Most quotes people show us from other companies are one number on a scrap of paper. No breakdown. So here's ours, in the open — what a removal actually costs around Rochester in 2026, and what makes one 60-foot maple $1,300 and the identical tree next door $2,400.
The ranges
Full removal in this market runs about $400 to $2,500, with the outliers going higher. By height:
- Under 25 ft — $300–600. Ornamental pear, crabapple, a young maple.
- 25–50 ft — $600–1,200. The bulk of what we do.
- 50–80 ft — $1,200–2,000. Mature street-side maples and oaks.
- 80 ft and up, or hazardous — $2,000–3,500+. Old-growth, storm-damaged, or leaning the wrong way.
Stump grinding is separate: $100–400 per stump, or roughly $2–4 per inch of diameter, with a job minimum so a single 10-inch stump won't come in at twenty bucks. Hardwood grinds slower. An oak or sugar maple stump eats more teeth and more time than a pine of the same width, and the price reflects that.
The six things that actually move the number
1. Height and mass
Not just how tall — how much wood. A 50-foot silver maple with three codominant leaders carries far more tonnage than a 50-foot linden with a single stem. Every extra ton is another rigging cycle.
2. What's underneath it
An open field tree gets felled in one piece. A tree eight feet off a 1900s foursquare on Park Ave, with a slate roof on one side and primary wires on the other, comes down in fifty pieces on ropes. That's the single biggest swing in the whole estimate. Anything near the utility line means a different plan entirely, and sometimes a call to the utility before we touch it.
3. Access
This is the one homeowners never think about, and it's brutal in the older neighborhoods. Corn Hill and the East Avenue district were platted long before anybody owned a chipper. A 34-inch gate means every log gets carried by hand to the street instead of driven out. Backyard tree behind a garage on a narrow city lot? Add hours. Out in Brighton or on the bigger lots toward Avon, we can usually back equipment right up to the trunk and the price drops accordingly.
4. Species and wood hardness
Maples are more than half the street trees around here — Norway, silver, sugar, red. Silver maple is soft and brittle and comes apart fast, which cuts down on cutting time but adds risk overhead. Red oak is dense and heavy and slow. Callery pear splits at the union while you're standing in it. None of that is theoretical pricing; it's how long the crew is in the air.
5. Dead and brittle
A dead tree costs more than a live one of the same size. Sounds backwards. It isn't. Green ash killed by emerald ash borer — first confirmed in the city at Upper Falls Park on St. Paul Street back in 2011 — goes structurally unreliable within a couple of seasons. You can't trust a limb to hold a climber, so it's a bucket or a crane, and that's a different rate. Monroe County has some of the heaviest ash density in the state, so we see a lot of these. Also worth knowing: the county sits in New York's EAB Restricted Zone, so untreated ash wood can't leave the zone. That affects where the debris goes.
6. Haul-away
Chips and logs have to go somewhere. Some people want the rounds left for firewood — that saves money. Some want every splinter gone, the lawn raked, and the driveway blown clean. That's a full truck and a dump fee.
Why you should bundle the stump
The grinder is a separate machine and a separate mobilization. If we bring it the same day the tree comes down, you're paying for the grinding — not for a second crew, second drive, second setup. Booking it two months later costs meaningfully more for the exact same stump. Same logic applies to multiple trees: three removals on one visit price better per tree than three separate appointments.
The permit question, briefly
It changes the timeline more than the price, but it changes both. In the City of Rochester a private tree 6 inches or larger generally needs a permit with a $90 fee — though owner-occupants of a one-family parcel under an acre are exempt, and so are dead, diseased or hazard trees. Neither exemption covers landmark trees or anything in the tree lawn; those belong to the City Forester Division. Brighton runs on Chapter 175 and its Woodlot Protection District, where parcels over an acre and trees over 5 inches get scrutiny. Brockport only regulates public and right-of-way trees. Canandaigua is currently the same, though a notification ordinance has been floated. Don't assume your neighbor's answer applies to your address.
If you want a real number instead of a range, we'd rather look at it. Photos help, but the gate width and the wire clearance are things we measure standing in the yard — send us the address and we'll come out. And if the tree in question is a big silver maple you've been ignoring since the last ice storm, put it near the top of your list. March 1991 is still the reason half of this town flinches at freezing rain.