The single word that explains nearly every hardwood lumber price discrepancy is cuttings. It is the unit the National Hardwood Lumber Association grading system was built around, and it is also the word most beginner woodworking guides skip past. If you understand what cuttings are, you can predict how much usable material you will get from a given grade before you spend a dollar at the yard.
This piece is a focused walkthrough of cuttings as a concept, how they tie to each grade tier, and what they imply for the raw board feet you should actually purchase.
A cutting is a rectangle
A cutting, in NHLA terms, is a clear rectangular piece of wood that can be sawn out of one face of a board, of at least a minimum size and free of defects under the rules for that grade. Each grade specifies:
- A minimum cutting size (for example, 4 inches by 5 feet, or 3 inches by 7 feet).
- A minimum percentage of the board face that must be obtainable as cuttings of that size or larger.
- A maximum number of cuttings the grader can use to reach that percentage.
The higher the grade, the larger the minimum cuttings, the higher the required clear percentage, and the lower the maximum number of cuttings. FAS, the top hardwood grade, demands the biggest clear rectangles, the highest yield, and the fewest cuts. No. 2A Common allows smaller cuttings, more of them, and a lower minimum yield.
If you stop here, you already understand the entire grading system. The rest is filling in the table.
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How the main grades break down
The simplified rules for the most common hardwood grades:
- FAS. Boards 6 inches and wider, 8 feet and longer, with cuttings at least 4x5 feet or 3x7 feet, and at least 83.3 percent of the face yielding cuttings. Both faces must meet the rules.
- F1F (FAS One Face) and Selects. One face must grade FAS; the back can drop one tier.
- No. 1 Common. Boards 3 inches and wider, 4 feet and longer. Cuttings 4x2 feet or 3x3 feet, at least 66.7 percent yield. The everyday workhorse grade.
- No. 2A Common. Boards 3 inches and wider, 4 feet and longer. Cuttings 3x2 feet, at least 50 percent yield. Good for short parts and paint-grade work.
- No. 3A Common and below. Heavier defects, lower yields, generally industrial.
Two practical effects fall out of this. First, the grade name is not a quality verdict; it is a yield prediction. A No. 1 Common board is not "lower quality oak"; it is oak that gave the grader less clear material per face than FAS oak would have. Second, the yield numbers (83 percent, 67 percent, 50 percent) are exactly the inverse of the defect allowance you should plan with.
The defect-allowance math
Here is the translation from grade to purchased board feet:
- FAS: roughly 83 percent yield, so plan a 20 percent defect allowance to be safe (slightly above the inverse to account for end trim and shop loss).
- F1F / Selects: roughly 80 percent yield, so plan 25 percent defect allowance.
- No. 1 Common: roughly 67 percent yield, so plan 50 percent defect allowance for longer parts, 35 percent for shorter parts.
- No. 2A Common: roughly 50 percent yield, so plan 100 percent defect allowance for longer parts, 50 to 70 percent for short parts.
These are conservative numbers. Skilled cutters get better yield than the grade implies because they plan the cuts intelligently. New cutters do worse. The right answer is project-specific; the wrong answer is no allowance at all.
To convert finished board feet into purchased raw board feet, multiply the finished total by (1 plus the defect allowance). A 12 board foot project in FAS becomes about 14.4 board feet purchased; the same project in No. 1 Common becomes 16 to 18 board feet purchased.
This is exactly the kind of math the Board Foot Calculator on EvvyTools is built to handle, and the weight estimate it produces alongside the volume number is what tells you whether a single truck trip works.
Why the rules are written this way
The NHLA was formed in 1898 to standardize hardwood grading across mills and to make trade between buyers and sellers possible without inspections at every transfer. Cuttings emerged as the unit because they are the only grading metric that ties directly to what a downstream user actually pays for: clear, usable material for furniture, flooring, millwork, and so on. A grading system based on the worst defect in the board, or on the number of knots, would not predict yield. A grading system based on cuttings does.
The same logic governs the rules for thicker stock. Cabinet-grade rough lumber sold in thicknesses like 4/4, 6/4, and 8/4 is graded under the same NHLA cuttings rules, but the cuttings yield gets translated into different shop expectations depending on thickness. If you want background on how that thickness math interacts with species and stability, the Wikipedia article on hardwood gives a clean overview.
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Where this changes pricing decisions
Once you can read cuttings as a yield prediction, two pricing decisions get easier.
Buying for a known project. Price the FAS option and the No. 1 Common option as finished cost per usable foot, not as per-board-foot retail. The two numbers will be much closer than the retail tags suggest. If the project is full of short parts, No. 1 Common usually wins on finished cost. If the project has long, continuous-grain show pieces, FAS often wins.
Buying for stock. If you keep a small inventory of lumber for unspecified future projects, FAS hardwood is the safer bet because you do not know what cuttings you will need. Lower grades are great when the project is specified, and a poor choice when it is not.
For the longer walkthrough of how each grade prices in current market conditions and how the stamps and tags decode, the hub guide on reading lumber grade stamps and price tiers carries the details.
A note on the softwood side
Softwood does not use cuttings rules the same way. Dimensional softwood is graded against strength values under American Lumber Standard Committee rules, so grade affects load capacity more than yield. Softwood appearance grades (the C&Better and D&Better tiers for paneling and trim) use a defect-counting approach more like hardwood, but the system is still simpler. The cuttings vocabulary is specifically a hardwood concept.
For the broader background on what gets called "lumber" and how the dimensional and appearance categories diverge, the Wikipedia entry on lumber is a quick refresher.
Putting it to work
The next time you stand at a hardwood rack and the tag says "No. 1 Common cherry, $5.80 per board foot" next to a tag that says "FAS cherry, $9.20 per board foot," do not ask which is cheaper. Ask:
- What are the cuttings I need from each part of the project?
- Which grade's cutting size and yield rules match those needs?
- What is the defect allowance that converts my finished board feet into purchased board feet?
- What does each option cost per finished usable foot?
That four-question framework usually does what the price tag alone cannot: it tells you which board is actually yours.
The rest of the practical project-cost calculators live in the EvvyTools tools directory if you want to keep them close.
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