Madison's Lumber Reporter - Weekly North American Lumber Prices

One number, and the whole North American framing-lumber market reads against it. Madison's Lumber Reporter is a Vancouver, BC timber trade publication that has covered the continent's softwood lumber markets for decades and publishes its main report about fifty times a year. Its headline figure, the Madison's Lumber Prices Index, is a weekly composite benchmark quoted in US dollars per mfbm - thousand board feet - with the move against both the prior week and the prior month carried beside every value.

Four consecutive issues show what the instrument captures: US$554 for the week ending 24 July 2026, US$558 on 31 July, US$558 again on 7 August, then US$536 on 14 August - a market grinding sideways through late summer before a single $22 (-4%) break in one week. Inside Datadory's 17-record forest-products shelf this is the only weekly price series, and catalog-wide just 89 of 1,744 datasets move on a weekly rhythm at all. Get a sample of this dataset cut to the weeks you actually model.

One composite value per issue, with its change measures attached - flat enough to enter a model without reshaping. Four verified issues, exactly as they deliver:

# Madison's Lumber Prices Index - weekly composite, US$ per mfbm

week_ending    : 2026-08-14
index_usd_mfbm : 536
wow_change     : -$22 (-4%)
mom_change     : -$12 (-2%)

week_ending    : 2026-08-07
index_usd_mfbm : 558
wow_change     : flat          # held the prior week's level exactly
mom_change     : +$11 (+2%)

# companion issues in the same run, same five columns
week_ending : 2026-07-31   index_usd_mfbm: 558   wow_change: +$4 (+1%)   mom_change: +$13 (+2%)
week_ending : 2026-07-24   index_usd_mfbm: 554   # month-over-month measure absent on this row as published

Read the run as one sentence about a market: lumber held between US$554 and US$558 per mfbm through the second half of July 2026, then broke $22 in the single week ending 14 August. The 7 August row rewards a second look - the index closed exactly flat week over week, the kind of print that separates a genuine plateau from a rounding artefact. Request a sample and the same shape returns extended across whichever weeks you nominate.

Six documented fields define every record, verified against the arriving data during research rather than inferred from headers. Three identify the observation - the Saturday-ending week, the composite level and the unit that governs how it reads - and three carry interpretation: the week-over-week change, the month-over-month change and the publication date that stitches successive issues into one continuous dated series.

Derived reshapes depend on the cut you specify, so they fold under additional fields on request: month-over-month measures computed where an issue omits them, normalized percentage-change columns, the stitched multi-issue panel delivered as one continuous series, and unit conversions set beside the native US$-per-mfbm quoting basis. These are confirmed with your sample rather than guessed at here. Terms such as sawnwood prime the surrounding vocabulary.

Geography - one continental composite spanning United States and Canadian softwood lumber. There is no regional, provincial or mill-level split beneath it: this is the market-wide benchmark, and asset-level questions need a different instrument layered alongside.

Temporal - a weekly rhythm totalling roughly fifty issues a year. A single year therefore holds an entire framing-season arc from spring ramp through autumn drawdown, which is precisely the resolution annual statistics cannot give you. The delivered history window is scoped and confirmed with your sample rather than assumed.

Granularity - one composite index value per issue at national grain, quoted in US$ per mfbm, with dollar and percentage changes attached. No species, width or grade breakout ships with the headline number.

Set against the wider catalog - average quality score 7.81 across all 1,744 datasets we cataloged - this slice scores 6/10: fully verified field definitions, docked because the figures travel inside prose commentary rather than a keyed grid. That gap between authoritative signal and awkward packaging is precisely what Datadory decodes once so nobody repeats it per project.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the rows stay byte-identical either way - decoded from the publisher's weekly commentary into typed observations keyed on the Saturday-ending week, with the change measures kept on the row so you decide what counts as signal. Because a fresh issue lands every week, catching the release matters more than any particular cadence setting, and changing the cadence later is a settings conversation rather than a re-integration project. Start small: get a sample of this dataset scoped to the weeks you will actually use.

• Housing-linked equity and macro positioning - a weekly read on the commodity behind construction margins turns housing-cycle theses into testable factors; the workflow pattern sits on our quant backtesting page.
• Building-materials market updates - current framing-lumber pricing cited issue by issue anchors construction-cost commentary in a named benchmark; the tracking pattern is sketched on our price monitoring page.
• Attribution for journalism and research - when a piece needs 'lumber prices moved 4% this week' attributed to a specific Vancouver tracker, the citation survives review; the pattern lives on our citation-grade research page.
• Feature engineering on a weekly cadence - roughly fifty dated observations a year with two precomputed change measures drop straight into models that annual statistics reach far too slowly.
• Input-cost watching for category margins - DIY, home-improvement and construction-category teams watch the commodity input whose swings reach shelf margins weeks later.
• Sales-conversation timing - account teams calling on building-supply and construction customers open with the same weekly number their buyers just watched move; see sales growth teams x forest products.

Investors and quant researchers get the highest-frequency tradable price signal in this industry slice - a weekly benchmark to set against housing and forestry-equity positioning. Market researchers and consultants get current framing-lumber pricing citable issue by issue, without reconciling secondary charts of unknown vintage. Data scientists get a compact typed series whose change measures arrive precomputed and whose week-ending keys hold still. Developers building data products get rows that land in a warehouse and diff cleanly issue over issue. Journalists, academics and students get a named, decades-old tracker to attribute moves to instead of an anonymous 'industry sources say'. Browse the rest of the shelf on the forest products data hub.

Three things, stated up front.

First, this is one composite number, deliberately. The basket behind the index - species mix, widths, regions - is not documented in the publisher's material, so a species-level or regional claim is yours to build from complementary sources, not something the headline value can carry alone.

Second, depth is bounded. Recent issues are visible week by week, roughly fifty a year; longer runs exist on the publisher's side, and the delivered history window gets fixed when you scope the sample rather than assumed here. Ask for the span up front and the answer comes back concrete.

Third, these are prices, never volumes. Pair the index with Statistics Canada - Lumber Production, Shipments and Stocks for monthly Canadian physical flows, or FAOSTAT Forestry - Forest Production and Trade for global context, and the price-volume picture closes.

Provenance note - compiled by Madison's Lumber Reporter, a Vancouver, BC timber trade publication covering North American softwood lumber markets for decades and publishing its main report about fifty times a year; the index is the headline figure each issue leads with.

Methodology note - the composite is quoted in US dollars per mfbm, where mfbm denotes thousand board feet; each issue carries the week-over-week change in dollars and percent, the month-over-month change, and occasionally a plain 'flat' where the prior week's level was held exactly.

Completeness note - Datadory scores this record 6/10 against a catalog mean of 7.81 across 1,744 datasets. The six-field dictionary above maps fully to the documented structure; anything beyond it, including the stitched multi-issue panel, is confirmed with your sample rather than asserted here.

Where to go next - build the shelf around it: ITTO Global Timber Index (GTI) Monthly Reports adds monthly survey sentiment across ten tropical producer countries, Eurostat Roundwood and Wood Products Statistics (FOR_BASIC) shows the European statistical cube at annual grain, and the head-to-head on our Luke vs Statistics Canada forestry statistics page weighs two official national instruments. Regional price context continues in roundwood prices by region, the full map sits in the forest products data guide, and the ranked slate lives on our best forest products datasets list. Start small: get a sample of this dataset scoped to the weeks you will actually use.