Land clearing
No survey separates land clearing on its own, so this page shows Sitework's figures as the nearest comparable trade, labelled as derived, and lists 6 mechanisms that cost land clearing contractors money and the step that fixes each.
No survey separates land clearing, and it isn't one of the 48 trades in the SPM reference. The figures on this page are Sitework's, the nearest comparable trade that's in it, and every table and export labels them as derived. They describe a trade that works like this one, not land clearing itself. Use them to find the neighbourhood, then let your own job costing be the answer.
Land clearing by revenue band
| Metric | $1M–$5M | $5M–$10M | $10M–$25M | $25M–$50MModeled | $50M–$100MModeled | $100M–$500MModeled | $500M+Modeled | CFOS target at $1M–$5M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overhead | 15% | 14% | 13% | 12% | 11% | 10% | 9% | 14% |
| Gross margin | 18% | 20% | 22% | 24% | 26% | 27% | 28% | 24% |
| Net profit | 3% | 6% | 9% | 12% | 15% | 17% | 19% | 10% |
| Metric | $1M–$5M | $5M–$10M | $10M–$25M |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overhead | 14% | 13% | 12% |
| Gross margin | 24% | 23% | 24.5% |
| Net profit | 10% | 10% | 12.5% |
Modeled extension of the survey curve, not reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker. That applies to the 4 bands above $10M to $25M, and no CFOS target is published for them.
Gross margin and overhead come from CFMA, Jones Maresca and SPM's own trade data, because those are the figures those sources report by trade and size. Net profit is calculated from them as gross margin minus overhead, so the three rows tie. That makes it an operating profit figure: what is left before interest, other income and expense, and the tax planning choices owners make, such as bonuses, depreciation methods and retirement contributions.
Surveys report net income before taxes after those items, so a reported net can run below the figure here. At the typical contractor the difference is small: CFMA's 2025 medians are 7.1 percent before interest and taxes and 6.7 percent net income before taxes. It grows with size. Against the separate measured net profit dataset, the calculated net runs 0.8 points higher at $1M to $5M, 2.2 points at $5M to $10M and 3.5 points at $10M to $25M, because the gross margin and overhead rows change faster with size than reported net profit does.
Above the $10M to $25M band the gross margin and overhead rows are a modeled extension of the same curves. They have not been reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker, and the calculated net there runs well above survey medians, so read those bands as a model and not as a survey result.
Run On CFOS. Run On CFOS Trade Benchmark Reference: Land clearing. 2026. Sulphur Prairie Operations, LLC. https://runoncfos.com/trades/land-clearing. CC BY 4.0.
Figures on this page were last revised 2026-08-21. Published under CC BY 4.0, which permits reuse of any figure here, including commercially, as long as the credit above travels with it. The same figures in machine-readable form: /benchmarks.json.
Trade level gross margin and overhead come from figures CFMA, Jones Maresca and other sources publish, and Run On CFOS derives net profit as gross margin minus overhead. The CFOS targets beside them are from the book CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System, published with the full reference at runoncfos.com.
- 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker, Executive Summary, Construction Financial Management Association, 2024.
- 2025 Construction Financial Benchmarker, Executive Summary, Construction Financial Management Association, 2025.
- 2025 Performance Benchmarks, Construction Companies, Jones Maresca and Company, 2025.
- Run On CFOS Trade Benchmark Reference, Sulphur Prairie Operations, LLC, 2026.
Sourcing and method: the methodology page.
Which bands are measured. The 4 bands above $10M–$25M extend the survey curve further out and have not been reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker. How every figure was built is explained on the methodology page.
6 problems specific to land clearing
On federally funded or permitted work, tree removal is locked into a winter window, and missing it slides a job you already bid, staffed, and financed into next year. Your burn permit is a line in your bid that a county can pull on a Tuesday morning, leaving you with a grinder, a truck line, and tipping fees that were never priced. You walked it in November with the leaves down and got there in June to a different tract, and the difference between those two is yours to absorb. A rotor bearing lets go, the machine is down two weeks, and the payment, the insurance, and the shop time keep billing while revenue stays at zero.
