Import duties and lumber price volatility are not pricing consumers out of the market, with the price of lumber making up a tiny contribution to the rising cost of housing. That is according to Andrew Miller, Chair of the US Lumber Coalition, who slammed CNBC for its “disappointingly one-sided reporting” in the coverage Why the U.S. Might Increase Duties On Canadian Lumber Again.
In a media statement provided by the Coalition—an alliance of large and small softwood lumber producers from across the country—Miller said the group fully “supports President Trump’s plan to further increase the supply of Made in the USA softwood lumber to build US homes.”
“Lumber accounts for a very small share of the sales price of a newly constructed home, typically 1-2%,” Miller said. “Lumber prices are low by historical standards and have not kept pace with inflation.”
Rising lumber capacity is enough to build 2 million more homes.
Miller said the idea that import duties on a fraction of the cost of a new home are keeping buyers out of the market is nonsensical: “The focus should be on the devastating Canadian unfair trade practices that are continuing to harm the stability of the U.S. softwood lumber supply.”
“The enforcement of the U.S. trade laws against Canada’s unfair trade practices has been an incredible success, adding 8.7 billion board feet of U.S. lumber capacity and the production of over 30 billion board feet of lumber cumulatively since 2016 – enough to build two million U.S. homes.”
According to Scott Dane, executive director of the American Loggers, loggers have for decades watched railcar after railcar transit Canadian lumber through Minnesota, only to return empty: “The US can produce more lumber domestically, and loggers are prepared to provide the additional timber to make that lumber, while at the same time improving the health of US forests,” Dane said.
And the US industry still has room for further growth…
The Coalition argues that US capacity growth has exceeded US consumption growth in seven of the last nine years. As a result, they say, there is ample demand for softwood lumber. “In the US South, harvestable forest growth exceeds harvest volumes by 40%. Access to harvestable timberlands is not a binding constraint on US lumber capacity as a whole. The U.S. Forest Service confirms that across the United States, average annual net growth continues to exceed removals,” it said in the statement.
And whilst lumber is a small share of a house’s cost, it has made an even smaller contribution to the increase in house prices in recent years—from 2015 to 2024, it said, the average sales price of a new home increased by $157,214, while the cost of lumber in a typical home increased by $901 per house. Thus, the increase in lumber prices was the equivalent of 0.57% of the rise in US home prices over the past decade.
By contrast, since 2019, the net income margin of the five largest homebuilder companies has expanded profit margins by 49%. An index of stock prices for the 16 largest publicly traded companies more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. While homebuilder stock prices have declined to some extent in the spring of 2025, they remain at elevated levels.
“Commodities other than lumber have seen much larger price increases, including building materials such as iron & steel and cement & concrete,” stated Zoltan van Heyningen, Executive Director of the US Lumber Coalition. “One must look elsewhere for a solution to new home prices — land, labor, regulatory restrictions, and the free market reality of homebuilding demand have boosted many homebuilding input prices. Simply put, it is not credible to blame softwood lumber for increases in US house prices,” van Heyningen said.
Trump needs to ramp up logging to meet US needs: Fastmarkets
The response comes after Wood Central last week reported that Donald Trump would find it “incredibly challenging for the US federal timber harvest to offset Canadian wood products in the coming years” without significant capacity, workforce and CapEx expansion. That is according to Austin Lamica from Fastmarkets, who argued the US would need to increase federal timber harvests by 450% to meet the shortfall in Canadian plywood, OSB, and softwood lumber, which make up vast volumes of timber used in single—and multi-family housing.
“Theoretically, the US federal lands have ample timber supplies to offset the volume of softwood lumber imported from Canada,” he said. But, “increasing federal timber harvests by (at least) 450% may be a challenge as many headwinds, aside from those related to lumber production capacity, may limit the government’s ability to ramp up timber production.”
- To read more about the impact of building materials on the cost of a new home, click here for Wood Central’s special feature from last month.
