Stump Grinding Cost Calculator
Stump grinding costs about $275 for a single 24-inch stump in Atlanta, which is $11 an inch of diameter — the unit this trade quotes in. It takes 34 minutes of machine time. The rate looks high on one stump because most of the price is getting the machine to your street: four at once brings it to $6 an inch. And before any of it, the free thing that matters most — grinding counts as an excavation.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost to grind the stump
$279
typical · range $174 to $383 · 1 × 24 in = 24 in of diameter · $12 per inch · 34 min each
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 79% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from bls.gov Aug 2026osha.gov Aug 2026and 1 more, all listed below
The one input that changes the answer for you.
Enough to put topsoil and grass over it and never see it again. It is what almost every quote means by "grinding", and it leaves the root plate in the ground to rot away over the next decade.
A drive or a side gate wide enough for a self-propelled grinder. It chews through a large stump in minutes and it is what makes this job cheap.
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The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
Before anything else: grinding a stump is an excavation
A grinder cuts 5 inches below grade on this setting. The gas line to a barbecue, the irrigation, the cable and the feed to a shed are routinely shallower than people assume. The national call-before-you-dig service marks them free of charge, a few working days ahead — and federal regulation defines “excavation activities” to include the removal of aboveground structures by mechanical means, which is exactly what this machine does. A good crew will have called before they arrive. Asking whether they did costs nothing and is the best question on this page.
Priced by the inch, and why yours looks expensive
- Diameter, all stumps
- 24 in
- Cost per inch
- $12
- Machine time
- 0.6 h
- Grindings produced
- 0.12 cu yd (~1 barrows)
The trade quotes by the inch of diameter, and on a single stump that rate always looks high — because most of what you are paying for is getting the machine to your street, which costs the same whatever it grinds. Doing four at once would take the rate from $12 an inch to $5. If a neighbour has one too, ask for a price on both.
Through a garden gate this job would be $313 rather than $279 — 12% more. Access matters more the more there is to grind, and hardly at all on one small stump.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bring the grinder and take it away1 per visit | 1visit | $95–$260 | estimated±46% |
| Operator time at the machine(8 min + 1.1 min per inch) × depth × access, per stump | 0.6hour | $25–$27 | sourced |
| Stump grinderone machine hour per operator hour | 0.6hour | $23–$63 | estimated±47% |
| Rake, blow and make good0.5 h + 0.2 h per stump | 0.7hour | $31–$33 | sourced |
| Total | $174–$383 | ±38% |
Where these numbers come from
- Grinding a stump is an excavation, in the federal sense
- PHMSA, 49 CFR 192.614 — Damage prevention program requires every operator of a buried pipeline to run a written damage-prevention programme, and defines what triggers it: “excavation activities” includes excavation, blasting, boring, tunneling, backfilling, the removal of aboveground structures by either explosive or mechanical means, and other earthmoving operations. Removing an aboveground structure by mechanical means is exactly what a stump grinder does. The same section says an operator may meet the requirement through a public service programme “such as a one-call system” — which is the footing under the national call-before-you-dig number. It is free, it takes a few working days, and a grinder cuts four to eighteen inches below grade. Retrieved 2026-08-23.
- Why the per-inch rate falls so fast
- One 18-inch stump is $15 an inch; four of them in the same visit are $6. Nothing about the grinding changed — the call-out is simply spread over four times the work. It is the same effect that makes a small countertop or a single drywall patch expensive per unit, and here it is stronger than almost anywhere else on this site, because the actual grinding of a normal stump is half an hour.
- When access matters, and when it does not
- A tracked grinder does in twenty minutes what a walk-behind does in an hour, and a 36-inch garden gate decides which one can come. But how much that costs depends on how much there is to grind: on this single 24-inch stump, going through a gate takes it from $275 to $309 — 13%. On six stumps it is $638 against $856, or 34%. The useful rule: on one stump negotiate the call-out, on several negotiate the access.
- Labour rates by area
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for tree trimmers and pruners and for labourers, adjusted to your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. ⚠️ Tree trimmers and pruners are published for only 192 of the 530 areas in our index; outside those the hour comes from the broader group for the same area. The machine band is our estimate rather than a FEMA figure, for the reason set out on our tree removal page.
