How Much to Charge for Tree Removal: Price It From Crew Time

October 19, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge for tree removal, turn the tree into crew minutes (height times your minutes per foot, trunk diameter times your minutes per inch, a difficulty factor, then setup and cleanup), cost those minutes at your crew rate, add hauling, dump fees and a share of overhead, and divide by one minus the margin you want. In the illustrative example below the crew costs $119.25 an hour, a 60-foot tree with a 24-inch trunk takes 7.94 crew-hours, and the whole job, with trimming, stump grinding and the haul, bids at $4,330.

Nothing on this page is a market price. The crew size, pay, equipment costs and minutes belong to one made-up three-person crew, and they are there to be replaced with yours.

The tree removal price formula

crew rate        = crew x labor cost an hour
                   + each machine's yearly cost / hours it works
cutting minutes  = height x minutes per foot + diameter x minutes per inch
crew-hours       = (cutting minutes x difficulty + setup + cleanup) / 60
full cost        = crew-hours x crew rate + stumps + haul and dump
                   + other costs + overhead share
price            = full cost / (1 - margin)

Tree removal cost per hour: the crew rate

An hour of tree work is not one person’s wage. It is the whole crew plus the machines that sit on the job with them.

Each machine is divided by the hours it actually works on jobs, not the hours in a year. That matters: equipment is 30% of this crew rate, and if the bucket truck worked 500 hours instead of 1,000, its share of every hour would go from $24.00 to $48.00. Log your machine hours before you trust an hourly figure.

The $119.25 is cost. Priced at a 35% margin, a crew hour is $183.46. That is the answer to “tree removal cost per hour” from the operator’s side: the figure your own costs and margin require, not a figure borrowed from someone else’s price list. The same method, applied to a one-person business, is in the freelance hourly rate calculator.

Worked example: a 60-foot removal

The example crew times its own removals at 3 minutes per foot of height and 4 minutes per inch of trunk diameter. This tree has a structure under it, so the operator sets a difficulty factor of 1.40. That number is the operator’s judgment about this tree, not a rule.

The difficulty factor alone adds $219.42 to the cost. It multiplies the cutting time only; setup and cleanup take the same minutes whatever the drop zone looks like.

How much to charge for small tree removal

Run a small tree through the same formula: 20 feet tall, an 8-inch trunk, open ground, difficulty 1.00. Cutting is 92 minutes, and with the same 30 minutes of setup and 60 of cleanup the crew is on site 182 minutes. At cost that is $361.72.

The big tree is 3 times as tall with a trunk 3 times as wide, but it costs only 2.6 times as much. The reason is the fixed minutes: setup and cleanup are 49% of the small tree’s time and 19% of the big one’s.

Overhead does the same thing. The example operator spreads $45,000 of yearly overhead over 150 jobs, $300.00 a job. On the small tree that makes the full cost $661.72, with overhead 45% of it, and the price at a 35% margin is $1,018.04 before any hauling. A small tree priced by its size alone misses both. If that price looks wrong to you, change the inputs, not the formula: fewer setup minutes, or overhead spread by crew-hours instead of by job, are the honest levers.

How much to charge for tree stump removal

The example grinds stumps of 24, 18, 12 inches, 54 diameter inches in all, at 2 minutes an inch, plus 20 minutes a stump to move, set up and backfill and 20 minutes to unload and load the grinder. That is 3.13 grinder hours at $43.00, $134.73 at cost. At a 35% margin, rounded up to the nearest $5, the price is $210, or $3.89 per diameter inch.

Now a customer calls about one 12-inch stump. At $3.89 an inch it would bring $46.67, but on its own visit it costs $45.87, and reaching the margin needs $5.88 an inch. The per-inch price from a three-stump job does not carry to a one-stump job, because the visit minutes do not shrink. That is what the example’s $100 minimum charge is for.

The whole job, bid from a target margin

The example property has the removal, 4 trees to trim, the stumps, and 3 loads of chips and wood to haul, $346.40 with the driver, truck miles and dump fees.

Margin is profit as a share of the price. A 35% margin means dividing cost by 0.65, which is the same as a 53.8% markup on cost. Adding 35% to cost instead gives $3,796.32, which is only a 25.9% margin and leaves $529.97 off this one bid. Haul and dump fees work the same way as in junk removal pricing, and the overhead share is the fixed-cost line from the break-even analysis formula.

The insight: price time, then check the time

A tree removal cost calculator is only as good as its minutes per foot and per inch. Those are not numbers to look up; they come from timing your own removals, setup and cleanup included. After each job, compare actual crew-hours with the estimate. If the crew keeps running over, raise your minutes or multiply future estimates by the overrun, before the next bid, not after the season.

How these were calculated

The crew rate is crew size x labor cost an hour plus each machine’s yearly cost divided by its working hours. Removal crew-hours are (height x minutes per foot + diameter x minutes per inch) x the difficulty factor + setup + cleanup, divided by 60. Stump cost is (diameter inches x minutes per inch + stumps x minutes per stump + visit minutes) / 60 x the grinder rate; the price is that cost / (1 - margin), rounded up, with a minimum charge. The bid is the full cost of every line plus an overhead share, divided by (1 - margin) and rounded up to $10. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program written from the formulas, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs, including the small tree, are illustrative, not market rates or measured speeds. None of this is financial, legal, tax or safety advice, and nothing here says how a tree should be taken down.

To run this on your own crew, equipment and timed jobs, the pack below has the same seven calculators linked together, including trimming, the haul and a job profitability check.