How to price a tree removal

In this article

Every other trade in these guides can survive a bad quote. This one cannot always survive a bad job. Tree work is the highest‑risk residential trade there is, and the way that risk shows up in your accounts is not dramatic — it is a line on an insurance schedule that quietly eats the margin of anybody who priced like a landscaper.

What people are actually charging

Job	Range	Notes
Typical removal	$400–$1,800	Most homeowners land near $900. That is the number they have in their head before you arrive.
Under 30 ft	$150–$500	Small. Only profitable if it is close, easy and part of a bigger day.
30–60 ft	$400–$1,000	The bread of residential tree work.
60–80 ft	$900–$1,800	Now you need rigging, and possibly a lift.
Over 80 ft	$1,500–$3,000+	And considerably more over a roof. This is where crane jobs live.
By trunk diameter	$226–$2,132	Under 12 inches $226–$946; 12–24 inches $517–$2,132. Diameter is a better predictor of weight, which is what the rigging actually cares about.
Stump grinding	$75–$1,045	Average about $330, or $2–$5 a diameter inch with a minimum near $100. Quote it separately, always.

Size gets you in the bracket. Position sets the price.

The same 60‑ft oak is three different jobs. In an open field you fell it in one piece and chip it. Fifteen feet from a garage you rig it down in sections. Over a roof with a power line behind it, you are hiring a crane and a traffic plan.

Four questions decide which job you are quoting, and none of them is “how tall”:

Question	What it changes	How to price it
How big is the drop zone?	The single biggest driver. A confined drop zone means rigging every section down instead of felling — more time, more skill, more equipment.	Not a percentage. A different crew‑hours estimate from the start.
Can the truck and chipper get in?	No access means hauling brush by hand, and hand‑hauling is the slowest work your crew ever does.	Add the hauling hours explicitly. Walk the route the brush has to take before you quote.
What condition is it in?	Dead, diseased or storm‑damaged wood cannot be trusted to hold a climber or a rigging point.	Higher risk, higher margin. If you would not climb it, price a crane or walk away.
What is nearby?	Power lines, glass, fences, pools, the neighbour’s conservatory.	Utility lines are not a premium, they are a phone call to the utility. Everything else is time and rigging.

Quote crew hours, not trees

A mid‑size removal with easy access is roughly 6–14 hours of combined crew labour. Complex jobs pass 20. A four‑person team — foreman, climber, groundman and support — costs somewhere around $355 an hour at normal rates, and emergency storm work runs far higher.

Break the day into the five phases and estimate each, because at least two of them are always forgotten:

• Travel — there and back, with a loaded chipper.
• Set‑up — cones, ropes, protection for what is underneath, and the walk‑round.
• Production — the part everybody estimates.
• Disposal — chipping, loading, and the trip to the dump.
• Return — unloading, refuelling, sharpening, and putting the kit away.

Equipment is its own line. A chipper is $150–$250 to hire; a mid‑size crane is commonly around $150 an hour with a four‑hour minimum, and if you are hiring one the minimum is the number that matters, not the hour.

The tree care quote calculator prices the same tree three ways side by side — open drop, tight rigging, and over a structure — so you can see what position alone is worth before you commit to a number.

What insurance actually costs you

This is the section that makes tree care different from every other trade in these guides, and it is why a landscaper who starts taking tree work goes broke slowly without understanding why.

Cover	Cost	What it means for your price
Workers’ comp	$8–$15 per $100 of payroll	Tree work is its own class code. Compare that to about $4.54 for cleaning. Every $100 you pay a climber costs you $108–$115 before tax, fuel or profit — and climbers carry higher exposure than ground crew.
General liability	$130–$150 a month	For $1M of cover. Tree service is often written in the excess and surplus market rather than by standard carriers, which means higher premiums and stricter underwriting.
The whole programme	around $489 a month	Liability, comp, commercial auto and equipment together for a typical operation. That is roughly $5,900 a year that every job has to help carry.

And the trap that catches people who came from landscaping: a generic landscaping policy very often excludes real tree removal and elevated work. Having insurance is not the same as being covered. Get it in writing that the policy names tree work and includes completed operations, before you take money for a removal.

Put it in your quote, too. “Fully insured for tree work, certificate on request” is worth more than a 5% discount to any homeowner with a tree near their roof.

Disposal is not free, and firewood is not payment

• Dump fees vary wildly by region and permits alone can be $60–$150. Find your actual number before you quote, not after.
• Only subtract resale value if it is guaranteed. A log you hope to sell is not a discount you can give today.
• “You can keep the wood” is not a concession. If the customer wants it cut to length and stacked, that is more labour, not less.
• Quote stump grinding separately so it can be declined without unpicking the whole price.

The quoting mistakes that cost the most

• Quoting from photos. A photo cannot show you the slope, the gate width, the septic field you must not drive over, or the rot at the base. Every experienced tree company has one story that ends this argument.
• Estimating hours from memory rather than records. Track actual hours against your estimate on every job. It is the only thing that makes anybody a better estimator.
• Treating risk as a feeling instead of a number. The higher the risk, the higher the margin — deliberately, and written down, not decided in the driveway.
• Being slow. Tree work is often urgent. The first credible written quote wins a large share of it.

Aim for 20% net or better. In a trade where one incident can end the company, a thin margin is not competitive pricing — it is an uninsured risk you took on purpose.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026.

• Angi, tree removal cost, HomeGuide, tree removal cost and Thumbtack — national averages, ranges by height and trunk diameter, and stump grinding. All built from what homeowners actually paid.
• MoneyGeek, tree service insurance cost and Insureon — general liability and workers’ comp premiums, and why tree work sits in the excess and surplus market.
• Workers’ comp rates for tree service — NCCI class code 0106 and the per‑$100‑of‑payroll range.
• Crew‑hour ranges, the five‑phase estimate and the equipment rates are drawn from how the tree care trade’s own estimating guides teach it, cross‑checked across several independent ones. They are working benchmarks rather than survey data — your own job records beat all of them.

Ranges move, and tree work varies by region more than most trades because disposal and insurance both do. Re‑check the Angi and HomeGuide pages first; they are updated yearly.