Wood Movement By Species Quick Reference

Two boards the same width, cut from different trees, do not move the same amount as humidity swings — and the gap between the most stable and least stable common furniture species is large enough to be the difference between a panel that survives a winter and one that splits.

The number that actually predicts movement

Every species has a published tangential shrinkage percentage (the green-to-oven-dry shrinkage measured across the growth rings, the cut that shows the most movement) and a radial figure (measured through the rings, always smaller). A board's real-world movement scales directly off whichever of those two numbers applies to how it was sawn — flatsawn boards move at close to their tangential rate, quartersawn boards move at closer to their radial rate — multiplied by the width and by how far the moisture content actually swings.

Where common species land, widest to narrowest movers

Comparing tangential shrinkage at a fixed 12"-wide panel across a typical 6%-to-12%-moisture-content seasonal swing (a reasonable stand-in for a dry heated winter shop versus a humid summer):

Species	12" panel movement
White oak (flatsawn)	0.252"
Hard maple	0.238"
Red oak	0.206"
Yellow poplar	0.197"
Black walnut	0.187"
Sapele	0.178"
Black cherry	0.170"
Teak	0.139"
Honduran mahogany	0.098"

White oak moves the most of this set at a given width, and Honduran mahogany the least — roughly two and a half times less movement for the identical width and humidity swing. That gap is not a rounding difference; it's the reason a wide, single-species case piece built in mahogany tolerates a smaller wood-movement allowance than the same design built in white oak, and why a hard-maple butcher block (a genuinely dense, hard wood) still needs the same generous movement allowance as a much softer species, because hardness and dimensional stability are unrelated properties.

Grain orientation moves the number more than most people expect

Cutting the same white oak board quartersawn instead of flatsawn — orienting the growth rings roughly perpendicular to the wide face instead of parallel to it — swaps the board onto its radial shrinkage axis instead of its tangential one, and at the same 12" width and humidity swing, that drops the movement from 0.252" to 0.134", nearly half. This is the real, physical reason quartersawn stock is specified for wide panels and tabletops in movement-prone species: it is not a cosmetic preference, even though the ray-fleck figure quartersawing exposes is a genuine bonus.

Using this table honestly

These figures assume a specific 6%-to-12% moisture swing and a specific starting width — real movement scales linearly with both, so a 24"-wide panel moves twice as much as the 12" figures above, and a smaller or larger humidity swing than the one assumed here scales the number proportionally in either direction. Species not listed here can still be reasoned about the same way: look up its tangential and radial shrinkage percentage and run it through the wood movement calculator rather than assuming it behaves like a listed relative — shrinkage percentage does not track density, hardness, or price in any consistent way, so a wood's reputation for toughness says nothing reliable about how much it moves.

What to do with the number once you have it

A movement allowance — the gap a frame-and-panel or breadboard-end joint leaves for the panel to expand and contract without splitting the frame or tearing itself apart — should be sized off the actual species and actual width in the actual piece, not a rule-of-thumb fraction applied regardless of species. The individual species and use-case answer pages linked from this site's answers index compute that allowance for specific common cases; this page is the reference for comparing species against each other before picking one for a movement-sensitive design.