Here is the short answer for anyone asking about agarwood prices in 2026: per gram, expect roughly USD 1–6 for light plantation chips, USD 10–40 for everyday Southeast Asian chips, USD 60–180 for Vietnamese Hui'an-style material, USD 600–1,500 for genuine wild sinking wood, and USD 2,500–7,000 for top qinan/kyara. Prices diverge rather than move together this year — wild old material keeps climbing while plantation supply expands and drags the entry tiers sideways. Market prices fluctuate; every figure below is for reference only, not a quotation.
Updated 2026-10-13 · Wubaiyi Agarwood (伍佰艺沉香), Hainan plantations & Beijing flagship store
Key takeaways
- Agarwood has no benchmark exchange price. The same word covers material that differs by a factor of more than 1,000.
- 2026 is a split market: scarce wild sinking wood and qinan trend up roughly 10–20% a year, while plantation output holds prices flat or slightly lower.
- Resin content drives price more than origin. Even inside one origin, a floating chip and a sinking chip can differ tenfold per gram.
- Always convert quotes to a per-gram (or per-millilitre) figure before comparing. Weight-based quotes hide grade differences.
- Budget separately for CITES permits, freight and insurance — often 8–15% of invoice value on legal cross-border shipments.
Ask ten dealers "how much does agarwood cost" and you'll get ten answers that are all technically true. That's because the word covers:
A kilogram of low-resin distillation chips and a kilogram of Vietnamese sinking nuggets are both "agarwood". One costs less than a laptop. The other can cost more than a car.
That's why any honest answer has to be a table of bands, not a number.
The bands below reflect wholesale-tier asking prices seen across Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Middle Eastern channels in 2025–2026, converted to USD. Retail adds anywhere from 30% to 300%.
| Material | Grade | Reference price per gram |
|---|---|---|
| Plantation chips | Light resin, distillation grade | USD 1–6 |
| Plantation chips | High resin, hand-sorted | USD 8–25 |
| Indonesian / Malaysian chips | Wild, floating | USD 10–40 |
| Indonesian chips | Half-sinking, select | USD 50–120 |
| Vietnamese / Cambodian | Hui'an-style common | USD 60–180 |
| Vietnamese | Half-sinking (_thuy_) | USD 200–450 |
| Vietnamese / Hainan | Wild sinking | USD 600–1,500 |
| Qinan / kyara | Sinking, top select | USD 2,500–7,000 |
Bulk and industrial quantities are quoted by the kilogram. Distillation-grade plantation chips typically trade around USD 150–900/kg depending on measured resin content; anything above that is sold into the incense or bead trades rather than the still.
Agarwood oil prices are quoted per millilitre or per _tola_ (≈11.7 ml) in Gulf markets. Plantation-distilled oil generally runs USD 15–60/ml wholesale; artisanal wild-grade distillations command USD 150–500/ml; single-origin prize lots go higher. For a fuller treatment of oil pricing and specifications, see the Agarwood Oil Buyer Guide.
If you want the underlying cost structure rather than finished price bands, our Agarwood Price Guide breaks down where each dollar goes — inoculation, harvesting, sorting labour, distillation yield, compliance. Mandarin readers can follow the same argument in 沉香为什么贵：成本拆解 and 各产区沉香特点.
Origin matters, but less than sellers suggest. Two yards of Indonesian wood can differ more from each other than either differs from a mid-tier Vietnamese lot.
Where origin genuinely moves the number:
Where it doesn't: below museum grades, resin content dominates. A high-resin Indonesian chip beats a tired, low-resin Vietnamese one on every measure that matters to someone actually burning the wood. See Sinking Grade Explained — resin behaviour predicts both price and performance better than a place name.
Compare the two big producing regions directly in Indonesian vs Vietnamese Agarwood.
This is the single most important thing to understand about 2026 pricing.
Wild material trends upward. Supply is finite and shrinking. Old-growth stands in Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia were heavily worked through the 1990s and 2000s; what circulates now is largely collector-held old stock, estate liquidations, and buy-backs from Japanese incense houses and Middle Eastern families. Published reporting across the trade puts compound annual increases for quality wild material in the 10–20% range for several years running. Nothing suggests 2026 breaks that pattern.
At the same time, legal friction rose. All Aquilaria species sit on CITES Appendix II, which means every commercial cross-border shipment needs permits attesting the harvest was not detrimental to the species' survival. Enforcement tightened across several exporting countries, paperwork takes longer, and the compliant cost is real. Our note on Sustainable & CITES-Compliant Sourcing explains what buyers should expect.
Plantation material trends sideways or down. Inoculation technology — the deliberate infection of Aquilaria trees to trigger resin — matured through the 2010s and expanded aggressively in Hainan, Guangdong, Vietnam and West Kalimantan. Supply is now reliable and, at the lower end, abundant. Result: entry and mid tiers are flat. Some categories have slipped.
The consequence is a barbell. The middle is the hardest segment to sell: too expensive for casual buyers, not rare enough for collectors. If you're buying to burn, the middle is often the worst value on the board. Buy high-resin plantation and enjoy it, or save for documented wild.
Timing matters more than people expect. Chinese demand peaks before Lunar New Year and before Mid-Autumn Festival — roughly six weeks either side — and gift-buying pushes retail prices up. The soft stretches are usually March to April and high summer. Wholesale negotiations are simply easier when nobody is in a hurry.
One buyer's arithmetic. A German incense brand contacted us in late 2024 for a 20-kilogram lot of high-resin plantation chips, and again in early 2026 for the same specification. Their 2024 landed cost was about USD 310/kg including sea freight and permits. The 2026 quotation came in near USD 335/kg — but almost all of that increase was freight and permit fees, not wood. The raw material price was effectively flat; compliance and logistics added roughly 8%. Meanwhile, the same buyer's standing request for Vietnamese half-sinking nuggets went from about USD 240/g to USD 310/g over the same period, and allocation was tighter — we could offer 400 grams where once we could offer two kilos. Same product category, two completely different markets. If your budget is fixed, knowing which half you're buying in changes what you can realistically ask for.
Planning a purchase above USD 2,000, or sourcing by the kilo? Send your specification — form, resin grade, quantity, destination country — and we'll quote against current stock with permits itemised line by line. Start at Wholesale or reach the desk directly via Contact.
Four habits will protect most of your money:
And ask what happens if the wood isn't what was described. A supplier who refuses to put the grade in writing is telling you exactly how much confidence to bring.
Reference bands run from about USD 1/g for light plantation chips up to USD 2,500–7,000/g for top sinking qinan. Common shopping bands are narrower: everyday Southeast Asian chips around USD 10–40/g, Vietnamese Hui'an-style material USD 60–180/g, and wild sinking wood USD 600–1,500/g. Market prices fluctuate and these are indicative only — always get a written quote against a specific lot.
Four variables, roughly in order of impact: resin content, origin and scarcity, whether it's wild or plantation, and the physical form. Because resin content alone can swing a price tenfold inside a single origin, two pieces that look similar can sit on opposite ends of the price table. Scarcity compounds it — documented wild sinking material from a famous region has no volume replacement, so each lot prices against the last one sold.
It depends entirely on which market. Wild old material and qinan continue to rise — trade reporting puts recent increases around 10–20% annually, and nothing in 2026 reverses that. Plantation-grown material is flat to slightly softer as supply expands. Legal-cross-border costs are creeping up everywhere because of tighter CITES administration, so landed prices may rise even where the wood itself hasn't.
Tell us the use case and budget — we will tell you what actually fits, and what does not.