What does it cost to mill a log ?

What Does It Cost to Mill a Log?

By Mark Dias, Good Wood Hunting LLC — Arvada, Colorado

Short answer: it depends mostly on what you want the log cut into. A typical one-log job runs anywhere from $200 or $300 on the low end up to $1,200 or $1,500 — and the difference between those two numbers is usually the cut list, not the log.

Here's how I charge, what drives the price up or down, and the honest part most people don't put on a website: when I'll tell you not to do it at all.

How I Charge: Hourly or Flat Bid

Most of my milling work is hourly. You bring me your log, or I pick it up, I cut it, and you leave with your lumber — the same day, or within a couple of days at most.

That rate is $125 an hour. It was $100 an hour up until this year, but gas, oil, and keeping this equipment maintained aren't what they used to be, so the rate went up. That $125 covers one thing: cutting your log on the mill. It is not a pickup fee, a delivery fee, and a cutting fee rolled into one.

The other way I work is a flat bid on the whole project. I come get the log, bring it back to my yard, cut it, and deliver your lumber to you — one price for all of it. A flat bid usually saves you a little money, and there's a trade: it gets done on my schedule. Typical turnaround is a week or two, faster if I'm slow. That flexibility is exactly why it costs less.

One thing I don't do: I don't charge by the board foot to mill your log. (Kiln drying is a different story — we'll get to that.)

What Actually Drives the Price

If I'm hauling the log, the single biggest factor is access. What equipment has to show up, and how long is it going to take to get that log off your property? That can outweigh everything else on the invoice.

On the milling itself, size and the cut list are the two big ones. I can't push the mill through a 36-inch log at the same speed I can through a 16-inch log — diameter sets how fast we cut, how much material there is, and how heavy the thing is to handle. And the cut list matters more than people expect: a 16-inch log cut into one-inch boards will cost you more than a 30-inch log cut into three-and-a-half-inch slabs, because there are simply more cuts to make. What you're going to build decides what we cut, and what we cut decides what it costs.

After that comes species — softer woods cut faster than hard ones — and metal. Hit metal in a tree and we're talking blade charges, and a loaded tree can eat blades all day.

Condition is honestly the last thing on the list. Character in a log doesn't slow the mill down much. The exception is a hollow log something has been living in — if a family of raccoons has been dragging who-knows-what up inside your tree, that's hidden debris we keep hitting, and that's a different conversation.

What's Included, What's Extra

Included, free, every time: sealing the ends. If your log shows up unsealed, it gets sealed before it goes on the mill. That's just good business practice — it doesn't matter if the log is yours or mine, every log gets sealed, and I don't charge extra for it.

Extra: pickup and delivery. Those are priced by distance and by the equipment the log needs, and they're separate from the milling. Kiln drying is extra too, when it's charged separately — and kiln drying is the one thing I do price by the board foot, mostly off the size and species of the wood. More often, drying just gets folded into a flat bid.

Stacking and stickering is not something I offer on customer logs as a standalone service — that's part of the process when your lumber is going into my kiln, not something separate.

And the blades: if we're on an hourly job and a blade finds metal in your log, that blade charge is yours — $45 today, up from $25, because blades cost more than they used to. That's the deal, and I say it up front, same as I always have.

A Word About Itemized Bills

Some customers want every piece broken out, and I understand that. But here's the trade nobody thinks about: piece-by-piece means an invoice with four, five, seven line items, each one tracked, measured, and explained — and that breaking down and explaining takes time. We do charge for that explanation, because it is work.

A flat bid is one line item: pick up, mill, kiln dry, and deliver the slabs, with the slab sizes you asked for noted right on it. One number, no surprises, nothing to argue about line by line. Some people still don't love the big single number, and that's fine — just know the itemized version isn't free either.

The Honest Part: When It's Not Worth It

Let me be straight with you, because I'd rather lose a job than mislead somebody. On a pure cost comparison, milling your own log is almost never worth it versus buying lumber that was milled for mass production. Almost never.

This is a premium service. It's a niche. I am not competing with farm-raised trees grown for production and processed by the hundreds — that's not feasible, and anybody who tells you custom milling is a way to save money isn't being straight with you.

There's a reason people call me, though. Take a yard tree to a big commercial sawmill and they'll tell you no — they're not cutting it, they're not interested. I take those trees. I know the risks going in — the metal, the unknowns — and I charge accordingly for taking them on.

So when is it worth it? When the tree means something. If it has sentimental or personal value, then in my book every log is worth milling. You're not buying lumber cheaper than the store. You're keeping your tree. That's the whole case, and for a lot of people it's case enough.

A Real Job: The Denver Locust Trees

A homeowner in southeast Denver was rebuilding a stone house that was close to a hundred years old — major foundation settlement, cracks running from the basement all the way to the roofline. The rebuild, plus an ADU out back, meant four or five locust trees had to come down. They hadn't planted them, and the trees didn't carry deep sentimental value, but they were healthy trees and the owners were sorry to lose them.

The arborists did the removal — I had no hand in that. The homeowner had them leave the logs on the ground, and then called me.

Here's what made this job unusual: nobody knew yet what the wood was going to become. The house wasn't designed. So like a lot of these jobs, we had to guess ahead of the construction timeline. Flooring, stair treads, window casements — we talked through all of it, and then we milled the thick stock first, because thick stock takes the longest to dry.

The smaller logs, 16 to 18 inches in diameter, went into slabs four and a quarter to four and a half inches thick, destined for stair treads. We didn't know the stair layout — two stories plus a basement, so I guessed they'd land somewhere between 28 and 36 treads. We cut enough for 44 or 45. That wasn't waste; that was insurance. Some pieces twist or cup past using, some crack, some just don't match the rest in grain or color. You want spares. In the end, 34 of those treads went into the house.

All told it was three, if not four, loads of logs, hauled out to my log yard in Strasburg. The big stock air dried slow, then went into the kiln when it was ready. The trees became roughly 600 to 700 square feet of hardwood flooring, those 34 stair treads, bullnose and square trim around the stairs, window sills, and other pieces here and there. We didn't use every piece of wood that came off those trees — we used as much as we could, in the places it fit.

Because the project stretched out, I charged storage fees for part of it — and stretch out it did. That job started in 2021 and we didn't finish it until 2024, and I want to be clear: the delays were their contractor and COVID, nothing to do with me.

The total came to somewhere in the ballpark of $60,000 to $65,000. I tell you that number with a big asterisk: that was an exceptional case — pickup, milling, kiln drying, storage, and finished components for an entire house rebuild, over three years. It is not what milling a log costs. It's what it looks like when a pile of logs becomes a house.

And that's the real lesson of that job: early on, there were a lot of unknowns, a lot of "let's do this just in case." When you work that way, it costs money. The more you know about what you're building before the first cut, the less your tree costs you.

So What Will Yours Cost?

If you've got a log and you want a straight answer, call me: Mark Dias, Good Wood Hunting LLC, Arvada, Colorado — (303) 589-0053. Tell me how big it is, where it is, and what you're dreaming of making out of it, and I'll tell you honestly whether it pencils out — even if my honest answer is "buy the lumber."

If it does pencil out, your tree doesn't have to end as firewood or landfill. It can end as the stairs you walk up every day.