How to Make a Cut List (the Right Way)

Every project that goes wrong at the lumber yard went wrong earlier, on paper. A cut list is the table that stands between your plan and your wallet: every part, its finished size, its quantity, its material. Get it right and the build is mostly assembly. Get it sloppy and you're driving back for one more board — or staring at a stack of parts cut 1/8" short.

What goes in a cut list

Six columns, no more: part name, quantity, thickness, width, length, material. Everything else — grain notes, joinery, edge banding — can ride along in a notes column, but those six are the ones every downstream step needs. Two conventions save headaches later:

• Finished dimensions only. The size of the part in the completed piece. Milling allowances and kerf get handled at layout time, not in the list.
• Width before length, and length runs with the grain. Pick a convention and never break it. "24 × 30" meaning two different things on two different rows is how doors end up sideways.

The five steps

1. Name every part like a stranger will read it

"Side, left" beats "S-L". You'll be reading this list at the saw, wearing hearing protection, three weeks after you wrote it.

2. Pull sizes from the drawing, not from your head

Work through the project one assembly at a time — carcase, then shelves, then back, then face parts. Cross each part off the drawing as it lands on the list so nothing gets skipped.

3. Multiply, don't repeat

Four identical legs are one row with quantity 4, not four rows. Fewer rows, fewer transcription errors.

4. Group by material and thickness

All the 3/4" plywood parts together, all the solid maple together. Each group becomes its own layout problem and its own line on the shopping list.

5. Sanity-check the extremes

Find your longest part and your widest part. If the longest part is 97", a 96" board won't cut it — literally. Catching this on paper costs nothing; catching it at the saw costs a trip to the yard.

A worked example: a small bookshelf

Notice the back is a different thickness — that's its own material group, its own sheet. Miss that and you'll try to nest a 1/4" part onto 3/4" stock.

The three classic mistakes

Forgetting the kerf. Every saw cut eats about 1/8" of wood. Four 24" pieces do not come out of a 96" board — the three cuts between them consume 3/8". Our full explainer on this: saw kerf explained.

Mixing rough and finished sizes. If some rows include your milling allowance and some don't, no layout — by hand or by software — can be trusted.

Buying by area. Adding up square footage and dividing by 32 (a 4×8 sheet) tells you the theoretical minimum, not what you can actually cut. Real parts don't tile perfectly. More on that in how many sheets of plywood do I need?

From cut list to shopping list

This is the step where paper stops being enough. Packing thirty parts onto the fewest sheets, with kerf between every cut and grain running the right way, is a genuinely hard puzzle — and doing it badly costs a full sheet on a cabinet-sized project.

If you're comparing tools first, we reviewed the whole field — free and paid — in our best cut list optimizer roundup.

Cut lists — Frequently Asked Questions

What is a cut list in woodworking?

A table of every part in a project — name, finished width, length, thickness, quantity, and material. From it you work out what to buy and how to cut it.

Should a cut list use finished or rough dimensions?

Finished. Oversizing for milling and kerf allowances happen at layout time. Mixing the two in one list is the most common cut list mistake.

Do I need software to make a cut list?

Not for the list itself — pencil works. Software earns its keep packing the parts onto stock with kerf accounted for, which is slow and error-prone by hand.

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