What is the hardest common wood species?
Hickory, at 1,820 lbf on the Janka scale — 41% harder than red oak, the default hardwood everything else on this site is measured against. Ranked hardness for all fourteen species here, and what it does and doesn't predict.
Hickory is the hardest of the fourteen species this site has data for, at 1820 lbf on the Janka scale.
That is 41% harder than red oak — the species the rest of this site treats as the everyday default — and 420% harder than Cedar, the softest wood in the list.
How that is worked out
- Janka hardness is the force to push a steel ball halfway into the wood's side grain. It is a real, standardised test, not an opinion — and it measures denting resistance specifically, not strength or stiffness.
- Sorting all fourteen species by their Janka figure puts Hickory at the top and Cedar at the bottom, a spread of 420%.
- A harder wood is not automatically a stiffer or a stronger one — hickory is both harder and stiffer than red oak, but sapele is nearly as hard as hickory's neighbours while being noticeably less stiff. Hardness, stiffness (the shelf calculator's modulus) and density are three different numbers that happen to move together most of the time.
Janka hardness, density and stiffness, hardest first
| Species | Janka (lbf) | Density (lb/ft³) | Stiffness (million psi) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hickory | 1820 | 51 | 2.16 |
| Hard maple | 1450 | 44 | 1.83 |
| Sapele | 1410 | 42 | 1.75 |
| White oak | 1360 | 47 | 1.78 |
| Ash | 1320 | 42 | 1.74 |
| Red oak | 1290 | 44 | 1.82 |
| Walnut | 1010 | 38 | 1.68 |
| Soft maple | 950 | 38 | 1.64 |
| Cherry | 950 | 35 | 1.49 |
| Mahogany | 900 | 37 | 1.50 |
| Douglas fir | 660 | 34 | 1.95 |
| Poplar | 540 | 29 | 1.58 |
| White pine | 380 | 25 | 1.24 |
| Cedar | 350 | 23 | 1.11 |
Worth knowing
- These are USDA Wood Handbook species averages, not a promise about the one board in front of you. Wood varies between trees more than it varies between these numbers and reality.
- Janka predicts how easily a floor or a worktop dents, which is why it is the number flooring is sold on. It says nothing about how much a shelf of the same wood will sag — that is stiffness, a separate figure the shelf calculator uses.
- Species toward the bottom of this list are softwoods (pine, fir, cedar) rather than soft hardwoods. "Hardwood" and "softwood" are botanical terms about the tree, not a hardness ranking, and this table is the demonstration: Douglas fir outranks poplar.
Work out your own numbers
- Weight calculator
What a board or a stack of sheet goods weighs — for shelf brackets, a car boot, or a freight quote.
- Shelf sag and span
How far a shelf bends under books, how far it can span, and what a strip on the front edge buys you.
Related questions
- Is hickory harder than oak?
- Yes, by a wide margin — 1,820 lbf against red oak's 1,290 and white oak's 1,360, roughly 30-40% harder than either. Hickory is the hardest wood on this site's list and the reason it is the traditional choice for tool handles that take repeated impact.
- What is the softest wood on this list?
- Cedar, at 350 lbf, with white pine close behind at 380. Both dent if you set a tool down on them wrong, which is exactly why neither is used for a floor or a worktop despite being pleasant, cheap and easy to work.
- Does a harder wood mean a stronger one?
- Not the same thing. Janka hardness measures resistance to denting from a point load; strength and stiffness under bending are separate figures — the shelf calculator uses stiffness (the modulus), not hardness, because a shelf fails by sagging, not by getting dented from above.