Oud Wood Price by Grade: How Agarwood Is Graded from D to AAA and Kynam

Oud wood price is set mainly by grade. Agarwood grading sorts resinated Aquilaria wood into price tiers by how much resin it holds and how well it smells. Agarwood grades are the labels that come out of that sorting, from D at the entry end to AAA and Kynam at the top. In practice, a grader judges colour, density, aroma and form, then assigns a letter that sets the price per gram.

Is there an official quality bar? According to the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, as cited by Liu et al. (2013), medicinal agarwood must contain at least 10% alcohol-soluble extractive. In that study, induced plantation samples measured 11.60–18.08%, against 10.56% and 19.30% for two wild samples.^[8]

Resin is the whole point. Healthy Aquilaria wood is pale and almost scentless, while the dark aromatic material forms only where the tree has reacted to a wound and infection. Therefore two pieces cut from the same trunk can sit four grades apart.

Published reviews of agarwood quality describe the same basic toolkit we use: appearance, resin content, density, aroma and, increasingly, chemical analysis.^[1] However, those reviews also note that the criteria are applied differently from market to market.

Why There Is No Universal Standard

No international body publishes a binding agarwood grading standard. CITES regulates whether the wood may cross a border, not how good it is. Consequently, each supplier, region and trade tradition runs its own scale.

Our scale is the one founder Wang Jianyu has applied since we started in 2014: D, C, B, A and AAA, with Kynam handled separately. It is our internal scale, not an ISO or CITES standard. For that reason, we pair it with paid samples and a written grading note, so the letter means something you have seen with your own eyes.

Plantation wood adds another layer. Induction methods, inoculants and the time a tree is left to build resin all shape what reaches the grading table.^[2] Our stock comes from our own 100+ mu Aquilaria sinensis plantation and from 100+ contracted plantation farmers, so grading, not origin alone, decides the grade of a lot.

In agarwood grading, each test answers a different question, and none is enough alone. Visual inspection shows where the resin is, weight and water show how much there is, and aroma shows whether it is any good.

Resin Colour and Spread

Colour is the first and fastest signal in agarwood grading. Resin-rich wood ranges from deep brown to near-black, often with a glossy or oily look on a fresh cut. By contrast, low-grade material shows thin dark lines running through pale, fibrous wood.

Spread matters as much as depth. A chip with one black streak and a pale body is weaker than a chip that is evenly brown all the way through. In practice, graders look at the ratio of dark to pale across every face, not just the best one.

Colour can also mislead. Some plantation wood darkens quickly but carries little aroma, while some lighter wood smells better than it looks. That is why colour opens the grading process but never closes it.

The Sink Test and Its Limits

The sink test works because resin is denser than water while healthy Aquilaria wood is much lighter. A heavily resinated piece can sink, a partly resinated one may hang at mid-depth, and a lightly resinated one floats. The Chinese term chén xiāng (沉香), "sinking fragrance", comes from this behaviour.

However, the test proves density, not quality. Mineral deposits, waterlogging or added oils can make poor wood heavy. Moreover, shape and trapped air change how a piece behaves, so graders compare pieces of similar size and let them settle before reading the result.

For plantation stock, sinking pieces are the exception rather than the rule. Most cultivated material sits in the floating or half-sinking range, and we grade it honestly on that basis instead of pretending every lot can reach sinking grade.

The Aroma Test on Heat

Aroma is the agarwood grading test buyers care about most, because it is what their customers pay for. Graders usually heat a thin sliver gently on an electric heater rather than burning it on charcoal, since flame adds smoke and hides the true profile.

A good piece opens cleanly, develops sweet, resinous and woody layers, and keeps releasing scent for a long time. A weak piece gives a short, sharp opening and then fades into plain burning wood. The chemistry behind this is complex: agarwood contains a large family of sesquiterpenes and 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones, and their balance varies widely between samples.^[3]

Cold smell matters too. High-grade wood often carries a noticeable scent at room temperature, while low grades smell of very little until heated. Finally, experienced graders compare against reference pieces from earlier lots, because a nose without a reference drifts over a long grading day.

Weight, Size and Form

Weight in the hand is a quick proxy for resin content when pieces are the same size. Two chips of equal volume, one noticeably heavier, almost always grade differently.

Size and form then decide the use. A large solid piece of A-grade wood may be worth more as a bead blank, a carving or a log section than broken into chips. Meanwhile, thin flakes of the same resin quality usually go to chips, powder or distillation.

The scale is a ladder, but the steps are not equal. The jump in price from D to C is modest, while the jump from A to AAA is steep, because AAA material is a small share of any harvest.

