Local Service Pricing

How much does tree removal cost?

In 2024, 99 tree trimmers and pruners were killed at work. Thirty-nine fell. Thirty-nine were struck by something. There are 55,160 of them in the country, and they earn a median of $24.50 an hour, against a median of $24.51 across every occupation in America. Ask how dangerous the job is and you get three different answers from three federal agencies: OSHA says 1 in 1,000, NIOSH says the rate cannot be calculated at all, and BLS, which owns the data, does not publish one.

Every page you will read about this opens by telling you tree work is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics owns that number and it declines to say it, in writing: 'the IIF program goes to great lengths not to frame these occupations as the most dangerous in a particular year'. It goes further, and this is the part that matters: BLS does not publish a fatality rate for tree trimmers at all. The finest grain it rates is the occupation group that contains them, 'Grounds maintenance workers', at 20.9 deaths per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers against 3.3 for all American workers. But that group is 1,048,490 people and only 55,160 of them are tree trimmers, so the rate you are allowed to cite is held down by the 952,640 people mowing lawns inside it. Tree trimmers are 5.3% of the workers in that group and 41.4% of its deaths. We can tell you the published rate understates them. We cannot tell you by how much, because nobody can, and we will not pretend otherwise. What this page does instead is take your quote apart: what the crew's hours actually cost, at your state's published wage, and what is left over. The part that is left over is a bucket truck, a chipper, disposal, and the insurance on that job.

In 2024, 99 tree trimmers and pruners were killed at work. Thirty-nine fell. Thirty-nine were struck by something. There are 55,160 of them in the whole country, and their median wage is $24.50 an hour. The median wage across every occupation in America is $24.51. They earn one cent less than the average American worker to do this.

Every page in this market opens by calling it one of the most dangerous jobs in America. The agency that owns the number refuses to say so. BLS, in writing: "the IIF program goes to great lengths not to frame these occupations as the 'most dangerous' in a particular year." And it does not publish a fatality rate for tree trimmers at all: "fatal injury rates are not calculated for many occupations that have a relatively small number of fatal work injuries and employment." And two other federal agencies contradict each other about it. OSHA publishes a rate: its Tree Care Issues Document says the fatality rate is "estimated at 1 in 1,000 tree trimmers", which is 100 per 100,000, and "nearly 30 times higher than the national average". NIOSH says it cannot be done at all: "rates of occupational injury death, which would support comparisons of risk with other types of work, could not be calculated because the numbers of workers who provide tree care is unknown and cannot be derived from national labor statistics." We do not simply hand you OSHA's number, because we traced where it comes from. The same OSHA document builds it out of "between 35 and 41 fatalities" among "about 41,000 professional tree trimmers and pruners". BLS counted 99 deaths in 2024, and 55,160 tree trimmers. So OSHA's numerator is less than half of BLS's and its denominator is well below BLS's too, it carries no source footnote for either, and OSHA itself calls the research preliminary. Two low numbers partly cancelling is not a figure we are going to repeat as though it were settled. It is a claim OSHA has made, and we tell you that OSHA has made it. What BLS does publish is a rate for the GROUP that contains them, and the group buries them. "Grounds maintenance workers" runs at 20.9 deaths per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers, against 3.3 for all American workers. But that group is 1,048,490 people, and 952,640 of them are landscaping and groundskeeping workers. Tree trimmers are 55,160 of it: 5.3% of the workers, and 41.4% of the deaths. Of the group's 61 fall deaths, 39 were tree trimmers. Of its 62 struck-by deaths, 39 were tree trimmers. So the only rate you are allowed to cite is held down by the people mowing lawns inside it. It understates tree work. By how much, nobody publishes, and neither will we. No federal source prices this job. Tree work lives inside NAICS 561730, "Landscaping Services", a $115.4bn industry of which "ornamental plant, shrub, and tree services" is 10.9%: nearly nine tenths of the trade is not tree work. That line carries dollars and no count, so no price per job can be divided out of it. There IS a billed rate for the class, and we very nearly told you there was not: the Economic Census publishes no hours, but BLS has published them monthly for this exact industry since 2006, and our own sod page already combines the two. It comes to $74.15 per employee-hour. It is a lawn-care rate. Nearly nine tenths of that class is not tree work, and the largest single thing in it is cutting grass, so we will not hand it to you as the price of a tree surgeon. So this page does the one honest thing left. It takes the wage BLS publishes for your state, multiplies it by the crew and the hours you give it, and subtracts that from your quote. What is left is the truck, the chipper, the stump grinder, the fuel, the tipping fee, the workers' compensation premium on that job, the office, and the profit. We cannot split it, and we are not going to imply it is all margin. A subtraction is not an accusation.

