Soft Maple price per board foot
Plan on about $4.25 a board foot for 4/4 stock at U.S. retail (our 2026-08 estimate — your yard gets the final word). A typical board, 6″ wide and 8′ long, will run you around $17.00.
'Soft maple' is the lumber trade's little joke — it's a catch-all for red and silver maple, and it's only soft next to its rock-hard cousin. It's still harder than cherry. This is the industry's quiet workhorse: half the 'maple' furniture in stores is soft maple, and when ambrosia beetles tunnel through and leave gray-green streaks, boards that were once culls now sell as 'wormy maple' to people who love the look. Sometimes character is just damage with good publicity.
Easier on tooling than hard maple at three-quarters the weight. Great paint-grade and secondary wood; often figured (curly, ambrosia).
Soft Maple at a glance
| Price per board foot | $4.25 (2026-08) |
| Weight, dry | 38 lb/ft³ · 3.2 lb per BF |
| Janka hardness | 950 lbf |
| Shrinkage, green → oven-dry | 8.2% tangential · 4.0% radial |
| Cost of 10 BF | $42.50 |
| Cost of 25 BF | $106.25 |
What common thicknesses cost
Same 6″ × 8′ board, priced by rough thickness (thicker stock often carries a small premium on top of this — figured on volume alone):
| Thickness | Board feet | Cost | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4/4 | 4.0 | $17.00 | 13 lb |
| 6/4 | 6.0 | $25.50 | 19 lb |
| 8/4 | 8.0 | $34.00 | 25 lb |
| 12/4 | 12.0 | $51.00 | 38 lb |
Will it stay flat?
Friendlier than hard maple in every practical way: it dries faster, settles sooner, and carries three-quarters of the weight. For painted built-ins and big cabinet runs, that's not a compromise — it's the point.
The measured numbers: drying from green, soft maple shrinks about 8.2% across a flatsawn board's width (tangential) and 4.0% across quartersawn (radial) — that ratio is why the two cuts behave so differently in your house.
Buying soft maple without regrets
Pound for pound this might be the best value at a real hardwood yard: cabinet-grade boards at nearly poplar prices. Flip through the stack — curly figure turns up often enough that finding some feels like winning a small raffle.
At the finishing bench
With a good dye job, soft maple passes for cherry or hard maple in finished work, and the price difference stays in your pocket. Like every maple it blotches under wiping stains, so seal first or use dye.
Sources & further reading
Prices vary with region, grade, width, and figure. Cheaper neighbor: Beech ($4.20). A step up: Ash ($4.40).