Oak and walnut are often weighed against each other for a dining table, a desk or a floor. Oak is the harder, cheaper, more widely available wood; black walnut is the premium North American furniture wood, chosen for its dark brown colour. This page compares red and white oak with black walnut, using the same Wood Handbook data for all three.
Oak vs Walnut: the numbers
| Property | Northern red oak | White oak | Black walnut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Janka side hardness, 12% MC | 1,290 lbf | 1,360 lbf | 1,010 lbf |
| Density at 12% MC | 44.1 lb/ft³ | 47.5 lb/ft³ | 38.5 lb/ft³ |
| Weight per board foot | 3.67 lb | 3.96 lb | 3.20 lb |
| Bending strength (MOR), 12% MC | 14,300 psi | 15,200 psi | 14,600 psi |
| Stiffness (MOE), 12% MC | 1.82 million psi | 1.78 million psi | 1.68 million psi |
| Crushing strength parallel to grain | 6,760 psi | 7,440 psi | 7,580 psi |
| Shrinkage green to ovendry, tangential | 8.6% | 10.5% | 7.8% |
| Shrinkage, radial | 4.0% | 5.6% | 5.5% |
| Shrinkage, volumetric | 13.7% | 16.3% | 12.8% |
| Tangential / radial ratio (cupping tendency) | 2.15 | 1.88 | 1.42 |
| Width change per 1% MC, flatsawn (Table 13-5) | 0.369% | 0.365% | 0.274% |
| Heartwood decay resistance (Table 14-1) | slightly or nonresistant | resistant | resistant |
What the numbers mean
- Hardness: White oak is 5% harder than Northern red oak (1,360 against 1,290 lbf), so it resists dents from furniture feet, dropped tools and wear correspondingly better.
- Weight: White oak is 8% heavier. A 1 x 6 board 8 feet long (4 board feet nominal) weighs about 15.8 lb in white oak and 14.7 lb in northern red oak at 12% moisture content.
- Strength and stiffness: White oak is 6% stronger in bending, but Northern red oak is 2% stiffer, and stiffness is what decides how much a shelf of the same size sags under the same load.
- Movement: a flatsawn board 10 in wide that goes from 6% to 12% moisture content (a dry winter to a humid summer indoors) swells about 0.221 in (7/32 in) in northern red oak and 0.219 in (7/32 in) in white oak, from Handbook Eq. 13-2 and the Table 13-5 coefficients. Allow for this in table tops, panels and floors.
- Decay resistance of the heartwood: Northern red oak: slightly or nonresistant; White oak: resistant; Black walnut: resistant. Sapwood of every species has low decay resistance.
- The percentages above compare the first two columns; the table also lists Black walnut for comparison.
Appearance, working and what to watch for
Black walnut heartwood is chocolate to purplish brown, with pale sapwood that is often steamed at the mill to darken it. It has a medium texture with fine, scattered pores, machines and carves cleanly, sands to a smooth surface and finishes beautifully with oil or lacquer. Oak is lighter in colour, coarser, and has the bold open grain of a ring-porous wood. Walnut is softer than oak, so a walnut table top will show dents sooner, but it is more stable across the grain: its tangential shrinkage and its tangential-to-radial ratio are both lower than either oak’s, so it cups less.
Walnut lightens with long exposure to sun while oak tends to darken and ambers under most finishes. Walnut is usually sold in shorter, narrower boards and costs much more than oak. A common compromise is a walnut top on an oak or maple base, or walnut accents in an oak piece.
Which to choose: verdict by use
| Use | Better choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Heirloom furniture and tables with a dark finish | Black walnut | Natural dark colour without stain, works and finishes very well. |
| Floors | Oak | Harder and much cheaper; walnut floors are beautiful but dent more readily. |
| Budget furniture and cabinets | Red oak | Widely available and the least expensive of the three. |
| Outdoor benches | White oak | Walnut and white oak both have resistant heartwood, but white oak is harder and costs less. |
| Gunstocks, carving and turned work | Black walnut | Fine texture, stable and pleasant to carve; the traditional gunstock wood. |
| Wide glued-up panels | Black walnut | Lower tangential shrinkage and T/R ratio than oak, so less seasonal movement and cupping. |
Frequently asked questions
Is walnut harder than oak?
No. Black walnut is 1,010 lbf of Janka hardness against 1,290 lbf for northern red oak and 1,360 lbf for white oak (Wood Handbook).
Is walnut stronger than oak?
In bending it is close: black walnut 14,600 psi, northern red oak 14,300 psi, white oak 15,200 psi. Both are more than strong enough for furniture.
Can you stain oak to look like walnut?
You can get the colour, but not the grain: oak’s large open pores and ray fleck still show through. A dark stain on oak reads as dark oak, not walnut.
Sources and method
All property values are read from our parsed copy of the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material (FPL-GTR-190, 2010), a US Government publication in the public domain, the same data as the wood species database. The percentages and the board examples above are our arithmetic on those values. The values describe small, clear, straight-grained specimens: real boards with knots or sloping grain differ, and structural lumber is sized from graded design values in your local building code, not from this table.
- USDA Forest Products Laboratory. Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material. General Technical Report FPL-GTR-190, 2010. Chapter 2 (species descriptions), Chapter 4 (Tables 4-3, 4-4 shrinkage; Eq. 4-7, 4-9, 4-12 density), Chapter 5 (Tables 5-3b, 5-5b strength and hardness), Chapter 13 (Table 13-5 dimensional change coefficients), Chapter 14 (Table 14-1 decay resistance)
- USDA Forest Products Laboratory. Wood Handbook, 2021 edition (FPL-GTR-282)
Last reviewed: 24 October 2026. How we build and check our data: methodology and corrections. Spotted an error? Please let us know.