Brush Hog Pricing Calculator: Bush Hogging and Field Mowing Per Acre
Price bush hogging and field mowing per acre from cutter width, ground speed, growth height, terrain, obstacles and float time, with your own machine rate and job minimum.
How this is calculated
The production half is machine arithmetic, and both constants in it are definitional: there are 5,280 feet in a mile and 43,560 square feet in an acre. Multiply the cutter width by the ground speed and you have the ground covered per hour; divide by an acre and you have acres per hour. The difficulty settings then slow the machine down rather than marking the price up, which is why the per-acre figure falls out of the time instead of being typed in.
theoretical = widthFt x speedMph x 5280 / 43560 (= width x speed / 8.25)
effective = theoretical x fieldEfficiency / (growth x terrain)
cutHours = acres / effective
extras = obstacles x minutesEach / 60 + edges + setup
onSite = cutHours + extras
travel = float + loading (billed share: travel x floatBillPct)
machine = (onSite + billedTravel) x chargeRate
subtotal = machine + mobilizationFee + towMiles x costPerMile
perCut = max(subtotal, jobMinimum)
perAcre = perCut / acres (a readout, not a rate card)
paidHours = onSite + travel
cost = paidHours x costRate + towMiles x costPerMile
margin = (perCut - cost) / perCut
annual = perCut x cutsPerYearWorked example, the one the tests pin. Ten acres of waist-high grass on rolling ground, a 6 ft cutter at 5 mph, 80 percent field efficiency. Theoretical rate 3.64 acres an hour; after efficiency and the 1.25 growth and 1.15 terrain multipliers, 2.02 acres an hour, so 4.94 hours of cutting. Eight obstacles at 3 minutes, half an hour of fence line and a quarter hour of setup add 1.15 hours, giving 6.09 hours on the field. At a 125 machine-hour rate that is 761.43. Add half of 1.5 hours of float and loading at the same rate, 93.75, and 40 towed miles at 0.85, which is 34. The cut prices at 889.18 before tax, or 88.92 an acre, and it consumes 7.59 paid hours once the whole float is counted.
The multipliers are editable starting points, not market data. The tool seeds 1 / 1.25 / 1.6 for light growth, heavy grass and brush, and 1 / 1.15 / 1.35 for open, rolling and rough ground. They say only that a stand of saplings takes longer per acre than knee-high grass. They are not a survey, not a published benchmark and not a price band, and every one sits in a box you can overwrite from your own timed jobs. Every currency field starts empty for the same reason: the per-acre numbers in circulation trace back to forum threads quoting each other, so this tool will not repeat them.
Growth height and ground speed are coupled. The multiplier is only half the story: tall or woody material has to be taken slower, and cutting brush at open-field speed is how a gearbox, a driveline or a set of blades gets destroyed. The tool flags the combination when the speed you entered is faster than the stand will tolerate, but the operator manual for your cutter is the authority on speed, PTO safety and slope limits, not this page.
Where the two rate boxes come from. The charge-out rate is your decision; the cost per machine-hour is not a guess. Derive it from what the tractor and the cutter actually cost you to own and run in the equipment cost per hour calculator, then bring it back here so the margin line means something. If you want to sanity-check the production half against your own mowing records, the mowing time estimator computes acres per hour from the same width-and-speed arithmetic, and the production rate job time estimator is the general version for any crew task you have timed.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
What this prices, and what it deliberately is not
Bush hogging is acreage work: a tractor and a rotary cutter knocking down pasture, fence lines, ditch banks, hunting lanes, vacant lots and fields nobody has touched in two years. The job is won or lost on three numbers, and only one of them is the acreage. The other two are how slowly the stand forces you to travel, and how long the tractor spends on a trailer instead of in the field.
This is not residential mowing sold by the acre. A finish deck on a weekly lawn is a different machine, a different customer and a different quote, and it has its own tool in the lawn care pricing calculator. The two pages share a word and nothing else: use that one for maintained turf on a cycle, this one for rough-cut ground once or twice a year.
The production half is arithmetic, and the constants are definitional
There are 5,280 feet in a mile and 43,560 square feet in an acre. Cutter width times ground speed gives the ground covered per hour, and those two constants turn it into acres per hour. Nothing about that number is a market claim, which is why the page shows the whole expression rather than a rate.
What follows it is judgement, and the page keeps it visible. Field efficiency knocks the theoretical rate down for overlap, headland turns and the stops that never make it into a plan. The growth and terrain multipliers then slow the machine further: a stand of saplings takes longer per acre than knee-high grass, and a wet ditch bank takes longer than an open field. Those multipliers are seeded as editable starting points, not as market facts, and the first few timed jobs should replace them. The mowing time estimator runs the same width-and-speed arithmetic if you want to check the production half on its own, and the production rate job time estimator generalises it to any crew task you have timed.
Every money field starts empty on purpose
Search for a per-acre bush hog rate and page one is forum threads. Follow the numbers in them and there is nothing underneath: no regulator, no trade body, no published survey. Under this site’s cite-or-omit rule that means this tool ships none of them, and every currency box opens blank.
The dollars-per-acre line the tool reports is not an exception to that. It is a readout of the job you just described, a division at the end of the arithmetic, and it changes the moment the field, the cutter or the stand changes. Read it to sanity-check the quote you built, never as a rate to quote the next field from.
Float time is the line that decides the season
A tractor on a trailer earns nothing. Acreage work is scattered, the stops are far apart, and the float plus loading on a small field can outrun the cutting itself. The tool keeps both halves honest: float and loading always land in your paid hours, so the per-hour return and the margin count them, while only the share you nominate lands in the customer’s price. If you cover it with a flat mobilization fee instead, that box is there too, and the tool stops warning you about absorbed travel once one of the two is set.
When the trailer time exceeds the field time, the page says so outright. That is the shape of job a minimum charge exists for.
Growth height is a speed limit before it is a multiplier
The coupled effect on this page is mechanical rather than financial. Tall or woody material has to be taken slower, so selecting brush should pull your ground speed down, not just push the price up. Cutting saplings at open-field speed is how a gearbox, a driveline or a set of blades gets destroyed, and no amount of per-acre margin covers that repair. The tool flags a ground speed that looks fast for the stand you chose, but the authority on working speed, PTO safety and slope limits is the operator manual for your cutter and tractor, not this page.
The cost side of the margin check
The margin block stays hidden until you supply a cost per machine-hour, because without it the biggest half of the job cost is unknown and a margin computed off the mileage line would flatter every quote. That cost is not a guess either: the equipment cost per hour calculator builds it from what the tractor and the cutter actually cost you to own, fuel and maintain, which is the number that decides whether an acre at your price is worth cutting at all.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. Estimate only, not a binding quote.