Texas Timber Prices Q4 2025

Texas stumpage prices declined sharply in late 2025, with pine sawtimber falling an estimated 16% year-over-year in Northeast Texas and pulpwood dropping below $4/ton in Southeast Texas. A persistent structural oversupply of standing timber across the US South — where growth has outpaced harvest since 2008 — combined with weak housing demand and continued pulp mill closures drove prices to their lowest levels in several years. South-wide pine sawtimber stumpage averaged $23.23/ton in Q4 2025, down 6% year-over-year and 10% below the Q1 2022 peak. Pine pulpwood fell 22% year-over-year to just $5.96/ton south-wide, a staggering 46% below its 2022 peak. These conditions reflect a timber market under sustained pressure despite rising Canadian lumber tariffs that could eventually shift demand toward domestic Southern producers.

Estimated Texas Timber Prices, Q4 2025 ($/ton)

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Northeast Texas pine sawtimber saw one of the steepest subregional drops in the South at 16% year-over-year. Southeast Texas pine pulpwood below $4/ton placed it alongside Arkansas and South Louisiana as one of the weakest pulpwood markets in the region. The Texas A&M Forest Service reported statewide pine sawtimber at $29.55/ton in January–February 2025, meaning the Q4 decline represents a roughly $4–6/ton drop within the same calendar year.

For per-unit context, current Texas pine sawtimber stumpage likely translates to roughly $185–$210/MBF (Doyle) and pine pulpwood to approximately $11–$14/cord.

Hardwood sawtimber has been the most resilient product category, holding near $35–$38/ton throughout 2025. Texas price reports aggregate all hardwood species into “mixed hardwood sawtimber” and “hardwood pulpwood” categories. Individual species prices for oak, sweetgum, and hickory are not separately tracked in publicly available Texas data, though red oak and white oak tend to command premiums when mills specify species.

Historical Texas Timber Price Data

How to Estimate What Your Timber Is Worth

These Texas timber prices give you the market rates per unit of timber in your area, but they’re not particularly useful on their own—you need to know how much wood you actually have standing on your land.

The most accurate way to determine your timber volume is to hire a professional forester to conduct a timber cruise, which involves systematically measuring sample plots across your property. This can cost $1,000 or more depending on your acreage and timber complexity.

For a quicker, DIY estimate, you can use SilviCultural—forestry mapping software designed for small woodland owners. It includes an amateur-friendly cruise system that walks you through measuring your timber and calculating volumes by species and product class.

Once you have volume estimates (in MBF, cords, tons, etc.), you can multiply them by the stumpage prices above to get a rough sense of your timber’s market value. For example:

• 50 MBF of pine sawlogs × $400/MBF = $20,000
• 100 cords of mixed hardwood pulpwood × $15/cord = $1,500

Keep in mind: Actual sale prices vary based on access, timber quality, market timing, and logger availability. These calculations give you a b

Market Update

Housing Weakness and Tariff Escalation Shaped Q4 Demand

The housing market — the primary driver of lumber and, by extension, sawtimber demand — continued to disappoint in Q4 2025. Total housing starts moved from a 15-month low of 1,272,000 units in October to 1,404,000 in December, but full-year 2025 starts of approximately 1,358,700 units were down 0.6% from 2024, marking the fourth consecutive annual decline. Single-family starts, the key lumber demand driver, totaled just 909,600 for 2025, down 7.4% year-over-year. The South underperformed other regions, with starts declining 2.8% month-over-month in December. Mortgage rates drifted to approximately 6.25% by November–December, providing modest late-year relief but insufficient to spark a recovery.

Canadian lumber tariffs escalated dramatically. The Commerce Department’s 6th Administrative Review raised combined anti-dumping and countervailing duties from 14.40% to 35.19% for most Canadian producers, effective July–August 2025, before an additional 10% tariff pushed total duties to approximately 45%. Canada supplied roughly 24% of US lumber consumption in 2024, so these tariffs represent a meaningful cost increase for builders. However, the impact on Southern pine stumpage has been muted — the South’s chronic timber oversupply limits price transmission from the lumber market down to the log market.

Lumber futures reflected this tension between tariff-driven supply fears and demand reality. After spiking to $695/MBF in August 2025, CME lumber futures retreated steadily through Q4 to the $530–$600 range by December. Forisk projected housing starts of 1.351 million for 2025 and 1.355 million for 2026, with meaningful recovery to 1.419 million not expected until 2027.

Mill Expansions Continue Despite Falling Utilization Rates

Southern softwood lumber mill capacity has expanded 35% since 2017 to over 28.4 billion board feet, yet utilization rates have collapsed from 85% in 2021 to approximately 74–75% in 2024–2025. In Texas, Georgia-Pacific’s Pineland Lumber Complex in Sabine County and Angelina Forest Products in Lufkin together accept hundreds of truckloads of logs daily, ensuring some baseline demand for sawtimber in East Texas.

Several major corporate developments shaped the Q4 landscape. Rayonier and PotlatchDeltic announced a merger on October 14, 2025, creating a timber giant with over 4 million acres and $40 million in expected run-rate synergies by end of 2026. Rayonier’s CEO noted that timber market headwinds persisted throughout the year, while guiding for Southern timber harvest of 12.1–12.6 million tons in 2026 with pine stumpage realizations expected to trend modestly higher. Weyerhaeuser meanwhile reported negative Wood Products EBITDA of −$20 million in Q4 2025, reflecting how challenging conditions were all the way up the supply chain.

The pulp and paper sector continued to contract, with more than 10 major Southern pulp facilities closing between 2023 and 2025, removing over 25 million tons of annual fiber demand. This structural decline is the primary force behind collapsing pulpwood prices. Partially offsetting this, US wood pellet exports reached 891,093 metric tons in November 2025, providing a modest demand floor for low-grade fiber.

Drought, Not Hurricanes, Defined Q4 Weather Risks

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season produced no US landfalls. No hurricane-related timber damage occurred in Texas in Q4 2025. The more pressing weather story was intensifying drought — by early 2026, approximately 73% of Texas was under drought conditions, raising wildfire risk and long-term timber growth concerns across East Texas.

Outlook

The Texas timber market in Q4 2025 reflects a fundamental imbalance: Southern softwood growth has consistently outpaced harvest since 2008, creating a standing inventory surplus that suppresses stumpage prices regardless of what lumber markets do. For landowners and timber investors, hardwood sawtimber at $35–$38/ton and pine sawtimber at $22–$26/ton represent the current reality — with meaningful price recovery unlikely until housing starts approach 1.5 million units, a threshold most forecasters do not expect before 2028.