Is It Legal to Sell Firewood by the Rick or Face Cord?

Someone has quoted you a price for a rick of firewood, or a face cord, or "a truckload," and you are trying to work out whether that is a real amount of wood. It is not, and in most of the United States it is not a legal way to sell wood either.

This post is about the part of the transaction that actually protects you, which is not the stack in your driveway. It is the piece of paper the seller has to hand you when the wood comes off the truck, and what you should do with the load before you burn any of it.

The only legal unit is the cord

The rule that most states work from is a model regulation written by the National Council on Weights and Measures and published by NIST as Handbook 130, section 2.4, Fireplace and Stove Wood. Its quantity requirement reads: "Fireplace and stove wood shall be advertised, offered for sale, and sold only by measure, using the term 'cord' and fractional parts of a cord or the cubic meter."

A cord is defined there as "the amount of wood that is contained in a space of 128 ft3 when the wood is ranked and well stowed." That last phrase carries real weight. The regulation spells it out as pieces "placed in a line or row, with individual pieces touching and parallel to each other, and stacked in a compact manner."

So a pile of wood thrown loose into a truck bed is not measurable as a cord in the state it arrives in. It has to be stacked before anybody can say how much of it there is.

The banned words, in the regulation's own language

Section 2.4.4 of the same document is titled Prohibition of Terms, and it is one sentence: "The terms 'face cord,' 'rack,' 'pile,' 'truckload,' or terms of similar import shall not be used when advertising, offering for sale, or selling wood for use as fuel."

Notice that advertising is in there alongside selling. A Craigslist post offering ricks is already outside the rule, before anyone has paid anything. "Terms of similar import" is what sweeps in rank, run and the other regional names for the same thing.

How many places this actually applies

Handbook 130 is a model, not a federal law. Each state adopts it, adapts it or ignores it, and NIST surveys them every year and prints the result. In the 2026 edition's status table, current as of November 1, 2025, 53 jurisdictions are listed: the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

On the Method of Sale column, 18 adopt the national standard by reference and update automatically, and 27 more have a regulation in force built on an earlier version of it. That is 45 of 53 working from the same text you just read. Six have a method-of-sale regulation that is not based on the national standard: California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Puerto Rico and Wyoming. Louisiana and the US Virgin Islands are listed as having none.

Having your own regulation does not mean having a looser one. California is in that group of six, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture's firewood page says plainly that "wood can only be sold by the cord or by fractions of a cord," and that a seller "may not legitimately use terms such as 'truckload,' 'face cord,' 'rack,' or 'pile' because these terms have no legally defined meaning."

NIST attaches its own caveat to that table, and it is worth repeating: unless a state adopts the recommended regulation along with later amendments, "there may be variation in the actual degree of adoption." Your state's own weights and measures page is the authority for your state. Texas, for example, simply tells sellers on the Texas Department of Agriculture's firewood page that they "must adhere to the Method of Sale regulations outlined in the NIST Handbook 130."

The delivery ticket is the part that protects you

Section 2.4.5 requires a delivery ticket or sales invoice "whenever any non-packaged fireplace or stove wood is sold," and lists six things it has to contain: the name and address of the vendor, the name and address of the purchaser, the date delivered, the quantity delivered and the quantity the price is based on if those differ, the price of the amount delivered, and the identity of the wood "in the most descriptive terms commercially practicable, including any quality representation made in connection with the sale."

That last item is why "seasoned mixed hardwood" belongs in writing rather than in conversation. It converts a sales pitch into something an inspector can hold the seller to.

States repeat the same list. New Mexico's Department of Agriculture requires "a receipt or invoice containing the name and address of the buyer and seller, date of delivery, quantity delivered, identity of the commodity and the total selling price." Connecticut's Department of Consumer Protection lists the same fields and also bans face cord, rack, pile and truckload. New Jersey's Division of Consumer Affairs adds a seventh field that the model does not have: the serial number of the delivery ticket or invoice.

