Hundredweight (CWT)

Hundredweight (abbreviated CWT) is a weight unit equal to 100 pounds in the U.S. and 112 pounds in the U.K. Most paper and pulp pricing in North America is quoted per hundredweight, not per pound or per ton.

The U.S. hundredweight is 100 pounds — sometimes called the 'short hundredweight' to distinguish it from the British 112-pound 'long hundredweight'. Twenty short hundredweight make one short ton; twenty long hundredweight make one long ton. Mixing them up in a pricing dataset is an easy way to be off by 12% on every transaction.

Pulp, paper, and many other commodity goods are priced per CWT because the unit aligns with how they are shipped and weighed. A truckload of linerboard might weigh 450 CWT (45,000 lb); pricing in CWT keeps the per-unit number in a readable two- or three-digit range.

On invoices and pricing sheets, CWT appears next to a dollar figure: '$48.50/CWT' for example. If you extract this as a dollar-per-pound rate by mistake, downstream cost calculations come out 100 times too high. This is one of the most common pricing-data extraction errors when teams move from paper invoices to digital workflows.

Related terms

Basis weightBasis weight is the standard measure of paper weight in the U.S., expressed in pounds per 3,000 square feet of a grade's parent sheet. Elsewhere it is reported as grams per square metre (gsm).

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