How Much to Charge for Leaf Removal: Per Visit, Per Acre and Per Season

How much should you charge for leaf removal?

Charge what the visit costs you, divided by one minus your target margin. The visit is paid crew time on the clock, the blowers and vacuum for those hours, the bags or dump fee, and a share of your yearly overhead. Price per acre and price per hour fall out at the end; they are not the inputs.

Half the results for this search are forum threads where operators swap per-yard and per-hour numbers. Those numbers carry someone else's wage, crew size, trees and dump fees. I'm not a landscaper - I build pricing math, so this page shows the arithmetic and labels every input as an assumption you replace with your own.

If you would rather keep these rates in one file for every job, the landscaping bid sheet holds them as yellow input cells.

How long does a leaf cleanup take by lot size and leaf density?

Count the whole visit, not just the blowing. In the example, two people spend 1.75 hours on the clock at a 1/4-acre lot with medium leaf fall, which is 3.5 crew-hours of paid time.

Lot size drives most of the time, and leaf density drives the rest. The hours below are assumptions for a medium leaf fall; a lot under a few mature oaks can take far longer than an open lot twice its size, so time your own and keep a note per property.

The calculator above starts on the 1/4-acre example. It has no separate equipment field, so materials here = blower and vacuum time plus disposal: 1.75 hours × $15 = $26.25, plus one $25 load, $51.25 in total.

Labour is 3.5 crew-hours × $26.00 = $91.00. Overhead is 3.5 × $8.25 = $28.88. Add $51.25 of kit and disposal and break-even is $171.13. Divided by 0.65, the price for the visit is $263.27.

Leaf removal price by lot size, per acre and per hour

Run the same formula for each lot size and you get a price table; divide each price by acres or by hours and you get the per-acre and per-hour figures. On the example rates, per acre runs from $1,335.36 on 1/8 acre down to $821.92 on a full acre.

Per acre falls on bigger lots because the drive and setup are shared over more ground. Per hour does not fall in a straight line, because dump loads come in whole numbers: the 1/2-acre lot needs a second load for only 1.25 more hours of work.

The cleanest leaf removal price per hour is one clock hour of the crew before disposal. Two people at $26.00 plus $8.25 overhead each, plus $15 of blower time, cost $83.50 an hour. At a 35% margin that is $128.46 per crew clock hour, or $64.23 per person-hour, plus each dump load at $25 ÷ 0.65 = $38.46. Quote by the hour only if the customer accepts an open-ended bill; otherwise quote the visit and use the hourly figure to check it.

Blowers, vacuums, bags and dump fees: what counts as materials

Treat equipment time and disposal as job costs that carry your margin, not as extras added at cost. In the example they are $51.25 of the $171.13 break-even.

• Blowers and leaf vacuum. Add a year of payments, repairs, fuel and a replacement reserve for the kit, then divide by the hours it runs. The example assumes $15 per clock hour for the crew's whole kit.
• Bags. If the town collects bagged leaves at the curb, disposal is the bag count × your bag cost, plus the bagging time in hours.
• Haul and dump. If you haul, add the tipping fee per load and the drive to the site. The example assumes $25 a load. Hauling is the same arithmetic as a junk load; how to price junk removal jobs costs truck loads in more detail.
• Curbside piles. Where a town vacuums loose piles from the curb, disposal drops to zero but the blowing time stays.

Disposal choice changes the price more than people expect. The same 1/4-acre visit with no dump load and no extra hours prices at $224.81; a heavy-fall visit with two loads is $430.19. Write the disposal method into every quote so the customer sees why.

How to price a fall leaf cleanup season: two or three visits

Price each visit by its own hours, then add the visits. Leaves fall over several weeks in October and November, so a season contract usually means two or three visits of different sizes, not three copies of one price.

The peak visit is 5.5 crew-hours and two loads, so it prices at $430.19, against $263.27 for the medium visit. The season total of $892.50 leaves $312.36 over break-even. Split into two payments it is $446.25 each.

A fixed season price carries leaf risk the way a seasonal snow contract carries weather risk: a year with more drop or a late wet fall adds hours you already priced. Cap the visits in the contract and price extra visits from the per-visit table. Leaf season also squeezes your billing days, so set the days you bill to the days you really work; fewer days raise overhead per hour.

