Convert lumber volume between board feet, cubic feet, cubic metres, cubic inches and cords.
Lumber • 6 units
All 6 units on the Board Foot (Lumber) Converter are defined against the Cubic meter (m³), so each result is one conversion factor away from a single reference rather than the end of a chain of roundings.
The conversion this page is most often opened for is ready before you type anything: 1 BF = 0.002359737 m³. Change either side and every row in the table recalculates with it.
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The board foot is the traditional unit of the North American lumber trade, equal to a piece of wood one foot square and one inch thick — 144 cubic inches. It lets sawmills and lumberyards price boards of many different dimensions on a single volume basis, and has been the industry standard for well over a century.
Woodworkers, builders and timber buyers convert board feet to and from cubic feet, cubic metres and cords when estimating material, comparing quotes, or working from metric plans. This converter handles all of those so you can budget a project or check a delivery without manual arithmetic.
Quick reference — 1 Board foot (BF) is equal to:
| Cubic foot | ft³ | 0.0833333245 |
| Cubic inch | in³ | 143.999987 |
| Cubic meter | m³ | 0.002359737 |
| Cubic yard | yd³ | 0.0030864195 |
| Cord | cord | 0.0006510417 |
6 units of board foot (lumber), each a fixed multiple of the m³. The table spans 221,184:1, from in³ (0.0000163871 m³) to cord (3.62456 m³). Conversion is one multiplication into the base unit and one division out of it, with no lookup table and no approximation.
value_to = value_from × (factor_from ÷ factor_to)1 BF = 0.00235974 m³1 ft³ = 0.0283168 m³1 in³ = 0.0000163871 m³1 m³ = 1 m³1 yd³ = 0.764555 m³1 cord = 3.62456 m³where:
Assumptions: Factors are exact definitions. Full double precision is carried internally and rounding is applied only for display.
Result25 BF = 0.0589934 m³
A board foot is 144 cubic inches — a foot square and an inch thick — and it exists because lumber is sold in an enormous variety of cross-sections that would otherwise be impossible to price against one another. Its convenience is that the arithmetic collapses for common sizes: nominal two-by-six stock yields exactly one board foot per lineal foot, so a tally can be run down a stack without a calculator.
The trap is that board feet are calculated from nominal dimensions, not from the wood you receive. A two-by-four leaves the mill planed to roughly one and a half by three and a half inches, so the piece contains about 55% of the volume its name implies, yet it is bought and sold as though it were the full size. That is not an error in the conversion; it is a trade convention, and comparing a board-foot price against a cubic-metre price without accounting for it overstates what is actually being delivered.
Firewood keeps its own unit for the same historical reasons. A cord is a stacked volume of 128 cubic feet — conventionally four feet by four feet by eight — which is about 3.62 cubic metres of stack rather than of wood, since the air between the pieces is included. A cord and a board foot therefore measure two genuinely different things, and the conversion between them assumes a solid volume the stack does not contain.