Jobs
Oregon’s forest sector offers a wide array of employment, including work in forestry, logging, millwork, cabinetmaking, engineering, hydrology, business management and academic research. Earlier Oregon Forest Resources Institute studies have estimated that each million board feet of timber harvest creates or retains about 11 forest sector jobs.
An analysis by the Oregon Employment Department that counted direct forest-related jobs in the state estimated that in 2023 the forest sector employed nearly 62,300 Oregonians working in a wide variety of fields, including forestry, logging, millwork, engineering and academic research.
In this narrower count of direct forest sector jobs targeting specific subsectors, most jobs were in wood products manufacturing, followed by forest management and logging. Forest management and logging jobs are more common in rural counties, while most of the wood products manufacturing jobs are in urban or urbanizing counties.
HIGHER-THAN-AVERAGE WAGES
Employment and wages are central to the economic contribution of Oregon’s forest sector, and recent trends reveal diverging trajectories across industries. Wood product manufacturing has been the clear leader in payrolls, with total wages surpassing $1.3 billion annually after 2018 and production workers alone earning over $1 billion by 2022. Wages in this sector rose steadily throughout the decade, interrupted only by a brief dip during the 2020 pandemic before rebounding to record highs.
