How Many Board Feet In A Cord Of Wood
1536 board feet
- 1 cord = 128 cubic feet (a stacked 4' x 4' x 8' rick)
Methodboard feet = cubic feet x 12 (since 1 board foot = 1/12 cubic foot).
A cord is a firewood-stacking measure of solid + air-gap volume, not a lumber grading term — this conversion is a useful sanity check, not a lumberyard convention.
A cord of wood contains 1,536 board feet — computed purely from the unit definitions (128 cubic feet in a cord, 12 board feet in a cubic foot), not from any lumberyard convention, because a cord and a board foot come from two entirely different trades.
Why this one specifically
A cord is a firewood-stacking measure — a 4' x 4' x 8' stack of split, ricked wood, including the air gaps between pieces, not a measure of solid usable lumber volume. Board feet, by contrast, assumes solid wood. Converting one to the other is a sanity-check exercise, useful for roughly comparing volumes across two different trades, not something a lumberyard or firewood dealer will ever actually invoice against.
What moves the number
This figure is a pure geometric conversion and doesn't depend on species, moisture content, or how tightly the wood is stacked — but a real cord's SOLID wood content (excluding the air gaps between split pieces) runs meaningfully below the full 128 cubic feet the stacking measure assumes, commonly estimated around 70-90 cubic feet of solid wood depending on how the pieces are split and stacked, which would put the true board-foot-equivalent of solid wood below this figure.