Timber and board prices in Kenya

Timber and board prices are among the most searched construction subjects in Kenya, and the reason is straightforward: almost every quotation for joinery depends on them and almost no quotation states them.

Figures below are Kenyan market rates reviewed September 2026. They are indicative ranges, not a quotation, and yard prices move with import costs and season.

Read the unit, not the number

Hardwood here is sold by the length at a given section, so “12 by 1” is a nominal section and the price is for a length of it. Board is sold per sheet, normally 1220 by 2440 millimetres.

Those are different units, and comparing a per-length hardwood rate with a per-sheet board rate tells you nothing. When a quotation gives a figure with no unit at all, that is the thing to query first.

Which timber for what

Mvule is the premium Kenyan joinery hardwood: dense, stable, insect-resistant, and it takes a clear finish beautifully. It is what you want for external doors, staircase treads and anything that has to look good for thirty years. It is priced accordingly.

Mahogany is the workhorse hardwood for doors, frames and stair components, and most of the ready-made joinery sold in Nairobi is mahogany. The rates in the first table give you a sense of how it is priced by component rather than by volume.

Cypress is the everyday structural softwood: roof timbers, studwork, painted joinery. It is cheap, plentiful and entirely adequate for what it is for. It is wrong for a clear-finished tread because it dents.

Camphor, podo, cedar and teak are scarce enough in the Kenyan market that we could not trace a reliable current per-foot price for any of them, so they are absent from the table rather than estimated. See the scarce timbers.

Boards, and the one distinction that matters

The second table covers sheet materials. The distinction worth learning is water.

Marine plywood tolerates damp and the occasional soaking; blockboard tolerates neither particularly well; standard MDF swells irreversibly and the swelling starts at the cut edges and the screw holes. Melamine-faced board arrives finished and its usual core is chipboard, which has the worst moisture behaviour of the four.

That is why a well-built kitchen is a marine ply carcass with MDF fronts rather than one board throughout. There is a full comparison on MDF, melamine, blockboard and marine ply.

What a yard price does not include

Delivery, cutting, wastage and finishing. On a small job the wastage matters more than people expect: a pattern that has to be cut around a knot, or a sheet that yields three pieces rather than four, moves the material cost by a quarter. That is part of why a joinery quotation is not simply a board count multiplied by a yard rate.