Free Tree Service Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most tree crews & arborists bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

A tree bid from the ground and a tree seen from the top are two different jobs. You plan a straight drop, get up there and find the top punky, a seam running down the union, or old cable hardware nobody mentioned, and now it comes out in pieces over a fence.

Ash killed by borers is the reliable one. It looks climbable and it is not, so it turns into a bucket or a crane and a half day you did not price. Grinding runs long when the teeth find what sits under the stump, usually a concrete footing, wire fence grown through, irrigation or a buried pet fence loop.

Access outruns all of it. If the only route out is a narrow gate, every limb travels by hand. Soft ground keeps the chip truck off the lawn. Wind above the canopy ends rigging for the day whatever the forecast promised at six. And anything the utility has to touch runs on the utility's calendar, not on yours, so a service drop over the drop zone can hold a whole crew for a morning.

This is labor and machine time with a thin materials layer, and the paperwork should read that way. Most of what a removal consumes is yours: chain, bar oil, fuel mix, rigging rope and slings, and grinder teeth, which one gritty old stump or one hidden footing can finish in an afternoon.

Real material shows up in the work that is not cutting. Cabling and bracing carries cable, thimbles and brace rods, and lightning protection carries copper, which is priced off a metal that moves, so a quote written in spring is not a quote in autumn.

Planting carries nursery stock, and stock you did not source is stock you cannot stand behind. Injections are dosed off diameter at breast height, so measure the trunk before ordering anything. The item most often short ordered is topsoil for a ground stump. Chips settle and the hole always drinks more than it looks. And equipment is the real material line in this trade: ropes and slings retire on a schedule, saws and chippers eat parts, and none of that is charged to the job it wore out on.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.