How Much Does It Cost to Have Leaves Removed?

How much does it cost to have leaves removed? If you’re looking to hire out your leaf removal, you’re probably interested in the answer.

This is a common question for homeowners, but not a simply answered one. The truth is, there’s a huge number of factors that impact the cost of leaf removal, like your yard, location, and more. In this guide, we’ll talk about how much, on average, you can expect to pay for leaf removal. Then we’ll break down the different factors that can affect the price of leaf removal one by one.

Let’s dive right in!

How Much Does It Cost to Have Leaves Removed, on Average?

On average, leaf removal in the United States costs about $350.¹ However, there’s a large range of possible costs, anywhere from about $150 and $550.

A typical leaf removal job will include gathering up the leaves across your lawn or garden, then bagging them. The company will then usually either haul off the bags of leaves or leave them at the curb for the next trash pickup.

So why the large range of prices? Well, not every leaf removal looks the same. The price depends on the exact services rendered by the company, the difficulty of the job, how long the job takes, and much, much more. Let’s take a look at the different factors that affect leaf removal costs individually.

Factors That Impact the Cost of Leaf Removal

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Lawn Size

One of the most obvious factors that affect leaf removal cost is the size of your lawn. After all, a larger lawn requires more work to clear and will usually have more leaves to haul off.

Most leaf removal costs between $600 and $700 per acre, though the range of costs can be as wide as $400 to $1,000 per acre. For context, the average home lot is about 1/6 or 1/5 of an acre, so most homeowners are looking at between $75 and $200 for their lot.

Trees and Other Obstructions

The size of the lawn isn’t the only impact that the physical landscape can have on the price of leaf removal.

If there are a lot of obstructions, like trees and large rocks to work around, that is likely to increase the cost. That’s especially true if the positioning of the obstructions makes them trickier to clear leaves around with the equipment used for the rest of the lawn. If you’d like leaves cleared from within flower beds or around bushes, that can also increase the cost.

Region

Image courtesy of Pixabay

The area of the country that you live in will also impact costs. If you live in an area that’s more forested, expect to spend more on leaf removal than if you lived in the plains, regardless of the number of trees that are actually in your yard.

For example, leaf removal in wooded Vermont costs between $230 and $480 on average. On the other hand, in the plains of Nebraska, leaf removal is more likely between $140 and $360.

Mulching or Bagging

Once all the leaves are gathered up, you can usually have them either mulched or bagged.

If you go with the former, you can expect to be charged $70 to $100 for the service. That’s a decent chunk of money, but it can actually save you over buying mulch for your garden. If you’re looking to save money, this is a method you can probably do on your own, too.²

If you opt to have the leaves bagged, you can usually then choose between having the company haul the leaves off or having the company leave them so you can deal with the leaves yourself. Having the company take them will usually result in a recycling fee of about $30 or about 15% to 25% of the cost of raking. There’s not usually an extra fee for just bagging the leaves, but if you plan on having your waste management company take them, check to see if they have a fee of their own for leaf disposal.

You can also rake or blow leaves yourself and have the company come out only to bag, mulch, or haul off the leaves. This can be a good way to save money if you find dealing with the gathered leaves to be the biggest headache in dealing with fallen leaves. This is especially true if you’ve invested in good leaf removal equipment, like a lawn sweeper.

Additional Services

Image courtesy of Pixabay

On top of the standard services described already, most companies offer additional services that you can have the crew perform while they’re servicing your yard.³ These can include all kinds of services like gutter cleaning, lawn care, hauling off other yard waste, tree trimming, pickup of other debris like sticks and rocks, hedge pruning, and more.

It’s generally a good idea to get your gutters cleaned at the same time if you have room in your budget. Be careful about adding too many extra services though. The additional costs add up fast. You don’t want to find yourself shocked and overwhelmed by a high price on your final bill.

Time of Year

Finally, leaf clean-up is definitely a seasonal business. Expect to pay far more, up to twice as much, for leaf removal in the fall compared to in the spring. There are, after all, a lot more leaves in the fall.

To spread the cost around, you may want to get just leaf removal done in the fall and let any other lawn and garden services that you can wait until spring.

Final Thoughts

Raking leaves is a pain, sometimes quite literally. Blowing them isn’t necessarily much better. And once you’ve gotten your leaves all piled up (and let the kids or dog jump play in them for a bit), you’ve got to actually do something with them. They’ve got to be mulched or bagged, and you may also need to take them somewhere for them to be disposed of.

So, if you have the dough to spend, it’s definitely worth it to just avoid the hassle and have a professional come out to take care of it. Hopefully, the information we’ve given here has helped you estimate how much you should expect to spend on leaf removal.

Article Sources

Home Life Daily uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.