Historical Lumber Price Chart: Every Major Spike and Crash Since 1972

Lumber futures have traded between roughly $100 and $1,700 per thousand board feet (MBF) over the past five decades. That range tells you almost everything about the commodity: it is tightly coupled to housing demand, slow to respond to supply shocks, and capable of extreme moves in both directions. This article walks through the full price record, explains why each major move happened, and draws out the patterns builders should know before pricing their next job.

The Data Sources Behind the Chart

The most widely used price series for framing lumber is the Random Lengths Framing Lumber Composite Price (FLCP), published weekly by Fastmarkets Random Lengths. It tracks actual cash transactions for dimension lumber at mills and distribution points across North America. The price data for softwood lumber used for framing is generally quoted using the Random Lengths Framing Lumber Composite Price or lumber futures price, neither of which adjusts for inflation.

For a longer historical view, the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database carries the Producer Price Index for Lumber (WPU081), which covers the commodity from January 1926 through March 2026. CME Group lumber futures, which trade in units of 110,000 board feet of random-length 2x4s, offer interactive daily price data back to 1972. All three series tell the same broad story; the FLCP is the most relevant for a builder because it reflects the cash market, not a financial instrument.

1972–1999: The Pre-Pandemic Baseline

From the early 1970s through the late 1990s, framing lumber prices were broadly range-bound in nominal terms, with a long drift upward that tracked general inflation. The big drivers were straightforward: interest rates and housing starts. When the Fed raised rates sharply in the early 1980s to break inflation, new home construction collapsed and lumber prices dropped with it. When rates fell and the post-recession building boom resumed in the mid-1990s, prices recovered.

The 1996 spike is worth noting. index=“19-18”>Even after adjusting for inflation, the average price of framing lumber in 2021 was 17% above its 25-year average and broke the prior record set in 1996. That prior 1996 record stood for nearly 25 years, which illustrates how unusual the post-2020 environment was. Through most of the 1990s, lumber traded in a range the industry considered normal. Lumber floated between $350 to $550 in the years leading up to the pandemic.

For builders working in this era, pricing was relatively predictable. Supply from Canadian mills was abundant, tariff disputes were occasional but contained, and the U.S. housing market absorbed production increases without dramatic price moves.

2000–2019: Two Crashes and a Long Flat

The 2000s brought two distinct demand shocks. The first was the housing boom of 2003–2006, which pushed starts to their highest levels in decades and put upward pressure on framing lumber. The second, more severe shock was the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out demand almost overnight. Housing starts, which had peaked above 2 million units annually, collapsed to under 600,000 by 2009. Lumber prices followed. A 4% to 5% decline in lumber consumption would be the largest decline in a single year since 2009, a year that saw an 8 billion board feet decline.

The recovery from 2009 to 2019 was slow and uneven. Builders came back gradually, and mills, burned by excess inventory during the crash, were cautious about adding capacity. The lumber and home construction industries’ misread of the economic impact, as well as a ten-year period of under-building of new homes since the 2008 financial crisis, set the stage for undersupply as demand surged. That ten-year under-build proved critical later, because it meant there was no cushion when pandemic-driven demand hit.

The 2018 mini-spike is also useful context.Lumber prices fell by around 50 percent between June and September 2018,a reminder that volatility wasn’t invented in 2020. Trade disputes with Canada over softwood duties contributed to an early-2018 run-up, followed by a sharp correction when demand softened. The pattern, demand surge plus tariff uncertainty equals overcorrection, repeated itself a few years later on a much larger scale.

2020–2021: The Record Spike

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a price spike with no historical precedent. The mechanism was a simultaneous supply cut and demand surge, which is the worst possible combination for a buyer.

On the supply side, mills read the early lockdowns as a standard recession signal. Seeing the temporary economic decline due to the lockdowns, lumber producers took a page out of their recession playbook, cut back production and took downtime. By April 2020, U.S. wood production was down 15% from 2019 levels.