- What to do with the grindings
- The default is that they stay, heaped over the hole, and they are perfectly good mulch. ⚠️ They are not topsoil: wood chip pulls nitrogen out of the ground as it breaks down, so grass sown straight into it struggles for a season or two. If you want lawn there this spring, have the chip taken out and soil brought in — and do both, because soil laid over a mound of chip sinks as the chip rots and leaves a dip exactly where the tree used to be.
- The machine is not gentle
- OSHA, Tree care operations covers the equipment used in this trade. A grinder throws stone and wood chip at speed, which is why there is a shield on it and an exclusion zone around it, and why hiring one for a weekend is a real decision rather than an obvious saving. Retrieved 2026-08-23.
- Material prices
- Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.
Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-23.
What this figure does not include
- The roots
- Grinding removes the stump and the top of the root plate. Everything running away from it stays where it is, decaying slowly. A large root lifting a path or a driveway is a separate excavation job, and taking it out is usually more disruptive than the stump ever was.
- Full stump excavation
- Digging the stump and root plate out whole with a machine is a different job: it needs an excavator, it leaves a crater that has to be filled and compacted, and it costs several times a grind. It is only worth it where something structural is going on that exact spot.
- Felling the tree
- This page assumes the stump is already there. Taking a standing tree down is priced by our tree removal calculator, and most crews quote the two separately because they are two visits with two machines.
- Anything the grinder cannot see
- Old fence wire grown into the trunk, embedded nails, buried rubble and rock all destroy grinder teeth, and a set of teeth is not cheap. Crews price for normal wood and charge extra when they hit metal, which is fair and worth agreeing in advance.
- Replanting in the same spot
- Even a deep grind leaves the ground full of decaying wood, and a new tree planted straight into it struggles for years. Planting a few feet away is free; excavating properly for a replacement in the same hole is not, and it is not priced here.
Questions people actually ask
How much does it cost to grind a 24 inch stump?
About $275 in Atlanta on its own, in a range of $170 to $380. That works out at $11 an inch of diameter, which is the unit this trade quotes in, and it looks high because most of what you are paying for is getting the machine to your street rather than the grinding itself — about half an hour of it. The rate falls fast with volume: four 18-inch stumps in one visit are $449, or $6 an inch, against $15 for a single one. If a neighbour has a stump too, ask for a price on both.
How long does it take to grind a 3 foot stump?
About 48 minutes of machine time with open access — roughly eight minutes to set up and position, then a little over a minute per inch of diameter. A 12-inch stump is 21 minutes and a 48-inch one is 61. Two things stretch that. Grinding deep enough to plant in the same spot, twelve inches or more rather than the usual five, takes it to 58 minutes on a 24-inch stump. And access: through a standard garden gate a tracked machine will not fit, so a walk-behind grinder does the same work in about half again the time. Add the travel either side and even a big stump is a morning rather than a day.
Is it cheaper to grind or remove a stump?
Grinding, by a wide margin, and it is not close. Grinding this 24-inch stump is $275: a machine chews the wood into chip in half an hour and leaves the root plate to rot away underground. Full removal means an excavator digging the stump and its roots out whole — a machine on a trailer, two to four hours of it, a crater several feet across that has to be filled and compacted, and the stump itself hauled away. It runs to several times the price and it leaves you with a hole where the lawn was. The only reason to do it is when something structural is going on that exact spot: a foundation, a pool, a retaining wall. For a lawn, a flower bed or a patio, grinding is the answer.
Can you grind a stump yourself?
You can hire a walk-behind grinder for a day and it is genuinely doable on a small stump, but three things are worth knowing first. The hire plus the trailer often comes to a real fraction of a quoted job for one stump, because the quote is mostly travel anyway — the saving is smaller than it looks. The machine throws stone and wood at speed and is one of the machines OSHA covers under tree care operations, so the shield, the eye protection and the exclusion zone are not decoration. And most importantly: grinding is an excavation. Call the national dig line before you start, free and a few working days ahead, because the gas line to a barbecue or the feed to a shed is usually shallower than the four to six inches you are about to cut through.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 23 August 2026, not invented.
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