How complicated is your project, really?

How this tool reaches its answer

The rules below are the rules the tool evaluates. There is no second copy, no weighting you cannot see, and no scoring model behind the answer. A rule either fires or it does not, and when it fires you are shown the same sentence the code carries.

The reference project

One to five acres of brush and saplings under about four inches, moderate density, on flat dry ground with open access for a full-size machine, cut and left reduced in place, stumps remaining, no grading.

It is the simplest complete clearing job that actually gets bought: one machine, one pass, no material handling, no below-grade work. Everything more complicated than this costs more, and the multipliers say by roughly how much.

How the multipliers combine

Each rule that fires contributes a published low and high multiplier. The low bounds are multiplied together to give the low end of the range, the high bounds to give the high end, and the mid-range figure is the geometric mean of the two. There is no additional adjustment, no weighting you cannot see, and no baseline price stored anywhere in this site.

The published rule set

1. dense-stand — Thick material slows production sharply. The machine covers less ground per hour, and time is what is actually being bought.
2. impenetrable-stand — Ground you cannot walk through takes several times as long per acre as open ground, and the operator is working blind for part of it.
3. mixed-woods — Mixed stands mean varied stem sizes, and the machine has to be sized for the largest ones while spending most of its time on the smallest.
4. large-stems — Stems above the working ceiling of a clearing head have to be felled individually, which is a different operation at a different rate.
5. mature-timber — A stand of mature timber is not an area-priced job at all. It is per-tree work, and area pricing stops being a meaningful way to think about it.
6. chipping — Chipping adds a second machine and the labour to feed it, and the material still has to be gathered before it can be chipped.
7. piling — Piling means gathering material rather than reducing it where it stands, which is a second pass over the same ground.
8. hauling — Removal is three costs, not one: loading, trucking, and the fee at the disposal site. It is usually the largest single difference between two quotes for the same land.
9. stump-grinding — Grinding is a separate operation with its own machine, priced per stump by diameter rather than by area.
10. stump-removal — Extraction is earthwork. It leaves holes to backfill and produces a soil-laden mass that has to go somewhere.
11. grubbing — Grubbing removes root mass across an area and is priced as earthwork by volume. It is the most expensive below-grade option by a wide margin.
12. rough-grading — Rough levelling adds machine time but no survey control, so it sits between clearing and true grading in cost.
13. specified-grading — Grading to a tolerance is earthwork with survey control and compaction. It is a different trade with its own pricing basis.
14. restricted-access — A gate or narrow point caps machine width, which caps production rate. The same acreage now takes a smaller machine considerably longer.
15. difficult-access — Steep, soft, or unformed access can mean a much smaller machine, hand work in places, or building a route before clearing starts.
16. steep-terrain — Slope limits which machines can work, slows every pass, and adds erosion-control obligations that flat ground may not carry.
17. wet-ground — Persistently soft ground narrows the working window, risks rutting, and can mean waiting — which shows up as scheduling cost and sometimes as repair.
18. structures-within-reach — Anything within reach of the work changes the method along that edge: slower, more controlled, and sometimes a different trade entirely.
19. very-small-parcel — Mobilisation is largely fixed. On a very small job it dominates the price, which is why minimum charges exist and why small parcels look expensive per acre.
20. large-parcel-efficiency — Over a large area the fixed mobilisation cost spreads, and production settles into a steady rate. That reduces cost per acre — provided conditions stay similar across the parcel.
21. mixed-terrain-unreliable — Ground that varies a lot across a parcel cannot be priced at one rate. The honest quote divides it into zones, and so should any estimate.
22. unmeasured-stems — The largest stems set the machine class for the whole job. Without them, an estimate is built on the part of the description least likely to be accurate.

What this tool cannot do

• This tool publishes no dollar figures. It has not seen your land, does not know your local disposal fee or contractor rates, and has collected no local price data. A currency figure produced from those inputs would be fabricated.
• The multipliers are planning ranges expressed against a stated reference project. They are a way of comparing complexity, not a quote and not a price anyone has offered you.
• Multipliers compound approximately. Real projects have interactions this arithmetic does not capture, in both directions.
• It cannot account for anything a contractor would see on a site visit, which is frequently the thing that changes the price most.
• Nothing here should be used to negotiate. Use it to understand what you are being quoted for.

This tool does not inspect your property and cannot determine whether a site is safe, accessible, buildable, or suitable for any particular machine. It organizes the questions; a qualified professional answers them on site. This site publishes general planning information. It is not legal, engineering, environmental, forestry, or arboricultural advice, and it is not a substitute for a professional assessment of your property. Platform methodology · Claim boundaries