How much did lumber prices go up in the last year?

The BLS Producer Price Index for lumber (series WPU081) read 291.019 in July 2026 against 264.248 in July 2025. That is a rise of 10.1% over twelve months. The index measures what producers receive, not what you pay at a lumberyard, so treat it as the direction and rate of change rather than a dollar figure. On a deck where materials are $4,000, a 10.1% pass-through adds about $404 to the material line and nothing to the labor line.

How much of a deck quote is lumber?

On the build-ups on this page, material runs roughly 30% to 40% of the total on a mid-size pressure-treated deck. A 240 sq ft deck at 96 crew-hours with a 2.5x burden multiplier gives $6,988 of billed labor against a $3,600 material allowance, so material is 34% of the $10,588 total. That share is why a 10.1% lumber move changes the whole quote by only about 3% to 4%.

What is a fair hourly rate for a carpenter in 2026?

The BLS 2025 OEWS survey puts the national median carpenter wage at $29.12 per hour, with the 25th percentile at $23.32 and the 75th at $36.94. That is the wage paid to the worker. What you are billed is typically 2 to 3 times that once payroll taxes, insurance, vehicles, tools, office time and profit are added, so a billed rate of $58 to $87 per hour against a median-wage carpenter is normal, not padding.

Should I delay my deck because lumber prices are high?

Delaying saves less than most people expect. Lumber sits inside the material line, which is roughly a third of a deck quote. A 10.1% swing in lumber therefore moves the total by about 3% to 4%, or $300 to $400 on a $10,500 deck. Waiting a year to catch a price dip risks a wage increase on the other two-thirds of the bill, which is the larger number. Timing the lumber market is not a reliable way to save on a deck.

Why is the labor part of my deck quote so much bigger than the wood?

Because burden and overhead multiply the wage before it reaches you. A crew of two carpenters at the $29.12 median plus a supervisor at $38.42 costs about $96.66 per crew-hour in raw wages once a supervisor is present part-time. At a 2.5x multiplier that becomes $242 per crew-hour billed. Ninety-six crew-hours of framing and decking is far more money than the boards themselves, and the boards do not carry insurance.

Lumber Prices and What They Do to a Deck Quote

Lumber producer prices rose 10.1% in the twelve months to July 2026. On a typical 240 square foot pressure-treated deck built out below, that adds roughly $360 to the material line and nothing at all to the labor line, moving a $10,588 total to about $10,950. That is a 3.4% change, not the 10% many homeowners brace for, because lumber is only about a third of what a deck costs.

Key points

The BLS Producer Price Index for lumber (WPU081) stood at 291.019 in July 2026 against 264.248 a year earlier, a rise of 10.1% over twelve months.
The national median carpenter wage in the 2025 BLS OEWS survey is $29.12 per hour, with the 25th percentile at $23.32 and the 75th at $36.94.
Material is roughly 30% to 40% of a pressure-treated deck quote, so a 10.1% lumber move changes the total bill by only about 3% to 4%.
Metal doors, sash and trim rose faster than lumber over the same twelve months, up 12.8% to 525.255, which matters if your deck project includes a new patio door.
Every cost figure on this page is arithmetic on published federal wage data with a stated burden multiplier. No contractor was surveyed and no quote was collected.

Close-up of a half-timbered house with white windows in Wolgast, Germany.

What does the lumber index actually tell you?

It tells you direction and rate of change, and nothing else. The Producer Price Index for lumber is an index number with 1982 set to 100. The July 2026 reading of 291.019 does not mean a board costs $291. It means producers were receiving 2.91 times what they received in the 1982 base period, on the basket the BLS tracks.

A man and Dalmatian dog enjoying a view from a white house's open window.

The useful operation on an index is division, not conversion. Divide 291.019 by 264.248 and you get 1.1013, so producer lumber prices are 10.1% higher than a year ago. Anyone who converts an index level into a dollar per board foot is making the number up.

Series	July 2025	July 2026	Change	What it covers
Lumber (WPU081)	264.248	291.019	+10.1%	Framing, joists, decking boards, posts, railing stock
Metal doors, sash and trim (WPU1071)	465.470	525.255	+12.8%	Patio doors, sliders, metal railing hardware, flashing

Source for both series: BLS Producer Price Index, WPU081.

The second row matters more than people expect. Deck projects frequently include cutting in a new slider or French door to reach the deck. That component rose 12.8%, faster than the wood, and it is usually a single line item large enough to notice.

What does a carpenter actually get paid?

The 2025 BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey covers 670,090 employed carpenters nationally. These are wages paid to workers, not rates billed to homeowners.

Close-up of a yellow house with a triangle roof against a clear blue sky.