Do not burn it yet

This is the single most useful sentence I found while reading through state guidance, and it comes from that same New Jersey consumer brief. If you think you have been shorted and the seller will not fix it, you call your county or state weights and measures office, and then: "Do not burn any firewood sold and delivered to you in that transaction until the firewood has been examined and re-measured by a N.J. Weights and Measures officer."

Every stick you burn is evidence you no longer have. An inspector cannot re-measure a load that is halfway up the chimney, and the delivery ticket by itself only proves what you were told you were getting.

Hamilton County, Ohio's auditor, who enforces weights and measures locally there, suggests two cheap habits that survive a dispute: write down the license plate of the delivery truck, and photograph the wood once it is stacked.

Measuring the load yourself

The cleanest method I have seen written down is in University of Missouri Extension guide G5452, How to Buy and Sell Firewood, reviewed by forestry state specialist Hank Stelzer. Its advice is that buyer and seller jointly measure the stack while it is still tightly stacked on the truck, before anything is dumped.

Measure length, width and height in whole inches, multiply the three together, then divide by the number of cubic inches in a cord. The guide uses a round 220,000. The exact figure is 128 times 1,728, or 221,184, and the gap between the two is about half a percent, so either works.

A stack measuring 96 by 48 by 20 inches gives 92,160 cubic inches. Divide by 221,184 and you have 0.42 cord. If you ordered half a cord, you are roughly 16 percent short and you have a number to say out loud rather than a feeling.

The Missouri guide's sample price sheet also carries a delivery tolerance worth borrowing into your own arrangement: loads may run 10 percent over or under the amount ordered, the buyer pays for no more than that, and a short load gets topped up at no extra cost. That is a suggested commercial practice in the guide rather than a legal tolerance, so write it into your order if you want it.

What calling it a face cord actually costs

Here is why the naming matters in money. A face cord is one row deep, so its depth is whatever length the pieces were cut to. At the common 16 inches, a stack 8 feet long and 4 feet high runs 8 times 4 times 1.33, or about 42.7 cubic feet. Against 128, that is one third of a cord.

If a seller advertises "a cord" at $400 and what lands in your driveway measures 8 by 4 feet with 16-inch pieces, you paid $400 for 0.33 cord. Per actual cord that works out to about $1,200. The wood is not bad value because it is a face cord, it is bad value because you paid cord money for it.

Cut length is the hidden variable. Pieces cut to 24 inches make a face cord half a cord, while 12-inch pieces make it exactly a quarter. Two sellers can both honestly say "face cord" and mean amounts that differ by a factor of two, which is exactly the ambiguity the prohibition exists to remove.

Our Firewood Cord & Rick Calculator has "rick" in its name for the same reason it carries a face cord field: those are the words you will actually be quoted, whatever the regulation says. Put in the dimensions you were given or the ones you measured, and it converts them back into the legal unit so you can compare one seller's offer against another's.

The bundle at the gas station follows a different rule

Small packaged wood is carved out of the cord requirement. Handbook 130 says natural wood packaged in quantities under 0.45 cubic metres, which it glosses as one eighth of a cord or 16 cubic feet, "shall display the quantity in terms of liters, including fractions or multiples of the liter," and may also carry a cubic-foot figure alongside.

Litres, on a bundle of firewood, in the United States. That is the model text, and it is why the labelling on those bundles looks so odd next to everything else on the shelf.

State guidance does not always match it. New Jersey's consumer brief tells buyers that packaged firewood "contains less than four (4) cubic feet" and "must show the net weight of the firewood and the number of pieces of firewood in the package," which is a different threshold and a different declaration from the model's. If you are checking a bundle rather than a delivery, check it against your own state's guidance.

What to do this week

If you are about to order, ask for the price per cord before anything else, and say you want the delivery ticket at the door. A seller who quotes only in ricks and will not put a cord fraction on paper has told you something useful for free.

If the load has already arrived, stack it, measure it in inches, and do the division. Keep the ticket, and hold off on lighting the first fire until the arithmetic comes out the way it should.