer pays the agency for the right to cut and haul the marked timber. Stumpage is not the delivered-log price and not the finished-lumber price; it is the value of the timber where it grows.
- MBF (thousand board feet)
- The standard volume unit for a state timber sale. One board foot is a piece of wood one foot by one foot by one inch; MBF is a thousand of them. A sale's price per MBF is the headline stumpage number. State agencies scale their sales in MBF.
- Board foot
- The base unit of log volume: nominally a 12 by 12 by 1 inch piece of wood. Log scaling estimates how many board feet a standing or bucked log will yield, by a regional scaling rule. Scaling conventions vary by region, so a board foot in one scale is not identical to another.
- CCF (hundred cubic feet)
- The volume unit the US Forest Service uses for federal timber, one hundred cubic feet of wood. Federal sale prices are quoted per CCF, not per MBF. CCF and MBF are different measures, so a federal price per CCF and a state price per MBF are not directly comparable, and this site never blends them.
- Cruise
- The field survey that estimates a tract's timber volume by species and grade before a sale. The cruise sets the offered volume and feeds the appraisal that becomes the minimum bid. The published offered volume is a cruise estimate, not a post-harvest scaled total.
- Tract
- The specific parcel of timber offered in one sale, its boundary, acreage and marked trees. A sale is a tract offered at auction under one contract. Sale names identify the tract.
- Advertised vs sold
- An advertised sale has been publicly noticed and scheduled for auction but not yet auctioned; it carries an appraised minimum and appears on the calendar. A sold sale has been auctioned and awarded to a high bidder. The site keeps the two apart: the calendar holds advertised sales, the board and the sale pages hold results.
- Minimum bid (appraised value)
- The floor the agency sets for a sale, from its appraisal of the tract. A bid below the minimum is not accepted. On a federal sale the minimum is an advertised rate per CCF; on a state sale it is a total dollar minimum. If no bid meets the minimum, the sale is a no-bid.
- Premium over minimum
- How far the winning bid ran above the minimum, as a percent. A 40 percent premium means the sale sold for 1.4 times its appraised floor. It is the clearest read on how hard buyers competed for a tract, and with the bidder count it is this site's bid-intensity signal.
- Bid intensity
- This site's read on competition for a sale: the number of bidders and the premium the winning bid ran over the minimum. High bid intensity, many bidders and a large premium, means buyers wanted the tract; low intensity, one bidder at the minimum, or none, means they did not. No agency publishes this across sales, so the site computes it.
- No-bid sale
- A sale that was offered at auction but drew no qualifying bid. It is a real result and a real signal, weak demand, a hard tract, or a minimum set above what buyers would pay, so the site records it as a no-bid, never as a zero price.
- High bidder (purchaser)
- The winning bidder at auction, the mill, logger or timber buyer who bid the most above the minimum and won the right to the timber. The site records the apparent high bidder as published; final award can follow after the agency's review.
- Sale ID
- The agency's contract or agreement number for a sale (a WA DNR agreement number, a BLM contract identifier like ORC04-TS-2026.0034). It uniquely identifies a sale even when two tracts share a similar name.
- WA DNR, USFS, BLM
- The three public sellers this site tracks: the Washington Department of Natural Resources (state trust-land timber, scaled in MBF), the US Forest Service (national-forest timber, scaled in CCF), and the Bureau of Land Management (federal O&C timber in western Oregon, scaled in MBF). Each runs its own auctions on its own calendar.