§ 01 Your numbers

What you were quoted (leave 0 if you have not asked)

Put your quote in and the page will work out how much of it is the crew's hours, at the median wage BLS publishes for your state. If you have not asked yet, leave it at zero and those cells will say so.

Get more than one quote, and get them in writing. Ask what happens to the wood, whether the stump is included, and whether they are insured for the work, because those three answers explain most of the difference between two prices for the same tree.

Your state

BLS publishes a median hourly wage for tree trimmers and pruners in 39 states, and this select carries all 39. Picking one sets the wage below.

The spread is real: $19.17 an hour in Texas, $36.27 in Oregon. If your state is not here it is because BLS did not publish a figure for it, and a missing cell is not a zero. The national median, $24.50, is the default.

The crew's wage, per hour

This is BLS's published MEDIAN wage for a tree trimmer in your state, and it is yours to change.

It is a median, so half of them earn less. It is also the wage of a tree trimmer, not of the crew leader, the climber with twenty years in, or the person running the crane, all of whom will be dearer. And a firm pays more than a wage: payroll taxes, workers' compensation on one of the country's most dangerous jobs, and the hours the crew is paid for that are not spent on your tree.

People on the job

A removal is rarely one person. There is somebody in the tree and somebody on the ground, and a big tree needs more.

The ground crew is not standing around. They are running the rigging that stops a limb landing on your roof, feeding the chipper, and keeping the drop zone clear. This is the number that turns four hours into twelve billed hours, and it is why two people for four hours is EIGHT worker-hours, not four.

Hours on site (clock time, not per person)

How long they are actually there. The calculator multiplies this by the head count above to get worker-hours, which is what the wages are paid on.

A straightforward removal of a medium tree in an open garden is a morning. A large tree over a house, taken down piece by piece on ropes with a crane, is a day or more and a different job entirely. If you do not know, leave it: what this page is for is the SHAPE of the quote, not a prediction of your tree.

The crew's wages for this job

$294

The crew's wages, at your state's published median$294

See next steps →

§ 02 What the hours cost, and what the rest is buying

Worker-hours (people x hours on site)12

Everything else in your quoten/a

The crew's wages, as a share of your quoten/a

Tree trimmers killed at work in 2024 (BLS)99

Every fatality figure and every wage on this page is BLS's own, read out of BLS's own files, which our puller re-downloads and re-checks on every build. The one derivation we make (deaths per 100,000 workers rather than per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers) is labelled as ours wherever it appears, and it is controlled against BLS's published national rate, which it reproduces to within about one percent. There is no price on this page, because no federal source publishes one.

Recommended next steps

You have not given us a quote, so there is nothing to compare yet. When you do get one, get three, get them in writing, and ask each firm for proof of liability and workers' compensation cover. Insurance is one of the things a firm can decide not to buy, and if somebody is hurt in your garden while uninsured, that becomes your problem.

