It shows the volume and value of forest products sold and harvested from national forests and grasslands, each fiscal quarter, cumulative through the year. It breaks them down by region and national forest, by species and product, and by sale value. It covers products measured in volume and others, such as Christmas trees, mushrooms and boughs. It is useful as a supply signal. Since fiscal 2019 its own notes have warned against using it for unit prices.
What the usual answer says
The agency's own page, which leads the results, explains the basics well: sold and cut are different events and won't match in any period, and a separate report is the official record of volume sold. What the landing page doesn't carry is the warning printed in the reports themselves, or what that means for anyone using older analyses.
What the report says about itself
The agency's page on the reports says they "show total volumes and values of all convertible forest products sold and harvested" from national forest system lands. The fiscal year begins on 1 October, and reports "are generally available near the end of the month following the end of each fiscal quarter". The reports "represent two distinct events", and sold volume and value "should not be expected to match those of forest products cut during any time period". Timber sold may be cut over years, and "adjustments to timber sales made during harvest will be reflected in the cut data, but not the sold data". Sold volume here is "less precise" than another report. The agency "relies on PTSAR as the official report of timber volume sold".
The service-wide report for fiscal 2026 through the third quarter, run on 4 August 2026, adds notes of its own. "As of 3rd quarter FY19", volumes for one class of partnership sales are included but their values are not. So "total value and value/volume do not reflect true values. Do not use this report to determine unit values." From fiscal 2023, free-use fuelwood permits are "included in Sold data; not included in Cut data".
Unit values before and after 2019
Before the warning, dividing value by volume was standard. Headwaters Economics built a public dataset for fiscal 1980 to 2018 in which "Average sold price and average cut price" come from total volume and value. Those figures are a different case from anything computed from fiscal 2019 onwards, when missing values make the quotient wrong. For current prices, the agency's page links "to Regional Websites with timber sale data, where it is available".
Reading the sold and cut lines
Within a year, cumulative cut includes harvest from contracts sold in earlier years. So the in-year difference between sold and cut isn't the volume under contract. At most it indicates whether that volume is growing or shrinking. Even then, the notes push the two apart by definition: fuelwood permits count in sold only, and harvest adjustments count in cut only. The stock of timber under contract isn't in this report. Read the two lines across several years, per region, with the notes beside them.
Sale sizes
The sale-value classes show how federal timber is sold. Of 65,181 sales and permits in the first three quarters of fiscal 2026, 55,590 were under $300 and 9,080 were non-convertible. Only 193 were above $100,000: 185 between $100,001 and $1,000,000, and 8 between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000. A handful of sales carry the volume a mill cares about, which is why individual sale advertisements and bid results in its own area tell a mill more than quarterly totals.
Reading it as data
The reports come as web tables, PDFs and spreadsheets for each region and service-wide. Each release changes the year's cumulative figures, and sometimes the notes. Reading them into records by quarter, region, species and size class, with the notes attached, gives a series that can be compared over time without re-reading every PDF. AI helps with that extraction, and with flagging when a note changes the basis of a figure.
When it doesn't apply
Businesses that buy no federal timber and compete with no one who does gain little from it. And for official sold volume, the agency points to its separate periodic accomplishment report.
Quarri for forest management is built around how a forest operation runs, from the cruise to the settled account.
Sources
- US Forest Service, "Cut and Sold from the National Forests and Grasslands": fs.usda.gov
- Headwaters Economics, "National Forest Timber Sales and Timber Cuts, FY 1980-2018: Methods and Data Sources", Winter 2019 (dated in the text): headwaterseconomics.org
- US Forest Service, "FY Cumulative Cut and Sold (CUTS203)", service-wide, FY2026 Q1 to Q3, run 4 August 2026: fs.usda.gov
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