Timber prices by species: Douglas-fir vs ponderosa

Species sets the ceiling on what standing timber brings, because each wood sells into its own market at its own price. Douglas-fir usually leads in the Pacific Northwest because it feeds the structural lumber market, while ponderosa pine sells into a smaller market for mouldings, millwork and shop lumber.

What each species has brought

Over the last 12 months, the Oregon Department of Forestry's median winning rate was $578/MBF (43 sales) for Douglas-fir, $248/MBF (7 sales) for hemlock, $172/MBF (8 sales) for true firs and $50.41/MBF (4 sales) for pine. ODF is the one agency tracked here that publishes a winning rate per species group, and the species page holds the full table with its ranges.

The chart above is Douglas-fir alone, month by month: ODF sales that offered it as their only bid species. A multi-species sale has no single price, so it stays off this line. Geography sits inside those medians too, since Oregon's pine comes mostly from the Klamath-Lake District, a long way from the coast-range Douglas-fir districts. The next two examples hold more of that still.

One sale, five prices

BLM's notice for Calamity Jane, a Linn County sale set for November 18, 2026, appraises each species on the same ground, with the same roads and the same trucks:

• Douglas-fir: 8,431 MBF at $397.90 per MBF, $3,354,694.90
• Red alder: 331 MBF at $222.60, $73,680.60
• Grand fir: 1,872 MBF at $191.40, $358,300.80
• Western hemlock: 926 MBF at $186.60, $172,791.60
• Bigleaf maple: 403 MBF at $25.10, $10,115.30

Douglas-fir is 70 percent of the volume and 85 percent of the $3,969,583.20 minimum. Those are appraised floors and not bids, and BLM marks the maple rate as a minimum stumpage value of 10 percent of pond value. Oral bidding on this sale is limited to Douglas-fir, so that is the rate bidders compete on.

Why the mix beats the volume

ODF's Lone Corndog notice shows a mix working against size. The Klamath-Lake sale offered 2,202 MBF: 1,323 MBF of ponderosa pine, 821 MBF of white fir and 58 MBF of lodgepole pine. Clabent Equipment won it on October 19, 2026 against two other bidders:

• Ponderosa pine: 1,323 MBF x $66.75 = $88,310.25
• White fir: 821 MBF x $190.69 = $156,556.49
• Lodgepole pine at its fixed rate: 58 MBF x $0.52 = $30.16
• Total: $244,896.90, the winning bid to the cent

Ponderosa was 60 percent of the wood and 36 percent of the money. The whole sale works out to about $111 per MBF. Four days later and well to the north, Mystree Solved sold 4,188 MBF, mostly Douglas-fir, for $2,289,352.49, about $547 per MBF: not quite twice the wood for more than nine times the money. Log size and location account for part of that gap: Mystree's Douglas-fir averaged 27 inches in diameter against 17 for Lone Corndog's pine, on the other side of the state. That is why a buyer reads the species table in a packet before the total.

Ponderosa, hemlock and the rest

Douglas-fir is dense, strong and straight-grained, the default west-side framing lumber, and it dominates forests west of the Cascade crest. When people quote a regional stumpage price without naming a species, it is usually the wood they mean. Ponderosa pine is largely an east-side tree, valued in its higher grades for mouldings and millwork more than for framing. Western hemlock is the H in hem-fir, a sound framing and pulp species that usually sells below Douglas-fir.

The order is not fixed. Lone Corndog's white fir outbid its ponderosa, and it was set at the higher minimum to begin with, $113.13 against $28.11. Western redcedar runs the other way from most of the list: ODF's Mystree Solved notice fixed cedar at $1,006.29 per MBF, about double that sale's $496.55 Douglas-fir minimum, though the sale listed no cedar volume at that rate.

Where the site has species data

ODF prints a rate per species group, so its sales build the table on the species page. Washington DNR, the Forest Service and BLM publish a whole-sale price or a notice-level species list, so their sales add to the species counts there and not to the rates. A sale's species appears only where the agency published it, so a blank is missing data and not a missing species. Compare prices within a species and within a unit. The site reports species and price as the agencies publish them and never forecasts where a species is headed.