Size is a proxy. Hours are the price.
Every consumer guide prices tree removal by height: small trees $300 to $700, medium $700 to $1,500, large $1,500 to $4,000. Those ranges exist because height roughly predicts crew hours. But you do not sell height. You sell a crew, a chipper and a truck for a number of hours, plus what it costs to get rid of the wood. Price the hours and the size takes care of itself.
A rough crew-hour map for a three-person crew with a chipper and chip truck, open access:
| Tree | Crew hours on site | Typical direct cost | Quote at 30% margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 30 ft, open yard | 4–6 | $450–$700 | $700–$1,100 |
| 30–60 ft, some obstacles | 9–15 | $1,000–$1,800 | $1,600–$2,900 |
| 60 ft+, near structures, rigging | 18–30 | $2,200–$3,800 | $3,500–$6,000 |
| Crane or technical removal | 15–25 + crane | $3,000–$6,000 | $5,000–$9,500 |
Notice the quote column is not direct cost plus 30%. It is direct cost plus overhead, divided by 0.70. That difference is where most small tree services leave their profit.
What goes into the cost
- Labor at a loaded rate. Wage plus payroll tax, workers comp and liability. Tree work carries some of the highest comp rates of any trade, so the burden is 30% to 45%. A $45 climber costs you $60 to $65 an hour. Count drive time for the whole crew.
- Equipment by the hour. Chipper $35 to $50, bucket truck $80 to $100, chip truck $40, crane by the day plus operator. Fuel is the small part; the payment, insurance, blades and repairs are the rest.
- Disposal. Chips by the yard, or a flat dump fee per load. Logs left on site are free; logs hauled cost a truck and a dump.
- Difficulty. Rigging over a roof, working around a service drop, a back yard with no machine access. These multiply the time. Level 2 adds 15%, level 3 adds 35%, level 4 adds 60% or more.
- Overhead. Insurance, yard, phone, software, ads, your own estimating time. Divide your monthly overhead by billable crew hours and put that on every hour.
Worked example: two dead oaks near a driveway
Three-person crew, six hours on site, 90 minutes of drive time round trip. Chipper four hours, stump grinder two hours, chip truck six hours. A fence and landscaping to protect.
| Labor: 22.5 crew hours × $45 loaded | $1,012 |
| Equipment | $470 |
| Fuel, dump fees | $125 |
| Difficulty level 2, +15% of direct cost | $241 |
| Overhead: 22.5 hours × $20 | $450 |
| Total job cost | $2,299 |
|---|---|
| Quote at 30% margin, rounded up | $3,300 |
A homeowner site would have told this customer to expect $1,500 to $3,000. If you quote $2,600 to "stay competitive," you earn $301 for three people and a full day of equipment. That is an 11.6% margin, and one broken chipper blade turns it into zero.
Where the consumer number comes from, and why it is low
Published ranges are averaged across every kind of operator: the insured company with a bucket truck and the guy with a pickup and no comp policy. The bottom of every range is the uninsured guy. You are not competing with him on price; you are competing on being there next year. Quote from your cost and let the range be someone else's problem.
Three pricing rules that hold up
- Never quote below your minimum job charge. Rolling a crew and a chipper costs $300 to $500 before the first cut. A $250 tree is a loss.
- Price difficulty up, not down. The hard jobs are the ones your competitors cannot do. They carry the highest margin, not a discount to win them.
- Watch revenue per crew hour. Two $3,000 jobs are not equal if one takes 20 crew hours and the other 30. Over a season, this number tells you which work to chase.