By the numbers

In 2024, 99 tree trimmers and pruners were killed at work. Thirty-nine fell, and thirty-nine were struck by something.
More
From BLS's Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, Table A-5, which breaks fatalities down by occupation and by what killed the person. Seven more died in transportation incidents and twelve from exposure to a harmful substance or environment. There are 55,160 tree trimmers in the United States.
A tree trimmer's median wage is $24.50 an hour. The median across every occupation in America is $24.51.
More
One cent. That is BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. The state spread is real and wide: $19.17 an hour in Texas, $36.27 in Oregon, and the calculator carries all 39 states for which BLS publishes a figure.
BLS does not publish a fatality rate for tree trimmers, and says plainly why not.
More
BLS gives a general reason for such gaps: 'fatal injury rates are not calculated for many occupations that have a relatively small number of fatal work injuries and employment.' We are NOT going to turn that general caveat into a specific explanation for this occupation, because it does not fit: BLS rated roofers (104 deaths), airline pilots (73) and security guards (65) in the same file, and tree trimmers, with 99, clear both thresholds the file names. Whatever the reason, the gap is real. The finest grain BLS does publish is the occupation group that contains them, 'Grounds maintenance workers', at 20.9 deaths per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers against 3.3 for all American workers. Our data puller re-reads that file on every build and fails the build if a tree-specific rate ever appears, because that would make this page's central sentence untrue and we would otherwise never notice.
That group rate does not describe tree work. It buries it. Tree trimmers are 5.3% of the group's workers and 41.4% of its deaths.
More
'Grounds maintenance workers' is 1,048,490 people, and 952,640 of them are landscaping and groundskeeping workers: the people who mow lawns. Tree trimmers are 55,160 of the group and accounted for 99 of its 239 deaths in 2024. Of the group's 61 fall deaths, 39 were tree trimmers. Of its 62 struck-by deaths, 39 were tree trimmers. So the published rate is held down by the other 94.7% of the group, and it necessarily understates the job you are hiring. By how much, BLS does not say.
Three federal agencies, three different answers. OSHA publishes a rate of 1 in 1,000. NIOSH says the rate cannot be calculated at all. BLS does not publish one.
More
OSHA's Tree Care Issues Document: the fatality rate is 'estimated at 1 in 1,000 tree trimmers', 'nearly 30 times higher than the national average for all workers'. NIOSH, from inside the same government: 'rates of occupational injury death, which would support comparisons of risk with other types of work, could not be calculated because the numbers of workers who provide tree care is unknown and cannot be derived from national labor statistics.' We do not simply repeat OSHA's figure, because we traced it. The same document builds it from 'between 35 and 41 fatalities' among 'about 41,000 professional tree trimmers and pruners', where BLS counted 99 deaths and 55,160 tree trimmers: both of OSHA's inputs sit well below BLS's, it gives no source for either, and it calls the work preliminary. It is a claim OSHA has made and we report it as one. NIOSH's objection, incidentally, is about tree care as an ACTIVITY, which landscapers and loggers and utility crews all perform, and NIOSH is right that you cannot rate an activity. It does not touch the OCCUPATION, which is what this page is about, and which BLS counts in both of the files we use.
Every other page will tell you this is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. BLS, which owns the number, refuses to.
More
Verbatim: 'Since there is no universal definition of dangerous or hazardous, the Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities (IIF) program goes to great lengths not to frame these occupations as the most dangerous in a particular year.' BLS illustrates the trap with elephant trainers: so few people do it that a single death would put them top of the table and a year with none would put them bottom. It is a warning about exactly the sentence the tree-service industry has built its marketing on.
2 more
- No federal source prices the job, and it is not for want of looking.
  More
  Tree work sits inside NAICS 561730, 'Landscaping Services', a $115.4 billion industry of which the 'ornamental plant, shrub, and tree services' line is $12.6 billion, or 10.9%. That line carries dollars and no count of a single job, so no price can be divided out of it. There IS a billed rate for the class, and we almost claimed there was not. The Economic Census publishes no hours for this sector, so our first draft said the denominator did not exist. It does: BLS has published hours for NAICS 561730 every month since 2006, and our own sod page already multiplies them out to $74.15 per employee-hour. But that is a LANDSCAPING rate. Nine tenths of the class is not tree work, the biggest thing in it is mowing, and we are not going to pass a lawn-care rate off as the price of a tree surgeon.
- What is left of your quote after the wages is not profit, and we will not imply that it is.
  More
  It is a bucket truck. A chipper. A stump grinder. Fuel. The tipping fee at the yard. The workers' compensation premium on an occupation that buried ninety-nine people last year. The office. And profit. We cannot split those, and we have no sourced figure for the size of any of them, so we are not going to rank them for you either. What we can say is that the wages are the part we CAN price, and on a typical half-day job they are a few hundred dollars.

Sourced: every fatality figure (BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024), every wage (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, national and by state), and the industry composition (2022 Economic Census product lines). Ours: the crew size and the hours, which are YOUR inputs, and one derivation, below, which is labelled and controlled.

We cut our one derivation, and the page is better without it. An earlier version of this page published "99 deaths among 55,160 tree trimmers is about 180 per 100,000 workers", labelled as ours and "controlled" against BLS's national figure. Both halves were wrong. It divided two different populations. The deaths are counted by BLS's fatality census, which includes the self-employed. The 55,160 comes from BLS's wage survey, which does not: "Does OEWS have occupational employment estimates that include the self-employed? No", in BLS's own words. And BLS lets you measure the gap for this exact job: of 658 tree trimmers killed between 2010 and 2018, 238 of them, 36%, were self-employed. So the numerator counted a third more people than the denominator did. And the control passed because two errors cancelled. We checked our method against the whole American workforce and got 3.26 against BLS's published 3.3, and called that agreement. It was not. Our numerator ran about 3% high and our denominator about 5% high, and they happened to land on opposite sides. Two arbitrary choices cancelling each other out is not a validation. It is a coincidence that looks like one, which is worse. What replaces it is a bound, not an estimate, and it is BLS's own arithmetic. For the published group rate NOT to understate tree work, tree trimmers would have to supply 41.4% of the group's HOURS while being 5.3% of its people: that is, work about thirteen times the annual hours of everyone else in it. They do not. So the published rate understates tree work, and that is the whole claim. We do not tell you by how much, because nobody knows, and the number of people who will confidently tell you anyway is the reason this page exists. And we will not tell you your tree surgeon is overcharging you. There is no sourced price to compare against, so any such comparison would be a comparison to nothing.

