About StumpCostCalc

I built this calculator after the fall 2023 derecho took down 40 trees in our area, seven of them in my own backyard. The storm was late September, the ground was still warm, and the first tree-service crew I called quoted me $2,400 to grind the seven oak stumps the cleanup left behind. The second crew quoted $1,800. The third quoted $900. The fourth, a guy named Dale with a 10-year-old Vermeer on a beat-up trailer and 60 five-star reviews on Google, quoted $400.

Same seven stumps. Same yard. Same access, same wood, same week. The spread was $2,000.

I hired Dale. He was done in four hours, left the chips as a free mulch pile, and handed me a handwritten receipt. The quotes from the other three crews were not scams, they were just priced for whatever the market would bear with different overhead structures, different franchise fees, and different lead-gen costs baked in. What I did not have, and what would have saved me a week of phone calls, was a formula I could run myself to know what a fair number actually looked like. So I built one.

How the formula was built

The calculator is grounded in the per-inch rates Angi, HomeGuide, LawnLove, and Fixr publish in their 2024 and 2025 cost-of-grinding reports, cross-checked against the numbers Homewyse returns for a large stump grind, the size-band table BobVila maintains, and the public formula LocalServiceCalculator uses for its grinding calculator. The multi-stump discount math matches what GrindNGoStumps exposes in Wisconsin and what every local crew I called described informally as "the first one pays for the trip, the rest are on sale."

The full formula and its reasoning live on the guide page. I believe in showing the work.

Who this is for

Homeowners pricing out a stump-grinding job who want to know what fair looks like before they call three crews. Also useful for property managers, landscape companies preparing estimates, and DIYers deciding whether to rent a DR Stump Grinder from Home Depot or just hire it out. If you are a tree service pricing a bid, this calculator will tell you roughly what a well-informed homeowner expects to see.

What is next

I am adding more home-improvement cost calculators as I go. If there is a service you want priced, tree trimming, hedge removal, foundation work, drop a note on the contact page and I will put it on the list.

About the ads

This site runs Google AdSense. The ads fund the hosting and let me keep the calculator free, with no lead-gen, no email wall, and no zip-code gate. If you want to support the site, sharing a link with a neighbor who has a stump problem helps more than you might think. Thank you.