How to Price Tree Removal Jobs: Crew-Day Costing With Worked Numbers

How do tree services charge for a removal?

A tree removal quote is usually one fixed price for the job, but the cost underneath it is time: a crew, a truck, a chipper and a dump run for a set number of hours. If you price the crew-day correctly, the per-tree price falls out of it.

Homeowner price guides quote ranges per tree or per foot of height. Those ranges describe what other companies charged someone else. They cannot tell you whether your crew, with your wages, insurance and equipment payments, makes money at that number. The only price that answers that question is one built from your own costs. I'm not an arborist; I build pricing math, and every number below shows its working so you can check it against your own books.

The method has four inputs you can measure:

• Crew-hours: people on site times hours on site, including setup, cleanup and loading.
• Loaded labour rate: wage plus payroll tax, workers' comp, insurance and paid time off. See the labor burden calculator guide for how to find your own percentage.
• Equipment day cost, fuel and disposal: the chip truck, chipper, saws and the dump fee, charged to the job that uses them.
• Overhead per crew-hour: the yearly costs that are not tied to any one job, divided by the hours you actually sell.

Tree removal pricing calculator: try your own numbers

Type your crew size, hours on site and costs below. The price updates as you type and shows the break-even floor first.

Put equipment day cost, fuel and disposal in the materials box. The same maths runs on the full tree service price calculator, which also shows what pricing on markup would cost you over a year.

How to estimate a tree removal job, step by step

Estimate the hours first, then cost them. The walk-around is where the money is made or lost, because every later number depends on the hour estimate.

1. Walk the site and write the hours. Break the job into tasks: setup, climbing or bucket work, felling or sectioning, chipping brush, bucking and loading wood, stump work if included, raking and cleanup. Put an hour figure next to each. Add them.
2. Multiply by crew size to get crew-hours. Three people for 6 hours is 18 crew-hours.
3. Cost the labour at the loaded rate, not the wage.
4. Add equipment day cost, fuel and disposal for this job.
5. Add overhead per crew-hour.
6. Stop at break-even, then divide by (1 − margin).

Write the task list on the estimate you give the customer. It explains the price without you having to defend a single total.

Worked example: a medium removal priced from the crew-day

A 3-person crew spends 6 hours on a medium tree with open drop space. Every input below is an assumption for illustration: replace each with your own figure.

Read it top to bottom. The wage of $24 loads to $32.40 an hour at 35% burden. 18 crew-hours cost $583.20. Overhead of $36,000 a year spread over 3 people, 200 days and 8 hours is $7.50 per crew-hour, so this job carries $135.00. Break-even is $948.20. At a 35% margin the price is $948.20 / 0.65 = $1,458.77, which leaves $510.57 of profit.

Do not count the chipper twice. If its payment is in your equipment day cost, leave it out of the yearly overhead figure. Overhead here means insurance, office, phone, software, marketing and your own time spent quoting.

How much to charge for a small tree or a minimum job?

Charge at least what a short visit costs you, because the truck, crew and dump run still leave the yard. Price one small job with the same method and use that as your minimum.

Here the crew is on site 2 hours, with half a day of equipment ($50), $20 of fuel and a $60 disposal fee, all assumptions. Break-even is $369.40 and the price at 35% is $568.31. If a customer asks what it costs to remove a 10 ft tree, this is the honest route to an answer: estimate the hours for that tree, then run the numbers. A small tree costs less, but not in proportion to its height, because setup, travel and disposal do not shrink with it.

Per-foot pricing, the thing homeowners search for, is an output, not an input. Once you have priced a few jobs, divide each price by the tree height to see your own per-foot figure. A 30 ft tree over a roof and a 30 ft tree in an open field will give very different per-foot numbers, which is why per-foot pricing on its own misprices both.

How to handle risk: add hours, not a guess

Price hazard as the extra time it takes. Rigging over a house, a crane lift, a tight backyard with no chipper access or a dead tree that cannot be climbed all add hours and sometimes equipment. A flat “danger percentage” hides that.

Take the medium removal above and assume it hangs over a roof, so it needs 3 more hours of rigging and lowering. Same crew, same costs, 9 hours on site instead of 6:

The customer can see why the second tree costs more: it takes longer. If the job needs a crane or a bucket truck you rent, add the rental to the materials box as a separate line.

For a whole-day sanity check, price a full 8-hour crew-day with the same inputs and $140 of equipment and fuel but no disposal: break-even is $1,097.60 and the price at 35% is $1,688.62. If a quote uses most of a day but comes in well under that, check your hour estimate.

The common mistake: markup instead of margin

Adding 35% on top of cost does not give you a 35% margin. Markup multiplies cost; margin divides it. On the medium removal:

• Margin price: $948.20 / 0.65 = $1,458.77.
• Markup price: $948.20 x 1.35 = $1,280.07, which keeps only 25.93% of the sale.
• Gap: $178.70 per job. At 4 jobs like this a week for 52 weeks that is $37,169.44 a year.

The second mistake is pricing from the wage. Paying $24 an hour does not mean a worker costs $24 an hour. The markup vs margin guide works through the difference in more detail.

Excel formulas for a tree service estimate template

You can build this in one sheet. Put inputs in column B and let every result be a formula, so changing one number reprices the job.

Keep a tab of past jobs with the estimated hours and the actual hours. After ten or twenty jobs you will know whether your walk-around estimates run short, and by how much. The job costing spreadsheet guide shows how to lay that out.

How to write a tree removal estimate the customer will sign

A good tree estimate states the scope, the exclusions and one price. The customer is buying an outcome, so describe it plainly.

Tips are the customer's choice and are separate from your price. Do not count on them when you set a price, and do not lower a quote because you expect one.

Spreadsheet, calculator or field-service app?

Use the one that matches how many quotes you write. A free calculator is fine for checking a single job. A spreadsheet suits an owner who wants to see and change every formula. Jobber-type apps suit companies that need scheduling, dispatch and online payments in one place.

• Free: the tree service calculator prices one job in your browser, and the free Job Pricing Starter is the same maths as a spreadsheet you keep.
• Built for you: there is no ready-made tree service template in the shop. If you want your crew sizes, equipment day costs, dump fees and quote page in one workbook, the done-for-you custom calculator is a $497 one-time build in Excel and Google Sheets, with one round of revisions.

For the general method across trades, see how to price a contractor job.

Step-by-step: How to Price Tree Removal Jobs: Crew-Day Costing With Worked Numbers

1. List the tasks and hours. Walk the site and write hours for setup, climbing or bucket work, felling, chipping, loading, stump work and cleanup. Add them.
2. Convert to crew-hours. Multiply hours on site by the number of people on the crew. Three people for 6 hours is 18 crew-hours.
3. Cost labour at the loaded rate. Multiply crew-hours by wage x (1 + burden %). A $24 wage at 35% burden costs $32.40 an hour.
4. Add equipment, fuel and disposal. Charge the job its share of chip truck and chipper day cost, fuel and the dump fee, plus any rental.
5. Add overhead per crew-hour. Divide yearly overhead by (field people x billable days x 8) and multiply by crew-hours.
6. Price on margin. Break-even divided by (1 - margin) gives the quote. Check it against your minimum charge and your full crew-day price.

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