Article — Woodworking Cut List
A woodworking cut list is the ordered map of every part you need to cut from raw lumber — with lengths, quantities, and ideally the board each piece comes off. Plan it well and a typical furniture project runs at 88–95% cut efficiency. Plan it on the back of a receipt and you will lose 20–30% of the lumber you paid for. The calculator above uses the First Fit Decreasing heuristic, the same family of algorithms commercial nesting software uses, to lay your pieces out across the fewest stock boards possible while accounting for saw kerf at every cut.
This article explains the math behind the cut list, why the saw blade itself eats more material than most beginners expect, and how grain direction and dimensional-lumber quirks change the numbers.
What a woodworking cut list is
At its simplest, a cut list is a table: part name, length, width, quantity. A bookcase might call for two sides at 36 in, three shelves at 30 in, and four braces at 8 in — nine pieces total, spread across however many boards you buy. The cut list calculator turns that table into a board-by-board map: piece A and B come off board 1, piece C and D off board 2, off-cut of 6.75 in saved at the end of board 3.
Professional shops have used optimized cut lists for decades because lumber is expensive. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory has tracked sawmill yields for over a century, and the same logic applies downstream: every inch of stock that ends in the scrap pile is money already spent. A cut list cuts that pile down before you ever pick up the saw.
The classical bin-packing problem was formalised in the 1970s and is one of the canonical NP-hard problems in computer science. Exact optimal solutions for large cut lists are computationally expensive, but heuristics like First Fit Decreasing reach within 11/9 of optimal in the worst case — close enough that commercial nesting software still uses descendants of the original 1973 algorithm.
Cut list optimization as bin packing
Mathematically, a one-dimensional cut list is the classic bin-packing problem: given items of various sizes and bins of fixed capacity, fit the items into the fewest bins. Boards are the bins (capacity = stock length), required parts are the items (size = part length). The optimization target is the minimum number of bins.
First Fit Decreasing — FFD — sorts items by size descending, then places each item on the first bin where it fits. The largest parts go down first and lock in the worst constraints; small parts fill the gaps the big parts leave behind. On dimensional lumber it typically reaches 88–95% efficiency, against 70–80% for hand planning. For two-dimensional sheet-goods nesting (plywood, MDF), the same heuristic family extends to guillotine cuts and rectangle packing.
- Hand-planned cut list — typical 70–80% efficiency
- FFD cut list calculator — typical 88–95% efficiency
- Industrial nesting software — 92–97% on dimensional lumber
- Random / first-grab cutting — can drop below 60%
- Worst-case FFD bound — 11/9 of optimal, proven 1974
- Realistic project savings — 1 to 2 fewer 8 ft boards on a 10-board job
This calculator works on length only. If you need to nest pieces from plywood sheets or wide hardwood boards where both length and width matter, you need a two-dimensional packer. Use this calculator for dimensional lumber (2×4s, 1×6s, etc.) where you only ever cut across the length.
Kerf accounting in a cut list
Kerf is the width of the slot the saw blade removes. Standard 10-inch table-saw blades cut a 0.125 in (3.2 mm) kerf. Thin-kerf blades come in around 0.094 in (2.4 mm). Track saws and many cordless circular saws sit between the two. Hand saws cut wider, typically 0.040 to 0.050 in, because the teeth are set further apart for clearance.
A cut list with no kerf accounting will be wrong by a small amount on a small project and dangerously wrong on a big one. Cut a 96 in stock board into eight equal pieces and you have seven internal cuts. At 0.125 in kerf, that is 0.875 in of stock turned into sawdust — the equivalent of one whole 7/8 in part lost. A project with 50 total cuts gives up 6.25 in to the kerf, easily a whole short part.
Beginners list parts that, on paper, sum to exactly the stock length — then come up short at the last cut. Always include kerf in the math. A safety factor of one extra kerf width per cut keeps you on solid ground.
Grain direction and the cut list
Wood grain runs along the length of every board for structural and visual reasons. In dimensional-lumber cut lists this rarely matters — you are crosscutting along a single linear axis. But two situations change that.
First, hardwood furniture with visible faces: matching grain across the doors, drawer fronts, and top is part of why people pay for hardwood. You may need to cut adjacent pieces from the same board to keep colour and figure consistent. Second, structural lumber loaded in bending (joists, beams): grain alignment affects strength. The Wood Handbook from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory documents how slope of grain reduces bending strength — a 1-in-10 slope cuts allowable bending stress roughly in half.
Dimensional lumber is sold by nominal size that no longer matches the actual size. A 2×4 is really 1.5 by 3.5 inches; a 1×12 is 0.75 by 11.25. The difference comes from drying shrinkage and surfacing. Always cut to actual dimensions; a 36 in shelf wants 36 in of actual board, not nominal.
Cut list savings on real projects
Lumber prices in the United States fluctuate, but the relative cost difference between species is steady. The U.S. Forest Service tracks softwood lumber prices in its monthly Lumber Market Report, and the National Hardwood Lumber Association publishes hardwood pricing benchmarks. As a rough 2024 guide: construction-grade pine 2×4s run $4–$7 per 8 ft board; oak boards run $4–$8 per board foot; walnut and cherry $8–$15 per board foot.
On a typical bookcase project the difference between hand planning and a calculated cut list is one to two extra boards out of ten. At $5 per board on construction pine that is $5–$10. On a hardwood project priced by board foot it is far more — a saved oak board is $30–$50, a saved walnut board can be over $100. Furniture shops running optimized nesting software on every job report material savings of 10–20% versus the same shop's pre-software numbers.
- Construction pine 2×4 (8 ft) — about $4–$7 per board
- Oak (1× boards) — $4–$8 per board foot
- Walnut / cherry — $8–$15 per board foot
- Typical FFD savings — 10–20% material on furniture jobs
- One saved oak board — roughly a meal out
- One saved walnut board — roughly a tank of gas plus dinner
Common cut list mistakes
The single biggest reason beginners run out of stock is cutting short parts first off a fresh board. The off-cut at the end of that board is then too short for the long pieces that come later. Always cut longest pieces first — the calculator's FFD order is intentional. Mark the boards and follow the plan.
Lumber has knots, splits, warps, and bowed sections. A perfectly optimized cut list assumes perfect boards. In practice, buy 10–15% extra stock to skip around defects. The cut list optimization works against gross length; defects come off the top of that figure before you start.
A 2×6 is 1.5 by 5.5 inches actual. A 1×12 is 0.75 by 11.25 inches. Furniture plans nearly always quote actual dimensions; lumber prices quote nominal. Convert before you cut. The Western Wood Products Association publishes a standard nominal/actual table that every project planner should bookmark.
Before any cutting, mark the boards with the calculator's plan in chalk or pencil. Lay out the marks for every piece on every board with the kerf included. Then cut to the marks. This catches measurement errors before they cost a board, not after.