On the demand side, the opposite happened. According to the National Association of Home Builders, single-family home construction jumped 12% last year, and remodeling activity climbed 7%. Meanwhile, domestic sawmill output rose just 3.3%. Low interest rates amplified the housing boom: the average mortgage rate in 2000 was around 8 percent while the rate during the beginning of COVID-19 was below 3 percent, making homebuying accessible to buyers who would otherwise have stayed on the sidelines.

The result: the Covid-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented increase in the U.S. price of softwood lumber by more than 300%.Lumber prices soared from $349 per thousand board feet in April 2020 to $1,514 in May 2021, according to the trade journal Fastmarkets Random Lengths. Lumber futures briefly touched even higher. The futures price in March 2020 was $303.40 per thousand board feet. That cost more than quintupled over the following 14 months, reaching a high of $1,607.50 in May 2021.

The impact on job costs was direct. In April 2021, the National Association of Homebuilders estimated that the rise in lumber prices had added over $36,000 to the cost of a new single-family home. Although the historical price differences are smaller in real terms than nominal, the inflation-adjusted lumber prices set records in both 2020 and 2021. The average real price of lumber exceeded the prior record by 4.3% in 2020 and 2.4% in 2021. Over that 24-month span, real prices were 37% above the historical average.

The crash was equally fast. Buyers simply stopped buying at $1,500+ prices. After peaking in late May at $1,515 per thousand board feet, the wholesale market price of lumber fell for 13 consecutive weeks. By August 27, the price sat at $389, down 74% from its peak. That put the price firmly back in its pre-COVID range of $350 to $500.

2022–2026: The Long Normalization

The 2022 to 2026 period has been a slow, bumpy return toward equilibrium, with tariffs and mill closures preventing a clean reset.

In 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising rates aggressively to combat inflation. One of the key features of the market was residential construction correcting hard in response to the historic rise in interest rates from 2022 into 2023. Higher mortgage rates crushed affordability for many prospective homebuyers and made construction financing extremely challenging for small builders and multifamily developers alike. After nosediving to $383 per thousand board feet by the end of 2022, the lumber futures price rebounded somewhat.

By 2023, the correction story had shifted from supply to demand. Demand for lumber remained comparatively subdued in 2023. Lumber pricing and availability became less about a lumber supply shortage and more about waning demand.The Random Lengths Framing Lumber Composite Price averaged $411 per MBF for 2023.

In 2024 and into 2025, framing lumber prices climbed back from their 2023 lows, but not to crisis levels. The price of framing lumber was $903.14/MBF in October 2025, down 3.52% since the prior quarter. Year-over-year lumber costs were up 12.71%. Supply-side pressure from mill closures offset weak demand: even as lumber demand softened in 2024, mill curtailments and permanent closures in the U.S. and Canada, resulting from softer prices, helped restrict supply and keep prices up. Over 5 billion board feet of North American mill capacity has shuttered since 2023 due to low prices and high costs, reducing output by roughly 7%.

As of late April 2026, lumber sits at approximately $582.50 per thousand board feet, well off the 2021 record but still elevated compared to pre-pandemic norms. Tariff uncertainty remains a wildcard: ongoing sawmill closures have removed 1.3 billion board feet of capacity and U.S. duties on Canadian imports remain at 45%, which puts a floor under prices even when demand is soft. Analysts expect lumber prices to experience a rash of volatility as a result of tariffs on Canadian imports.

What the Long Record Tells a Builder

Fifty years of price history compress into a few durable rules. Lumber tracks housing starts more closely than any other single variable. Supply responds slowly, which means demand-side shocks cause disproportionate price moves. Tariffs on Canadian softwood create a persistent cost premium that doesn’t go away when demand falls. And every era that felt like a new normal eventually reverted: the $400–$550 range that looked permanent before 2020 broke in both directions within 18 months.

The number that matters most for job pricing today is not the current spot price but the spread between current prices and your local supplier’s lead times. When mills are curtailing and lead times are stretching, prices are about to move. That combination, not the headline futures number, is the signal worth watching.