Our D to AAA oud wood chips start from $0.24/g at entry grades with an MOQ of 100 g, and the price rises with each step. We quote the exact figure per grade, because a single headline price would hide the gap between a D lot and an AAA lot.

Oud Wood Price per Kg at the Top of the Market

Wild, old-growth wood sits in a different price world from plantation chips. At a Sharjah oud exhibition in October 2025, Khaleej Times reported top-grade wild chips at roughly AED 70,000–105,000 per kg. One Philippine variety was quoted above AED 100,000 per kg, up from about AED 10,000 in 2017.^[4]

Those are retail asking prices for scarce wild material, not wholesale prices for plantation wood. We think they are useful for one thing: they show how steeply oud wood price climbs with resin, age and scarcity. The same report notes that a ton of agarwood may yield only one or two kilograms of high-quality oud, and that the best wood comes from trees at least 25 years old. For a plantation lot, the honest way to compare is price per gram at a stated grade, checked against a paid sample.

Why Kynam Sits Outside the Scale

Kynam, called kyara in Japan and qí nán (奇楠) in China, is not simply "AAA plus". It behaves differently: the resin is softer and waxier, a fingernail can mark it, and its scent is often noticeable without heat.

Because of those differences, we grade kynam with its own references rather than placing it on the D–AAA ladder. Our kynam wood listing starts from $0.89/g, while the scarcest pieces are never stock-held; we allocate them and quote per enquiry. Treat any offer of large, cheap, ready-stock "kynam" with caution, and ask to see the specific pieces.

Comparative reviews confirm that grading practice differs between producing and consuming countries, and that most systems still rely heavily on the senses of experienced graders.^[1] For medicinal-use agarwood, the Chinese Pharmacopoeia adds chemical requirements, such as a minimum extract content, which a pure sensory grade does not cover.

The Japanese system is the most different. Kōdō practitioners classify pieces into six "countries" and describe them through five tastes. A kōdō buyer therefore asks what a piece is like, not only how dense it is.^[5] Therefore, Japanese buyers usually look for small, carefully cut pieces from A and AAA material and place the wood in their own tradition.

Gulf buyers, by contrast, often grade by burning. A chip that throws a rich, long scent on charcoal earns its tier, regardless of the letter on the bag. For that market it is worth testing samples on charcoal as well as on an electric heater, because the two methods can rank the same chips differently.

The feedstock grade sets the ceiling for the oil. Higher-grade wood generally yields richer oil, but extraction method changes the profile too. Our hydro-distilled oud oil starts from $7.00/g, while our supercritical CO₂ agarwood oil starts from $1.50/g; both have a 10 g MOQ.

For oil, lab work matters more. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry separates and identifies the volatile compounds in a sample, so a GC-MS report can show whether an oil carries the compound families typical of agarwood.^[6] We provide GC-MS reports on request. The extraction routes themselves are covered in our guide to how oud oil is extracted.

Agarwood grading misleads when one test is allowed to outvote the others. These are the most common patterns in the trade:

• Oil-soaked chips: low-grade wood soaked in oil smells strong when cold and looks darker, but the scent on gentle heat is flat and fades fast. A fresh cut often shows pale wood under a dark skin.
• Wet weight: damp wood is darker and heavier. If chips feel cool and slightly soft, ask how and when they were dried before you pay by the gram.
• Sinking without scent: a piece can sink because of minerals, added resin or waterlogging. Sinking is a density result, never a grade on its own.
• Top-of-bag grading: the best pieces sit on top of the sample photo. Ask for photos or video of the whole lot, spread out, not one hand-picked chip.
• Grade without a reference: "Grade A" on a quotation means nothing until you have seen that supplier's Grade A. Always compare a paid sample with the shipped goods.

Grade is the single biggest driver of price per gram within one species and source. However, it sits alongside origin, wild versus cultivated status and form, which we compare in detail in our wild vs cultivated agarwood price breakdown.

Form changes the agarwood grading question as well. A log section is graded on how much usable resin it holds and how it can be cut, so our resinated agarwood log sections, from $88/piece, are assessed whole rather than chip by chip. Bracelets and beads, meanwhile, are priced by weight from $18/g because the grade is already locked into the bead.

The Grade on Your Documents

Agarwood grading only protects you if the result is written down. Every wholesale shipment from us carries a grading note or certificate that names the grade and lot, alongside a CITES Appendix II export permit where one is required. All Aquilaria species have been listed in Appendix II since 2004, and annotation #14 exempts some finished, retail-packaged products, so check the current annotation text for your goods.^[7]

Our grading, testing and export services page lists the documents and lab options in one place. In practice, matching the grade note, the invoice description and the permit before dispatch saves most of the delays buyers meet at customs.