Land clearing cost

Clearing land costs $1,500 to $6,000 an acre, typically around $3,500. Light brush and saplings sit at the bottom of that range and a mature wooded acre at the top. Clearing a wooded half-acre for a house pad, driveway and yard therefore typically runs $2,500 to $5,000 once getting the machine to site and grubbing the house footprint are included.

How thick the growth is decides the per-acre rate. What happens to the material afterwards, and whether the stumps come out, decides the final bill.

What it costs

Cutting a single large tree near a house is not land clearing. It is priced tree by tree, and the tree removal guide covers it.

Forestry mulching or bulldozing

These are the two main methods and they produce very different ground.

Forestry mulching uses a tracked machine with a rotating drum of teeth that grinds brush, saplings and trees up to about 8 inches into mulch where they stand. Nothing is hauled, the mulch layer protects the soil from erosion, and the root systems stay in the ground holding it together. It is fast, typically one to three acres a day in brush, and the cheapest route on most lots.

It leaves stumps at or just below grade and a layer of wood chips several inches deep. That is ideal for trails, pasture, fire breaks, hunting land, views and wooded lots where you want to remove the undergrowth and keep the good trees. It is the wrong finish for a lawn or a foundation.

Bulldozing and excavating pushes trees over with their root balls, piles them, and grubs out stumps. The ground ends up bare, with topsoil disturbed and often mixed into subsoil. The material then has to be burned, ground or hauled, which is where the money goes.

It is the right method where something is being built: a slab, a footing, a driveway base or a septic field all need stump-free ground, because buried wood rots and settles.

Many good contractors combine the two: mulch the whole site, then excavate stumps only on the footprint of the house and drive.

Burning, grinding or hauling the debris

A wooded acre produces hundreds of cubic yards of trunks, limbs and root balls. Getting rid of it is often half of a bulldozing quote.

Burning on site is the cheapest where it is allowed, which is increasingly rare. Many counties ban open burning, others require a permit and a fire department notice, and root balls full of soil burn badly. An air curtain burner, a contained pit with a fan, adds $1,000 to $3,000 but is permitted in more places.

Grinding the piles into mulch with a tub grinder costs more than burning but leaves usable mulch or material that can be spread on site.

Hauling is the most expensive. A 30 cubic yard roll-off at $400 to $800 holds only a fraction of an acre's debris, and landfills charge by weight.

Selling the timber can offset the cost on land with mature hardwoods or pine. A forester can say whether there is enough merchantable timber to interest a logger, which usually means several acres. On a typical residential lot, there is not.

Permits, wetlands and what can go wrong

Wetlands. Filling or mechanically clearing a wetland without a permit can breach the federal Clean Water Act and state wetland laws, and the fines and restoration orders dwarf the cost of clearing. A lot with standing water, cattails, sedges or dark, waterlogged soil may contain a wetland even if it is dry in August. A delineation at $1,000 to $3,000 before a machine arrives is cheap by comparison.

Local permits. Many towns require a land disturbance or grading permit above a threshold, often somewhere between 5,000 square feet and an acre, plus a tree protection or tree replacement ordinance that charges per tree removed. Stream buffers commonly forbid clearing within 25 to 100 feet of the bank.

Erosion. Bare soil on a slope will wash into the road, the neighbor's yard or a creek after the first storm, and that is a fine in most places. Silt fence at $1 to $3 a linear foot and prompt seeding are usually required.

Boundaries. Contractors clear the land they are shown. A survey or at least marked corners before work starts avoids clearing the neighbor's woods, which is an expensive dispute.

Clearing a lot for a new build

A builder usually wants three separate things, and pricing them separately makes quotes easier to compare:

1. The building envelope, cleared, grubbed and stripped of topsoil, typically the house footprint plus 10 to 20 feet all round
2. The driveway and utility corridor, cleared and grubbed to firm subsoil
3. The yard area, which can often be mulched rather than grubbed, and left as woodland where it is not needed

Keep the topsoil. Stripped and stockpiled on site, it saves buying it back at $25 to $60 a cubic yard when the landscaping goes in. After the house is built, the rough site then needs yard grading before any lawn, and the ground around the walls needs the fall covered in the drainage and grading guide.

Mark the trees you want to keep with tape and fence off their root zones, at least to the edge of the canopy. Machines driving over roots kill trees slowly, often two or three years after the house is finished.

Frequently asked questions

Why does a small lot cost so much more per acre to clear?

Because a machine and its operator cost the same to get to site whatever the size of the job. Mobilization of $300 to $1,000 and minimum charges of $1,000 to $2,000 mean small lots cost much more per acre than large ones.

Can forestry mulching take down large trees?

Most mulching heads handle trees up to about 8 inches in diameter, and larger machines up to 12 to 18 inches. Bigger trees are felled with a saw and either mulched in sections or left as logs. Expect the price to rise with the number of large trees.

How long does it take to clear an acre?

Often a single day for light to moderate growth with a mulcher, and three to five days for a wooded acre with excavation, stump grubbing and debris removal. Permit reviews, where needed, take longer than the work itself.

Will clearing the underbrush alone raise the value of the land?

On a residential or recreational lot it often does, because buyers can see the land, the views and the building sites. Removing brush while keeping mature trees generally adds more appeal than clearing everything to bare soil.

Do I need to clear the land again after a year or two?

Brush regrows fast, especially on mulched ground where roots were left in place. Mowing or mulching once or twice a year afterwards at a fraction of the original cost keeps it clear; leaving it three years often means starting over.