Each one below points at the item, the unit, the clock, or the party that makes it a land clearing problem, and it says which step fixes it.
| Mechanism | Why it's specific to this trade | Step |
|---|---|---|
| October to March Is the Only Window You Get | Every trade on the job deals with schedule slips. Land clearing is the only one whose permission to work is written by a wildlife agency and expires on a fixed date, because the restricted activity is the work itself, putting trees on the ground. A framer who starts late still starts, while you can't touch a restricted tract between April and September at all, so the slip runs to the rest of the season rather than a few weeks. | Project management |
| A Burn Ban Can Rewrite Your Disposal Cost Overnight | Other trades price a material and then buy it. Land clearing prices a disposal method that exists only as long as a permit stays valid, and that permit is controlled by an agency with no contract with you and no stake in your schedule. Grinding and hauling the same acre can cost several times what burning it costs, which means the method is the price. | Project management |
| You Bid Acres, the Tract Decides the Machine Hours | A takeoff off a drawing doesn't change once the drawing is issued. A clearing bid estimates how much machine time the woods will take, and you make that estimate from the outside of the woods, on a tract that keeps growing between the walk and the mobilization. The unit you sell, the acre, has no fixed relationship to the unit you spend, the machine hour, and nothing in the contract ties them together. | Estimating system |
| The Mulching Head Is Your Longest Lead Item | Most subs can throw a second crew at a job when a tool fails. Your crew is the machine, and a replacement takes months to get here, so one failed rotor bearing takes your whole production capacity offline at once. The wear is also continuous and predictable in hours, which means you're accruing a real cost on every acre whether or not anyone writes it down. | Equipment cost basis |
| No One Pays for the Third Trip Back to the Tract | The trade that goes first is the only one that installs the site's erosion control and then watches twenty other crews treat it as a driveway for a year. Each remobilization has a real lowboy and setup cost that a per acre number never accounted for. You're the operator on record for the first disturbance, so those repairs get treated as your obligation rather than someone else's damage. | Project management |
| Finished in March, Retention Releases Next Winter | Retention is a slice of your contract held against a completion date you can't influence. Clearing is the first scope on the ground, so the stretch between your last day and the project's last day is the widest on the job, and it repeats on every project you take. A routine contract term turns into a permanent block of your cash parked inside other people's buildings. | Software and bookkeeping alignment |
Other civil and earthwork trades
What owners ask
What gross margin should a land clearing contractor run?
No survey reports land clearing on its own, so there's no figure of its own to give you. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Sitework, which runs 18% gross margin at $1M–$5M. That's the number this page shows, labelled as derived. Treat it as the neighbourhood, because land clearing can run above or below it.
Where do the figures on this page come from?
From Sitework. In the surveys land clearing rolls into 238910 Site Preparation, which mixes it with several other trades, so the reference pairs it with the nearest trade it does measure. Gross margin and overhead are that trade's, and net profit is calculated as gross margin minus overhead, so the three tie out. Every table and every export says "Derived from the nearest comparable trade."
What costs a land clearing contractor the most money?
October to March Is the Only Window You Get. On federally funded or permitted work, tree removal is locked into a winter window, and missing it slides a job you already bid, staffed, and financed into next year. That's one of 6 on this page, and 3 of the 6 resolve to step 06, project management.
Which steps does land clearing keep pointing to?
step 06 project management on 3 of them, step 04 estimating system on 1 of them, step 02 equipment cost basis on 1 of them, step 05 software and bookkeeping alignment on 1 of them. That distribution is the install order for this trade, because the step with the most mechanisms is the one holding the most money.
What should a land clearing contractor use instead?
Work the mechanisms on this page first, since they're specific and actionable. For a rough sense of the economics, read the civil and earthwork group, which is the nearest published context. Your own job costing beats any industry average once step 01 is installed.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, and CONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for land clearing contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.