What is the minimum charge for a small leaf cleanup?

Your minimum is the full price of the smallest visit you will make. A 1/8-acre lot still needs the drive, the setup and a dump run, so on the example rates it is one hour on the clock for two people and prices at $166.92.

That hour is $52.00 of labour, $16.50 of overhead, $15 of blower time and one $25 load: $108.50 before profit. Divided by 0.65 it is $166.92. Any yard smaller than this still costs nearly the same visit, so quote the higher of your minimum and the lot-size price. Do not round the minimum down to a friendlier number unless you have checked what it does to your margin.

Common leaf removal pricing mistakes that cost margin

The four that cost the most are adding margin as markup, costing at the wage, passing the dump fee through at cost, and stretching a big-lot per-acre rate over small lots.

• Markup instead of margin. Adding 35% to the example break-even gives $231.02 and keeps only 25.93%. Dividing by 0.65 gives $263.27. That is $32.25 short per cleanup, or $1,290 over 40 cleanups in a season. The markup vs margin calculator converts any percentage.
• Wage instead of loaded rate. Costing the crew at $20 an hour with no burden prices the 1/4-acre visit at $230.96, which is $32.31 short.
• Dump fee at cost. Pricing everything else on margin and adding the $25 load at cost gives $249.81, not $263.27: $13.46 less per visit, and the trip to the dump earns nothing.
• One per-acre rate for every lot. The 1-acre figure of $821.92 per acre prices a 1/4-acre lot at $205.48, which is $57.79 under its price. On a 1/8-acre lot it gives $102.74, $5.76 under break-even.

Leaf removal pricing calculator, app or spreadsheet?

Use a tool that makes you enter hours, crew size, equipment, disposal and overhead before it shows a price. A going rate does none of that.

In the lawn care and landscaping estimate template, a leaf cleanup goes in as one of the eight service lines: its hours and its dump or bag dollars. The sheet adds your loaded labour rate and its equipment cost per hour ($15 default), marks up materials by the percentage you set, spreads yearly overhead per crew-hour ($8.25 on its defaults), and shows break-even and the price at your margin. Because it charges equipment per labour hour and marks up the dump fee, its price will differ from this page's example unless you set those to match.

For the same properties in summer, see how to price lawn care jobs; for spring beds, how much to charge for mulch installation.

What to put on your leaf removal price sheet

A leaf cleanup price sheet is a short list of your own numbers that turns a lot size and a leaf estimate into a price in a minute.

• Hours by lot size for light, medium and heavy leaf fall, timed on real cleanups.
• Crew size and loaded labour rate.
• Equipment cost per clock hour for blowers, vacuum and trailer.
• Disposal: fee per dump load and loads by lot size, or bag cost and bags.
• Overhead per crew-hour, from your billing days in leaf season.
• Target margin, applied by division.
• Minimum charge, calculated like $166.92, not rounded down.
• Season terms: visits included, and the per-visit price for extras.

The formulas below build it in Excel or Google Sheets. Layout: B2 = hours on the clock, B3 = workers, B4 = loaded rate, B5 = overhead per crew-hour, B6 = equipment cost per clock hour, B7 = dump loads, B8 = fee per load, B9 = margin, B10 = minimum, B11 = acres, B12 = the price cell.

Step-by-step: How Much to Charge for Leaf Removal: Per Visit, Per Acre and Per Season

1. Time the whole visit. Record hours on the clock for drive, blowing, vacuuming or tarping, clean-up and this stop's share of the dump run.
2. Cost the crew. Multiply hours by crew size to get crew-hours, then by your loaded labour rate (wage × 1 + burden).
3. Add equipment and disposal. Add blower and vacuum cost per clock hour, plus dump fees per load or bag cost per bag.
4. Add overhead. Divide yearly overhead by sellable hours (people × billing days × 8) and charge the job its crew-hours' share.
5. Divide by one minus margin. Price = break-even ÷ (1 − margin). Quote the higher of that price and your minimum charge.
6. Derive per acre, per hour and per season. Divide the price by acres and by clock hours to check quotes; add visit prices for a season.

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