Guide
Market tiers
The same species, in the same region, in the same month, can appear in this index at seventy euro a cubic metre and at two thousand three hundred. Both figures are correct. They are prices from different markets, and the difference between them is the single most important thing to understand before reading any timber price anywhere.
The three tiers
Bulk roundwood
State forestry price lists, statistical bulletins, and volume auctions of unsorted or lightly sorted roundwood. The buyer is a sawmill or a pulp mill buying by the lorryload. Prices are administered or lightly competitive, move slowly, and describe the floor of the market: what ordinary wood is worth in quantity.
Most of the volume in European timber trades here, and most of the rows in this index come from here. If someone quotes you “the price of oak” with no further qualification, this is almost always what they mean.
Value-timber auction
The German and Austrian Wertholzsubmission and its equivalents: a submission auction where selected logs are laid out, inspected, and bid on individually by sealed offer. Buyers are veneer mills, instrument makers and specialist sawmills, and they are bidding on a specific log they have walked up to and looked at.
Prices here are not a premium on the bulk price. They are what a scarce object fetches at auction, and a single exceptional trunk can set a headline figure that no volume buyer will ever pay. A tier that is ten or twenty times the bulk price for the same species is normal and is not an error.
Retail listing
Asking prices from commercial marketplaces — processed boards, slabs and small lots, offered to workshops and individuals. Two things make these different in kind from the tiers above: the wood is usually further along (sawn, sometimes dried), and the number is an ask, not a sale. Nobody has agreed to it yet.
Listings sit at the top of any honest band for that reason, and the index tiers them separately rather than letting an unsold asking price pull a median that is supposed to describe transactions.
In this index, right now
The examples below are live cells, not illustrations — each one links to the page it came from, where the sources behind it are named.
| Tier | Cell | Stage | Median €/m³ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk | European Ash, Grand Est / Alsace | Standing tree | €7 |
| Value timber | Black Walnut, Austria | Sawlog | €1,330 |
| Retail | European Walnut, EU Trade | Sawn board | €780 |
These are the most extreme published cell in each tier, chosen to show the range rather than the typical case. They are different species in different regions and are not a like-for-like comparison — that is the point.
Telling which tier a quote belongs to
- Who is selling? A state enterprise or statistics office is bulk. A growers’ association running a dated submission event is value timber. A website with a shopping cart is retail.
- Is it a list or an event? A tariff you can read any day is bulk. A price that only exists because a specific auction happened on a specific date is value timber.
- Can you see the individual log? If the price attaches to a numbered trunk, it is value timber. If it attaches to a grade and a diameter class, it is bulk.
- Has anyone bought it? A listing price has no buyer yet. An auction price has one by definition.
Why the index does not blend them
Averaging a bulk price list with a submission auction produces a number that describes no market anyone can buy or sell in. It would be higher than any mill will pay and lower than any veneer buyer will bid, and it would move whenever the mix of sources shifted rather than when prices did.
So the market tier is part of the index’s grain: cells are computed per species, region, product stage and tier, and every figure on this site is labelled with the tier it belongs to. A page showing more than one tier shows them as separate rows, always.
The trade-off is that the index has more cells, each with fewer observations, and some cells fall below the minimum-evidence gate as a result and are not published at all. That is the right side to err on: the gate is what keeps a published number meaningful.
Related
- How timber pricing works in Europe — the four product stages, transport terms and units.
- Normalization — the arithmetic that puts every tier on one basis.
- Sources — which body publishes in which tier.