Sources: BLS, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, TABLE A-5: fatal occupational injuries by occupation and event, 2024. Tree trimmers and pruners: 99 total, 39 falls, 39 contact incidents, 7 transportation, 12 exposure. Grounds maintenance workers: 239 total, 61 falls, 62 contact incidents · BLS, CFOI hours-based fatal work injury rates, 2024. Grounds maintenance workers (SOC 37-3010): 20.9 per 100,000 FTE, margin of error 1.33. All US workers: 3.3. There is NO row for 37-3013, Tree trimmers and pruners · BLS, 'Using fatality rates to evaluate risk and dangerous jobs'. The source of both quotations: that the IIF program 'goes to great lengths not to frame these occupations as the most dangerous in a particular year', and that 'fatal injury rates are not calculated for many occupations that have a relatively small number of fatal work injuries and employment' · BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, national. Tree trimmers and pruners (37-3013): 55,160 employed, $24.50 median hourly. All occupations: $24.51 median hourly. Grounds maintenance workers (37-3010): 1,048,490. Landscaping and groundskeeping workers (37-3011): 952,640 · BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, by state. The 39 states for which a tree-trimmer median wage is published, from $19.17/hr in Texas to $36.27/hr in Oregon · OSHA, Tree Care Issues Document. The one federal fatality rate published for this work: 'the tree care industry has a high rate of fatalities (estimated at 1 in 1,000 tree trimmers). This fatality rate is nearly 30 times higher than the national average for all workers (reported at 3.5 per 100,000).' Its own inputs, from the same document and with no citation attached to either: 'between 35 and 41 fatalities' among 'about 41,000 professional tree trimmers and pruners'. OSHA calls the research preliminary · NIOSH / CDC, MMWR 58(15), 'Work-Related Fatalities Associated with Tree Care Operations, United States, 1992-2007'. The federal agency that says it cannot be done: 'rates of occupational injury death, which would support comparisons of risk with other types of work, could not be calculated because the numbers of workers who provide tree care is unknown and cannot be derived from national labor statistics.' It counted 1,285 tree-care deaths over the period, an average of 80 a year · Census, 2022 Economic Census product lines by industry (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD). NAICS 561730 Landscaping Services: $115,405,806,000 total, of which 'Ornamental plant, shrub, and tree services' is $12,592,288,000 (10.9%), carrying dollars and no count

How this estimate is calculated

The wage is a MEDIAN, so half of them earn less. And a crew is not all tree trimmers.
More
BLS's $24.50 is the median for the occupation. The climber with twenty years in the trade, the crew leader, and the person operating the crane will all be dearer, and a firm's cost is more than a wage: payroll taxes, workers' compensation on one of the most dangerous jobs it insures, and the paid hours that are not spent on your tree.
The crew size and the hours are YOURS, not a statistic.
More
There is no federal source for how long a tree takes, and we are not going to dress our guess up as one. The defaults (three people, four hours) are a plausible medium removal, and they are there so the page has something to compute. Change them. What this page is for is the SHAPE of a quote, not a prediction about your tree.
Worker-hours, not clock hours. Three people for four hours is twelve hours of wages.
More
This is the mistake that makes tree quotes look mad. You see the crew for half a day and you think 'four hours'. The firm is paying three people for four hours, which is twelve hours of wages, before the truck has turned a wheel.
What is left after the wages is NOT profit, and this page does not treat it as such.
More
It is the truck, the chipper, the stump grinder, the fuel, the tipping fee, the insurance, the office and the profit, all together, and we cannot split them. If any sentence here reads as though the residual were margin, it is a defect and we want to know.
BLS's 20.9 is the group's rate, not the job's, and we do not scale it.
More
We could multiply 20.9 by the ratio of the death share to the worker share and print a tree-specific number. We will not: that would be taking a federal figure, rescaling it against a different denominator, and passing the result off as though BLS had said it. We say the published rate understates tree work, because 5.3% of the workers carrying 41.4% of the deaths permits nothing else, and we stop there.
Eleven states have no published tree-trimmer wage.
More
BLS did not release a figure for them, and a missing cell is not a zero. The 39 states we do carry cover 50,810 of the 55,160 tree trimmers in the country, about 92% of them. If yours is missing, the national median is the honest default.