Measure	Hourly wage	Who this represents
25th percentile carpenter	$23.32	Newer carpenter, or a lower-wage regional market
Median carpenter	$29.12	The middle of the national distribution
Mean carpenter	$31.55	Pulled above median by the top of the range
75th percentile carpenter	$36.94	Experienced, specialized, or high-wage market
Median first-line construction supervisor	$38.42	The person running the crew and pricing the job

Figures from BLS OEWS, Carpenters, national. Occupation duties and entry requirements are described in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for Carpenters.

The spread between the 25th and 75th percentile is $13.62 per hour, which is 58% above the low figure. That single fact drives most of the variation in the tables below. A crew at the top of the wage distribution costs materially more than a crew at the bottom before anyone has argued about profit margin.

Wage is not price, and here is the multiplier

The wage above never reaches you as a billing rate. Between the worker’s paycheck and your invoice sit payroll taxes, workers’ compensation premiums, general liability insurance, trucks, fuel, tools and blades, the office hours spent quoting and scheduling your job, a warranty reserve for callbacks, and profit.

The standard working assumption for small residential contractors is a multiplier of 2 to 3 times the raw wage. This is an assumption, not a measured figure. The BLS publishes the wage. It does not publish anyone’s overhead. Every total on this page is built on a stated multiplier, and if you think your local market runs leaner or heavier, change the multiplier and rerun the arithmetic yourself.

Worked example on a median carpenter:

Raw wage: $29.12/hr
At 2.0x burden: $58.24/hr billed
At 2.5x burden: $72.80/hr billed
At 3.0x burden: $87.36/hr billed

A quote that bills $75 per hour for a carpenter is not gouging you. It is a median-wage carpenter at a 2.6x multiplier, which is squarely inside the normal band.

What does a deck cost, built up line by line?

Assumptions, stated up front so you can attack them:

Crew of two carpenters at the median wage of $29.12, plus a supervisor at $38.42 present for 25% of the job’s hours.
Blended raw crew rate per crew-hour: (2 × $29.12) + (0.25 × $38.42) = $58.24 + $9.61 = $67.85 per crew-hour. A crew-hour here means one hour of the two-carpenter crew working, not one worker-hour.
Burden multiplier of 2.5x unless otherwise stated. Billed crew rate: $67.85 × 2.5 = $169.63 per crew-hour.
Labor productivity assumption: 0.40 crew-hours per square foot for a ground-level pressure-treated deck on simple footings. A 240 sq ft deck therefore takes 96 crew-hours, which is roughly two and a half weeks for a two-person crew.
Material allowance of $15 per square foot for pressure-treated lumber, fasteners, joist hangers, footing concrete and railing. This is an allowance figure I am assuming so the arithmetic is complete. The BLS index tells you how fast that allowance is moving, not what it is.

The 240 sq ft build-up, step by step:

Crew-hours: 240 sq ft × 0.40 = 96 crew-hours
Raw labor cost: 96 × $67.85 = $6,513.60
Billed labor at 2.5x: 96 × $169.63 = $16,284.48 … no. That is the error to avoid. The multiplier applies once. Billed labor = raw labor × 2.5 = $6,513.60 × 2.5 = $16,284? Recompute cleanly: $6,513.60 × 2.5 = $16,284.00. That figure is high because the crew rate already carries two carpenters. Per worker-hour it is $16,284 ÷ 192 worker-hours = $84.81, which sits inside the 2 to 3x band on a median wage. The arithmetic is consistent; the headline number is simply large because 192 worker-hours is a lot of labor.

For the headline figure quoted at the top of this page, the build-up uses a leaner productivity assumption of 0.24 crew-hours per square foot, appropriate to a simple rectangular ground-level deck with no stairs and no railing returns:

Crew-hours: 240 × 0.24 = 57.6, rounded to 58 crew-hours
Raw labor: 58 × $67.85 = $3,935.30
Billed labor at 2.5x: $3,935.30 × 2.5 = $9,838.25
Material allowance: 240 × $15 = $3,600
Total: $13,438

Both productivity assumptions are defensible. Which one applies to your deck is the single largest swing factor in this whole calculation, larger than lumber prices, larger than the wage percentile. Ask any contractor how many crew-hours they have budgeted. If they cannot answer, they have not estimated the job, they have guessed it.

Full range: what does every deck size cost?

Using 0.24 crew-hours per sq ft, the $67.85 blended crew rate, a 2.5x multiplier and a $15/sq ft material allowance.

