Hardwood Lumber Grades Explained: FAS, Select, and Common

The first time you order hardwood over the phone, the dealer asks a question the home center never did: what grade do you want? If you came up buying 2x4s off a rack, that question lands flat. Softwood has no grade to pick, so nobody teaches you what FAS or Select or Common mean before you need to know.

Grade is just a measure of how much clear, usable wood a board gives you. A higher grade means longer stretches with no knots, splits, or sapwood, which means less waste when you cut your parts. It also means a higher price per board foot. Learning to match the grade to the job is one of the easiest ways to stop overpaying at the lumber counter.

Who decides the grades

Hardwood grading in North America follows the rules of the National Hardwood Lumber Association, the NHLA. Those rules have been around since 1898, and nearly every domestic dealer sorts to them. That is why a board called FAS in Ohio means the same thing in Oregon.

The grader works from the worse of the two faces of each board. They flip it, look at both sides, and grade off the poorer one. So a board is only as good as its weaker face, which is why even top-grade lumber has a back side that is not flawless.

Grade is measured by clear cuttings. A cutting is a rectangle of clean wood with no defects, and the grade depends on how much of the board yields into those rectangles and how big each one is. The whole system is built around the way you actually use the wood, cutting clear parts out of a rough board.

The main grades, from best to budget

Here are the grades you will run into at a hardwood dealer, roughly from clearest to knottiest.

Grade	Minimum clear yield	What it means for you
FAS	About 83%	Long, wide, clear cuttings. Best for long clean parts.
F1F	About 83% one face	FAS-quality on the good face, one step down on the back.
Select	About 83% one face	Like F1F but allows smaller boards.
No. 1 Common	About 66%	Shorter clear cuttings. The cabinet-maker's grade.
No. 2 Common	About 50%	Lots of character and waste. Paint grade and shorts.

FAS stands for First and Seconds, a name held over from the old days when the top two grades were sold together. It gives the longest and widest clear cuttings, so it is what you want for a dining table top, long rails, or anything where you need clean wood running the full length of the part.

F1F, or FAS One Face, and Select are the middle ground. The good face grades out like FAS while the back face is allowed a bit more character. For most work where only one side shows, these grades save money and you never see the difference.

No. 1 Common is the grade most furniture and cabinet shops actually buy. It is often called the cabinet grade because the shorter clear cuttings still cover the door, drawer front, and face-frame parts that make up a kitchen. You cut around the knots and the yield works out fine.

Why a lower grade can be the smart buy

The instinct is to buy the best grade you can afford. That is usually the wrong move, and here is why.

You do not build with whole boards. You cut them into parts, and most parts are short. If your longest piece is a 24 inch drawer side, the long clear runs you paid for in FAS are wasted, because you were going to crosscut the board anyway. No. 1 Common gives you those same short parts for a lot less money.

Grade also stacks with the other price drivers. Species sets the baseline, then grade, thickness, width, and figure all move it. We break the full picture down in hardwood prices per board foot, and the short version is that dropping one grade often saves more per board foot than switching species does.

So the honest rule is to match the grade to the longest clear part you actually need. Long clean tabletop or a run of trim, buy FAS. A kitchen full of doors and drawers, buy No. 1 Common and cut around the character. Paint-grade carcass parts hidden inside a cabinet, No. 2 Common is fine and cheap.

Grade and figure are not the same thing

One point that trips people up: grade measures defects, not beauty. A plain, boring board with no knots grades higher than a wildly figured one with a small split. The stunning curly maple slab you want for a guitar top might grade below a flat, lifeless FAS board.

That is why dealers price figure separately. Curl, quilt, bird's-eye, and burl carry their own premium on top of the grade, sometimes doubling or tripling the number. If you are buying for looks, you are shopping figure and paying past the grade sheet.

For structural math and weight, none of this changes the board foot count. A board foot is a fixed volume no matter the grade, so you can tally your parts the same way every time. If you want the weight of a stack, that runs off species and volume, which we cover in the lumber weight calculator.

Putting grade into your budget

Grade turns into dollars through two numbers: the price per board foot for that species and grade, and how many board feet your project needs.

Start with the volume. Run your cut list through the board foot calculator to get an honest tally, and add 20 to 30 percent for waste since lower grades waste more. If board feet are still fuzzy for you, the walkthrough in how to calculate board feet lays out the formula step by step, and what is a board foot covers the unit itself.

Then multiply by the grade price. Say a project needs 40 board feet of walnut. At an FAS price you might pay $12 a foot, and at No. 1 Common closer to $8. That is $480 against $320 for the same parts, if your parts are short enough to cut around the extra character. On a project full of small pieces, the Common grade is free money.

For live figures by species you can check the lumber prices page, and there is a dedicated breakdown for black walnut since it is the wood people ask about most. Sketch the budget from those numbers, then confirm grade and price with your dealer before you commit to a cut list.

The short version

Hardwood grade measures how much clean, usable wood a board gives you, graded off the worse face by the NHLA rules. FAS gives the longest clear cuttings and costs the most, Select and F1F sit in the middle, and No. 1 Common is the grade most cabinet shops actually buy because you cut around the character anyway. Match the grade to your longest clear part, not to your pride, and you stop paying for wood you were only going to cut off and throw in the scrap bin.