Plan a land clearing project

A structured way to work out what you are buying before anyone quotes it. Nothing you enter is saved or sent, and nothing here recommends a method, a price, or a contractor.

Published by the Land Clearing Authority editorial team · Last revised 2026-07-29 · Editorial policy · Corrections

Most clearing projects go wrong before a machine arrives, because the owner and the contractor were picturing different jobs. This works through the same ground three times: what you can observe, how much of it there is, and what you think you want done. It records what each observation does not settle, and produces a summary you can print and take into the conversation.

Private by construction

Everything you enter stays in this browser tab. There is no account, no database, no upload, and nothing written to your device — no cookie, no local storage. Closing the tab discards it.

There is also very little here to leak. The planner never asks for your address, never accepts a photograph or a file, and never accepts a sentence you type: every answer is a choice from a fixed list, and none of those choices is transmitted anywhere. Usage is counted as a step number and a tally of how many conditions were ticked — never which ones.

Your answers are not carried into the request form either. Start that separately and use the printed summary as your own reference.

What it will not do

It produces no price, no duration, no method recommendation, and no conclusion about permits, property boundaries, wetlands, buried utilities, timber value, or whether your land can be cleared. Land Clearing Authority is an independent educational platform. It is not a contractor, surveyor, engineer, forester, environmental consultant, utility locator, or permitting authority, and it has not seen your property.

This one settles

What your project actually consists of, and what you need to gather before asking anyone to price it.

If that is not the question you arrived with, one of these is the better place to be. They are not ranked — they settle different things.

The whole gate sequence — For when you want the order rather than one answer: which decisions have to be settled, in which sequence, and which of them change the price of everything downstream.
Which trade should quote this — For when you are not sure whether the job belongs to a forestry mulching operator, an excavation contractor, a tree service or a grading crew. Asking the wrong trade produces a quote that is priced correctly for work you did not want.
The site visit checklist — For when a contractor is coming out and you want the visit to produce a real scope rather than a follow-up. Ordered so the items with a lead time — locates, surveys, permits — come first.

What the land has to do afterwards

Every other decision on a clearing project is downstream of this one. Nothing here is a recommendation, and none of these answers leaves your browser.

What will the ground be used for?Roughly how large is the area to be cleared?Where are you in the process?When would you want the work done?

Start a contractor request

Nothing you enter here is saved, stored, or sent anywhere. It lives in this browser tab only, and closing the tab discards it. Your answers are not carried into the request form — start that separately, and use your printed summary as the reference.

Why finishing it shortens the site visit

A contractor standing on unfamiliar ground spends the first part of a visit establishing facts the owner already knows. How dense the cover is, how thick the brush is, the diameter of the largest trunk out there, roughly how many stumps, and how steep it gets are the five answers that decide which machine goes on the trailer — and they are the same answers that move the price per acre, so a quote written without them carries a margin for those answers turning out badly. Bringing them in writing leaves the visit for the questions only somebody standing on the parcel can settle.

Naming the work you have in mind matters for the same reason, which is why the planner records it as a request rather than a specification. Two owners who both say “clear it” frequently mean total removal and selective thinning. Writing down which one you meant is the difference between quotes you can compare and quotes that were priced against different jobs. Where you have not measured something, saying so is worth more than a guess: a band invented at a keyboard reads on the printout as a fact, and gets priced like one.

What sits behind the questions

The planner is generated from two registries rather than hand-written, which is why every question carries the same discipline. 36 project conditions and 33 work methods are declared as typed entities, each one required to state what it does not establish before it can be published at all.

Decode the words on an estimate once you have quotes in front of you
Prepare for a site visit — what to measure, mark, and photograph first
Compare estimates side by side on scope rather than on price
The five decision gates every scope decision here runs through