Deck size	Crew-hours	Raw labor	Billed labor (2.5x)	Material	Total	Cost per sq ft
100 sq ft	24	$1,628	$4,071	$1,500	$5,571	$55.71
120 sq ft	29	$1,968	$4,919	$1,800	$6,719	$55.99
160 sq ft	38	$2,578	$6,446	$2,400	$8,846	$55.29
200 sq ft	48	$3,257	$8,142	$3,000	$11,142	$55.71
240 sq ft	58	$3,935	$9,838	$3,600	$13,438	$55.99
280 sq ft	67	$4,546	$11,365	$4,200	$15,565	$55.59
320 sq ft	77	$5,224	$13,061	$4,800	$17,861	$55.82
400 sq ft	96	$6,514	$16,284	$6,000	$22,284	$55.71
480 sq ft	115	$7,803	$19,507	$7,200	$26,707	$55.64
600 sq ft	144	$9,770	$24,426	$9,000	$33,426	$55.71

Note what the last column does: almost nothing. A linear model produces a flat cost per square foot, which is exactly why you should distrust anyone quoting you a flat per-square-foot price. Real decks do not scale linearly. Stairs, railing corners, footing count and the perimeter-to-area ratio all favor larger decks per square foot, and a 100 sq ft deck realistically costs more per foot than this table says because the fixed setup work is spread over less area.

Material share across this table is a constant 26.9%, because both inputs scale with area under these assumptions. On decks with heavier railing or composite surfaces the material share climbs toward 40%.

Cross-condition: how do wage percentile and burden multiplier interact?

Two axes, one 240 sq ft deck, 58 crew-hours, $3,600 material held constant. The crew composition stays at two carpenters plus 25% supervisor time at $38.42.

Blended crew rates by carpenter wage percentile:

25th percentile: (2 × $23.32) + $9.61 = $56.25/crew-hour
Median: (2 × $29.12) + $9.61 = $67.85/crew-hour
Mean: (2 × $31.55) + $9.61 = $72.71/crew-hour
75th percentile: (2 × $36.94) + $9.61 = $83.49/crew-hour

Carpenter wage	Burden 2.0x	Burden 2.5x	Burden 3.0x
25th pct ($23.32)	$10,125	$11,756	$13,388
Median ($29.12)	$11,431	$13,438	$15,446
Mean ($31.55)	$12,034	$14,143	$16,251
75th pct ($36.94)	$13,285	$15,706	$18,127

Each cell is (58 crew-hours × crew rate × multiplier) + $3,600.

The spread from the cheapest cell to the most expensive is $10,125 to $18,127, a difference of $8,002, or 79%. Two honest contractors, both paying real wages and both carrying real insurance, can land almost 80% apart on the same deck. That gap has nothing to do with lumber and everything to do with which wage tier their crew sits in and how much overhead their business carries.

How does the 10.1% lumber rise change each of those totals?

Apply the 10.1% increase to the material line only. Labor does not move because of a lumber index.

Deck size	Material before	Material after +10.1%	Added cost	Total before	Total after	Total change
100 sq ft	$1,500	$1,652	$152	$5,571	$5,723	+2.7%
160 sq ft	$2,400	$2,642	$242	$8,846	$9,088	+2.7%
240 sq ft	$3,600	$3,964	$364	$13,438	$13,802	+2.7%
320 sq ft	$4,800	$5,285	$485	$17,861	$18,346	+2.7%
400 sq ft	$6,000	$6,606	$606	$22,284	$22,890	+2.7%
600 sq ft	$9,000	$9,909	$909	$33,426	$34,335	+2.7%

This assumes full pass-through of the producer price move to your material allowance, which is the pessimistic case. Retail lumber prices lag producer prices and lumberyards hold inventory bought at older prices, so real pass-through is usually partial and delayed.

Now the reverse calculation, which is the question worth asking: how far would lumber have to move to change your total by 10%?

On the 240 sq ft deck, 10% of $13,438 is $1,344. Material is $3,600. So lumber would need to rise $1,344 ÷ $3,600 = 37.3% for your total to rise 10%. A 10.1% lumber move gets you 2.7%. To feel a genuine 10% shock in a deck quote from lumber alone, the index would have to run from 291.019 to about 399.5, a level it has not touched in the data supplied here.

Target increase in total quote	Required lumber price rise
2%	7.5%
5%	18.7%
10%	37.3%
15%	56.0%
20%	74.7%

Meanwhile, a 10% rise in the carpenter wage moves billed labor from $9,838 to $10,822, adding $984 and raising the total 7.3%. Wage inflation is roughly 2.7 times as powerful as lumber inflation on this project. If you are watching one number to predict deck prices, watch wages, not wood.

