Yellow Birch price per board foot
Plan on about $4.50 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 $18.00.
That pale, calm, glowing furniture the Scandinavians conquered mid-century design with? A lot of it is birch. Canada's great cabinet hardwood has a war-hero cousin too: the de Havilland Mosquito, one of the fastest aircraft of WWII, was substantially built of birch plywood — a 400-mph bomber made of the same stuff as your IKEA shelf's noble ancestor. Birch has always been the strong, quiet one in the room.
Hard, closed-grained, and affordable; a maple stand-in. Blotch-prone under stain; excellent for painted work and plywood matching.
Yellow Birch at a glance
| Price per board foot | $4.50 (2026-08) |
| Weight, dry | 43 lb/ft³ · 3.6 lb per BF |
| Janka hardness | 1,260 lbf |
| Shrinkage, green → oven-dry | 9.5% tangential · 7.3% radial |
| Cost of 10 BF | $45.00 |
| Cost of 25 BF | $112.50 |
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 | $18.00 | 14 lb |
| 6/4 | 6.0 | $27.00 | 22 lb |
| 8/4 | 8.0 | $36.00 | 29 lb |
| 12/4 | 12.0 | $54.00 | 43 lb |
Will it stay flat?
Treat it like hard maple's cousin, because it is one: dense, a little slow to settle into a new shop, and worth the extra week of acclimating before you mill to final size.
The measured numbers: drying from green, yellow birch shrinks about 9.5% across a flatsawn board's width (tangential) and 7.3% across quartersawn (radial) — that ratio is why the two cuts behave so differently in your house.
Buying yellow birch without regrets
Regularly cheaper than hard maple while looking nearly identical once finished — that arbitrage is the whole reason to know this wood. And 'red birch' at the yard isn't another tree; it's just the reddish heartwood of this one, sorted and marketed separately.
At the finishing bench
The blotchiest common hardwood in America — pigment stain turns it into a leopard. Gel stain or dye only. Finished clear, it's a dead ringer for maple's Scandinavian glow at a Canadian price.
Sources & further reading
Prices vary with region, grade, width, and figure. Cheaper neighbor: Ash ($4.40). A step up: Alder ($4.60).