Why a removal is timed in site hours, not feet of tree
Two 70 ft trees can be a 2-hour fell in an open yard or a full day of roping limbs off a roof. Height tells you very little about the rigging, the drop zone, the wires or how far the brush has to be dragged to the chipper. Site hours capture all of it, so the calculator starts there.
Each site hour then carries 5.5 labour hours. Four people on the ground and in the bucket account for most of it. The rest is the drive from the shop and back for the whole crew, dump runs, loading up and the hours lost to delays, spread over the 7 hours on site. That is $357.50 of labour per site hour at $65.
Timing the maple and the spruce before you write a number
Walk the job and split it into pieces you can time. In the example: setup with cones and lawn mats, rigging limbs off the roof and clearing the house drop from the bucket, dragging and chipping brush, felling the spar and loading logs, taking down the spruce by the shed, grinding 2 stumps and the final rake and blow. The roof work alone is half the day.
Call 811 and look for buried lines before you price the stump grinding. A septic tank or a sprinkler line where the stump sits changes how you grind and how long it takes, and that time belongs in the site hours.
A 4-hour job, a 10-hour job and the machine line
Set the site hours to 4 for a smaller removal with the same crew and machines and the price becomes $2,633.13, about $658 a site hour. A 10-hour job comes to $5,598.44, about $560 a site hour. The per-hour figure drops on longer jobs because the tipping fees, the damage reserve and the $330 for the bucket truck, chipper, skid steer and grinder are spread wider.
If a job needs no bucket truck or skid steer, cut that line. With the machine line at zero, the 7-hour example comes to $3,703.28. Do the same with the labour hours per site hour when you send 2 climbers instead of 4 people.
Machine hours and the $4,348 removal in the tree spreadsheet
The $65 break-even rate is the example company's $65.13 per labour hour, rounded. It has to cover the climbers, the groundies, the trucks, insurance and every unpaid hour. The tree service hourly rate page shows how the example gets there, and the free true hourly rate calculator builds yours.
The spreadsheet charges each machine for the hours it actually runs, keeps fuel and wear parts on a price list, adds a cushion, lists the tree job costs owners forget, prints a quote with your terms and tracks each job in a log. Its version of this removal is $4,348. For owner prices on trims, stumps and per-foot pricing, see the tree service pricing guide.