Tree Removal in Winston-Salem

Size sets the bracket and access sets the rest. Under thirty feet is commonly $250 to $700. Thirty to sixty feet is usually $700 to $1,700. Sixty to eighty feet, which is where most mature neighborhood oaks sit, runs about $1,700 to $3,800. The largest tulip poplars and old white oaks, above eighty feet, run $3,800 to $8,000 and beyond when a crane is needed. A tree standing alone in a back field with a clear drive to it is a fraction of the cost of the same tree over a slate roof and a driveway. The quote is free and it comes in writing.

For a tree standing entirely on your own residential property, no. Winston-Salem regulates trees through the Unified Development Ordinance, and the tree preservation requirements in UDO Section B.3-4.2 attach to development projects that need a land disturbing permit, not to a homeowner removing a tree from a private lot. The line that matters is public versus private. Trees in the public right-of-way, the strip between the sidewalk and the street, are city trees. The city Urban Forestry program cares for trees on city property and enforces the tree ordinances, and work on those goes through the city rather than a private crew.

A small ornamental is a morning. A sixty-foot oak in an open yard is most of a day for a crew of three. A large poplar overhanging a house, rigged down piece by piece, is a full day and sometimes two, and if a crane is scheduled the whole job gets compressed into a tighter window because crane time is billed by the hour. Stump grinding is usually a separate stop with different equipment.

Standard scope is that everything leaves: brush through the chipper, trunk wood bucked and loaded, area raked. Two variations save money and are worth asking about. Leaving the trunk wood on site in firewood rounds cuts the haul-away, and oak and hickory are worth burning even if poplar and sweetgum are not. Chips can often be left in a pile for mulch. One thing not to plan around: the city does not collect brush cut by contractors or commercial services, so contractor debris leaves with the contractor.

Not at all. Plenty of removals here have nothing to do with hazard. A water oak dropping limbs onto a new deck, a sweetgum carpeting a lawn in gumballs every fall, a Bradford pear splitting down the middle the way they eventually do, a pine too close to a foundation, a tree blocking the only sunny spot in a yard. Removal is a decision about how you want to use the property, and a healthy tree costs about the same to take down as a dead one, sometimes less because the wood is still sound to climb.