What state firewood costs near you

Why prices differ#

The first reason is the wood. Beech, oak and hornbeam give more heat per cubic metre than lime, poplar or fir, and at the same district the state usually charges 1.6 times as much for them. The second is where you collect it: at the stump, already felled and cut in the forest but hauled out to the road by you, it costs about 14% less than at the forest road, and from a depot about 14% more.

Across all 41 lists, as fixed in advance, species and delivery point together explain 63% of the differences between the 1,973 firewood prices; across the household lists in force, 63%. Much of the rest comes down to the directorate: for the same wood, collected from the same kind of place, some directorates charge a third less than the national average and others more than 40% more.

The lists do not say how the prices were set. Each directorate’s management approves its own, under a 2016 Romsilva circular on single prices per species at directorate level. In practice, some directorates have one price for the whole county and others set a different price for each district.

How much of the winter comes from the state#

At the 2021 census, 3.29 million Romanian homes had wood stoves and almost 940 thousand more had wood-fired boilers (some have both). In villages, 60 homes in 100 have a wood stove; in towns, 10 in 100.

In 2024, households burned firewood and plant waste giving the heat of about 12.1 million cubic metres of dry wood. Romsilva sells around 1.75 million cubic metres a year directly to households: about one cubic metre in 7 (between one in six and one in nine, depending on how dry the wood is). The rest does not pass through the state’s direct sales.

In 2021, the census year, the national average per wood-heated home came to between 3.4 and 4.4 cubic metres of dry wood a year, depending on how homes with stoves and boilers are counted. On the commune card, a winter starts at 4 cubic metres, and the amount can be changed to match what your house burns.

In the capped winter, state wood was already under 400 lei#

In October 2022, Romania’s government capped the price of firewood sold to households at 400 lei a cubic metre, VAT included, until 31 March 2023 (Emergency Ordinance 134/2022). Prolemn, an association of wood-industry firms, said at the time that firewood, pellets and briquettes had vanished from big retailers’ shelves.

In December 2022, in the middle of the capped winter, the median price posted for hardwood firewood by the 16 directorates with up-to-date rows was 275 lei a cubic metre. The table does not say whether prices include VAT, but even with VAT added the median stayed well under the cap. The state’s posted price has risen since: from 215 lei in 2019 to about 325 lei in 2025 and 2026.

How it was calculated#

Prices come from the 41 household price lists published by Romsilva’s county directorates, downloaded on 29 October 2026. Scanned lists were read with optical character recognition, and every number was checked against the page image. All prices were converted to lei per cubic metre of solid wood without VAT; the page adds 11% VAT, the rate for firewood since 1 August 2025. Prices per stacked metre and per tonne are not used.

For each district, the price is the median of its directorate’s list by species and delivery point; where the list has several tiers (distance, diameter, quality), the median combines them. Galați is left out of the comparisons: its decisions say its prices are for institutions and businesses. So is Constanța: its list was approved in July 2025 with no start date and no VAT rate. Hunedoara publishes no price table, only a range (170–560 lei without VAT). The lists from Prahova (2023), Satu Mare and Covasna (2024), Dâmbovița and Teleorman (2025, before August) and Cluj (undated, with 5% VAT, so from before August 2025) appear on the commune card with their date but not in the comparisons.

The test was fixed before any price was read and registered with a SHA-256 fingerprint: if species and delivery point had explained more than 85% of the price differences across all 41 lists, the project would have stopped. They explained 63%. In Maramureș, the separate, higher prices for wood already cut and stacked are left out of the comparisons.

The number of homes with wood stoves in a commune is an estimate. The census publishes heating only by county, separately for towns and villages, so the card multiplies the commune’s dwellings (Romanian statistics institute, 2021) by the share of homes with wood stoves in that county’s villages or towns.

National demand comes from the Eurostat energy balance: 113,770 terajoules of solid biofuels burned in homes in 2024 (firewood, wood waste and plant residues), converted at 9.4 gigajoules per cubic metre of dry wood (the FAO factor for fuelwood at 20–30% moisture). Romsilva’s sales to households come from its press statements.

The nearest district means the nearest state forest district office, as the crow flies from the commune’s centre. The forest the wood comes from may be elsewhere, and a district may sell first to people in its own area. Private and municipal forest districts, which also sell firewood, are not included.

Sources#

1. Romsilva, household firewood price lists of the 41 directorates
2. Romsilva, available wood volumes, with Internet Archive copies (2018–2025)
3. Romsilva, unit codes for RO e-Factura (list of districts)
4. Romsilva, directorate “forest units” pages (district offices)
5. Romanian statistics institute (INS), 2021 census, tables 8.9 and 8.18
6. INS, TEMPO LOC101B, dwellings by locality
7. Eurostat, energy balance nrg_bal_c (households, solid biofuels)
8. FAO, fuelwood conversion factors
9. Agerpres, 20 December 2025: Romsilva sold over 1.75 million m³ of firewood directly to households in 2025
10. Economedia, the Prolemn association on the effects of the price cap (2022)
11. HotNews, the 2022 firewood price cap (Emergency Ordinance 134/2022)
12. Commune outlines: geo-spatial.org (CC BY-SA 4.0); places: OpenStreetMap (ODbL)