Land clearing costs

[Arif K.]

I am looking to purchase a .5 acres plot for new construction of a single family home. It is densely packed with trees an I got an estimate of $30K from one contractor. It seems excessive to me. Google's AI tells me:

"For heavily forested land, the cost is between $3,000 and $5,600 per acre"

Does anyone have any experience with clearing land for construction?

[JD Martin]

Quote from @Arif K.:

Yes, it would include removal of trees, grinding every stump and haul away everything. Thanks.

 I don't know where Google got that information but your first quote is going to be a whole lot closer. I think I spent around $3k in 1999 clearing and rough grading (but not excavating) when I built my house and there wasn't any real timber to cut down, just a decent amount of brush and stump hauling, and certainly nothing to grind. If you are having 1/2 an acre of dense trees cut and stump ground, that is going to cost a lot of money. My tree guys, who I use on all my rentals plus my own home, just charge me by the hour on grinding and one decent sized stump with grindings left behind easily runs me $100-150. My guys will drop a 24" tree DBH clean up and haul off for around $500 if they don't have to work around too many obstacles. So take down of that tree plus grinding the stump would be around $600, maybe a bit of a discount if I'm doing multiple at the same location. 

Now if you have trees that make sense for logging, you might be able to swap the timber for cutting, or even just sell the entire stand if there's enough there to make it worth someone's effort. If it's just a weedy abandoned lot, however, probably not. A good timber guy can walk it and tell you if it's worth logging - if they have easy access, enough good sized timber to at least cover a couple or more trips by the hauling truck plus make the mobilization make sense. On half an acre there's probably not enough to do anything with, however.