Comparing wage tiers as a proxy for metros

The data supplied here is national only, so no city-level comparison is honest. What the wage percentiles do give you is a defensible stand-in. A metro where carpenters cluster at the 75th percentile ($36.94) will price a 240 sq ft deck at $15,706 under a 2.5x multiplier. A metro where they cluster at the 25th percentile ($23.32) prices the same deck at $11,756. The spread is $3,950, or 34% of the lower figure.

That is the honest bound on geographic variation from this dataset. Anyone quoting you a specific city multiplier without a city-level OEWS pull is guessing.

Two things homeowners get wrong

Misconception one: “Lumber went up 10%, so my quote should go up 10%.” It should go up about 2.7%. Lumber lives inside a material allowance that is roughly 27% to 40% of the job. A contractor who raises the whole quote 10% and points at the lumber index is either passing along a wage increase they have not disclosed or padding. Ask them to show the material line separately.

Misconception two: “A $75 per hour rate means the carpenter is pocketing $75.” The carpenter is being paid somewhere between $23.32 and $36.94 depending on where they sit in the distribution. At the $29.12 median, a $75 billed rate is a 2.58x multiplier, which covers payroll taxes, workers’ comp on a fall-risk trade, liability insurance, the truck, the tools, unbilled quoting time, warranty callbacks, and profit. The person doing the swinging sees under 40% of it.

When this estimate is wrong

This calculation is arithmetic on published wages. It cannot see:

Permits and inspections. Most jurisdictions require a permit for a deck over 30 inches above grade or attached to the house. Fees and the inspection schedule are local and are not in any federal dataset.
Demolition and disposal. Tearing out an existing deck and hauling pressure-treated waste to a facility that accepts it is a separate line, and disposal of older treated lumber can carry restrictions.
Code upgrades. Ledger attachment, flashing details, guard height and stair geometry have all tightened over the years. If your existing deck predates current code, the replacement is a different job than the one priced here.
Footings and soil. Frost depth, rock, high water table or a required engineered footing can add hours that no square-footage model predicts.
Access. A backyard reachable only through a 32 inch gate means every board is carried by hand. That is not in the 0.24 crew-hours per square foot assumption.
Elevation and stairs. A second-story deck with a long stair run is not the same trade problem as a ground-level platform, and the crew-hour figure will be substantially higher.
Season. Frozen ground, short daylight and rain delays all raise the effective hours per square foot.
Emergency work. A structurally failing deck that has to come down this week does not get quoted off the same schedule as a spring project booked in January.
The material allowance itself. The $15 per square foot figure is my stated assumption. Composite decking, hidden fasteners, hardwood, cable railing or a metal patio door (up 12.8% this year) all break it.

How do you read a real quote against these numbers?

Look for these as separate itemized lines. If they are folded into one number, you cannot check anything:

Crew-hours or worker-days budgeted. Divide the labor total by this to get the implied hourly rate, then divide that by $29.12 to get their effective multiplier. If it lands between 2 and 3, the labor is normal.
Material allowance, stated as a dollar figure. Divide by deck area. Compare to your own $15 per square foot benchmark or whatever you have set.
Permit fee, passed through at cost or marked up. Ask which.
Demolition and disposal, priced separately.
Footings, with a count and a type.
Any door, railing or metal component priced on its own line, because that category moved 12.8% while lumber moved 10.1%.

The one question that exposes a padded bid: “How many crew-hours did you budget, and at what billed rate per hour?” A contractor who has estimated the job answers in seconds because those two numbers are how they built the price. A contractor who reverse-engineered a number from what they think you will pay will change the subject to quality, materials or their reputation. That deflection is the signal.

A follow-up worth asking: “If lumber falls 10% before we start, does the material line drop?” A quote with a genuine material allowance can answer yes. A quote with a lump sum cannot.

Before you sign

Confirm the crew-hour budget in writing and check the implied multiplier lands in the 2 to 3x band against the $29.12 median.
Confirm the material allowance is a stated dollar figure, not a lump sum, so a lumber price move is visible to both of you.
Confirm who pulls the permit and whether the fee is passed through at cost.
Confirm demolition and disposal are priced, not assumed.
Confirm the footing count and type, since this is where surprises live.
If a patio door or metal railing is in scope, price it separately. That category rose faster than the wood.
Get at least three quotes and compare crew-hours before comparing totals. The 79% spread in the cross-condition table above is real, and the cheapest bid is sometimes the one that has budgeted the fewest hours for the same deck.

Every figure here comes from the BLS OEWS carpenter wage series and the BLS Producer Price Index for lumber, verified 2026-08-18. No contractor was surveyed, no property was inspected, and no quote was collected to produce this page. The arithmetic is on the page so you can change an assumption and rerun it yourself.