The mass timber story in the United States has shifted from “is this real?” to “can we build enough mills?”
As of March 2026, the country has 2,746 multi-family, commercial, or institutional mass timber projects either in progress or complete. The number was barely a thousand five years ago. One industry forecast now projects annual mass timber starts to climb from about 750 in 2025 to roughly 5,000 by 2035 — a near-sevenfold increase in a decade.
For an industry that often complains about innovation moving slowly, that is fast.
What is actually driving this
Three things, in order of importance.
First, embodied carbon is increasingly a procurement requirement, not a marketing claim. A typical mass timber building can store up to 2,000 tons of CO₂ and reduce embodied carbon by 13 percent or more compared to a comparable steel-and-concrete structure. On larger projects the swing is even bigger — some life-cycle analyses show 76 to 94 percent emissions reductions against conventional baselines. As more state and federal procurement specs incorporate embodied carbon targets, that math becomes the deciding factor on bids.
Second, the building code finally caught up. Tall mass timber provisions in the 2021 and 2024 IBC removed the height ceiling that kept earlier projects locked into the four-to-six-story range. The 18-story and 20-story towers now coming out of the ground in Portland, Milwaukee, and Atlanta were code-impossible in 2017.
Third, contractors who have done a few projects are starting to bid mass timber competitively against concrete. The labor savings on a panelized erection sequence — fewer trades on site, faster floor cycles, dry interiors months earlier — are no longer hypothetical.
Where the friction has moved
The constraint two years ago was code and lender comfort. The constraint today is mill capacity and insurance.
Michigan offers a useful snapshot. The state Department of Natural Resources just awarded ten design-phase grants of $25,000 to $60,000 to mass timber projects under a $400,000 appropriation, hoping to stand up demand fast enough that a regional CLT producer pencils out. There is no in-state mass timber production yet. Every panel has to be trucked in from out of state.
Multiply that pattern across the country and the supply problem is clear: U.S. CLT production exists, but it is concentrated in a few mills in the Pacific Northwest, the South, and Quebec. National-scale demand growth requires either much more domestic capacity or much higher import volumes.
Insurance is the other choke point. Underwriting mass timber projects has gotten cheaper as more loss data accumulates, but it is still meaningfully more expensive than insuring a comparable steel building. The industry view is that this gap closes as the underwriting cohort matures — but in the near term it remains a real number on the budget.
What to watch
Two indicators will tell you whether the 5,000-projects-per-year forecast is conservative or optimistic. The first is new mill announcements in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic — the regions with the most demand and the least domestic supply. The second is the spread between mass timber and conventional construction insurance premiums on midrise multi-family. When that spread is under 15 percent, mass timber is no longer an architectural statement. It is a default option.
The global mass timber market is projected to exceed $1.3 billion by 2030, with North America expected to be the fastest-growing region over the coming decade.