Frequently asked questions

How much does tree removal cost?

Nobody publishes a national average and we are not going to invent one. Tree work sits inside a $115 billion 'landscaping services' industry of which it is about a tenth, and that line carries revenue but no count of a single job, so no price can be divided out of it. There is a billed rate for the industry that contains tree work, $74.15 per employee-hour, and we publish it on our sod page. It is not a tree rate: nine tenths of that industry is not tree work. What we can do is tell you what is in the quote you have been given: put it in the box above with the crew size and the hours, and the page will work out what the labour actually costs at the median wage BLS publishes for your state. On the page's default job, three people for four hours at the national median wage, the wages come to $294. Whatever your quote is, subtract that and the remainder is the truck, the chipper, the disposal and the insurance. We have no sourced figure for how large that remainder usually is, so we are not going to tell you what is normal. What we can tell you is what it is FOR, and it is not margin: the truck, the chipper, the disposal and the insurance.

Why is tree removal so expensive?

Because of what is in the other half of the quote, and because of what the work is. In 2024, 99 tree trimmers and pruners were killed at work: thirty-nine fell, and thirty-nine were struck by something. There are only 55,160 of them in the country. Insuring that work is expensive, and we have no sourced figure for how expensive, so we will not put one in front of you. Add a bucket truck, a chipper, a stump grinder, fuel, and a tipping fee at the yard. The crew's wages on a half-day job with three people come to $294 at the national median wage, which is likely to be a small fraction of what you were quoted. We have no sourced figure for the size of any of the other lines, so we cannot itemise them and we will not pretend the remainder is profit.

Is tree work really one of the most dangerous jobs in America?

Everyone says so, and the agency that owns the number will not. BLS says, in writing: 'the IIF program goes to great lengths not to frame these occupations as the most dangerous in a particular year', because there is no agreed definition of dangerous and because small occupations produce wild rates. It is stranger than that, and the strangeness is worth knowing, because two other federal agencies flatly contradict each other. OSHA DOES publish a rate: its Tree Care Issues Document puts it at 'estimated at 1 in 1,000 tree trimmers', which is 100 per 100,000, and 'nearly 30 times higher than the national average'. NIOSH says the opposite, from inside the same government: 'rates of occupational injury death, which would support comparisons of risk with other types of work, could not be calculated because the numbers of workers who provide tree care is unknown and cannot be derived from national labor statistics.' And BLS, which owns the underlying data, simply does not publish one. Three agencies, three answers. We do not just hand you OSHA's, because we traced it: the same document builds it from 'between 35 and 41 fatalities' among 'about 41,000 professional tree trimmers and pruners', where BLS counted 99 deaths and 55,160 tree trimmers. Both of OSHA's inputs sit well below BLS's own, it gives no source for either, and it calls the research preliminary. What BLS does publish is a rate for the group tree trimmers sit in, 'Grounds maintenance workers', at 20.9 deaths per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers against 3.3 for all American workers. And that group is 94.7% not tree trimmers. Tree trimmers are 5.3% of its workers and 41.4% of its deaths. So the published rate is an understatement, and how big an understatement is a question nobody has answered.

How much do tree removal workers get paid?

A median of $24.50 an hour, which is one cent below the median wage for every occupation in America ($24.51). It varies by state, and the calculator carries all 39 states BLS publishes: $19.17 an hour in Texas at the bottom, $36.27 in Oregon at the top. It is worth sitting with that for a second. The person going up a dying oak with a chainsaw, in an occupation that lost ninety-nine people last year, is paid the average American wage.

My quote seems high. Am I being ripped off?

We do not know, and we are not going to imply it, because there is no sourced price to compare yours against and a comparison to nothing is worth nothing. What we can tell you is that the labour is a smaller share of a tree quote than most people expect, and the rest of it is real: the truck, the chipper, the stump grinder, the disposal, and the insurance on a job that killed ninety-nine people last year. The useful thing is not to hunt for a small number. It is to get three written quotes, ask each of them for proof of liability and workers' compensation cover, and ask what happens to the wood and the stump. A quote that undercuts the others by half is worth a question, because insurance is one of the things a firm can decide not to buy, and if somebody is hurt in your garden while uninsured, that becomes your problem.

Related calculators

What a locksmith costs

Calculator

What a plumber charges

Calculator