You will find websites quoting land clearing at a dollar figure per square metre. Treat that number with suspicion, because it is answering a question nobody asked. Area is the easiest thing to measure and one of the least important things about the job.
Here is what actually sets the price, roughly in order of how much it moves the number.
1. Access, before anything else
The narrowest point between the street and the work area decides which machine can come, how the spoil gets out, and whether the job takes one day or three.
Around a metre of clear width lets a 1.8 tonne excavator with retracted tracks reach the backyard, and it can then load the tipper directly. Drop to 800 mm and the options narrow to a micro machine or a wheelbarrow, and the job can double. Open frontage a machine can drive straight onto is the cheapest case there is.
This is why a compact townhouse backyard in Roxburgh Park can cost more to clear than an open quarter-acre block in Kalkallo, despite being a quarter of the size. There is a separate guide on how to measure your access properly.
2. How much has to leave the property
This is usually the largest single component of a suburban clearing job, and the one people underestimate most.
Cutting and pushing material into a pile is fast. Getting it off your property is not. Every tipper load is a round trip to a transfer station plus a disposal fee, and the machine is not clearing anything while the truck is away. A block with six loads on it costs meaningfully more than one with two, even when the clearing itself is the same morning’s work.
Vegetation is deceptive here. A backyard of chest-high grass and blackberry looks like a small job and produces a startling volume of green waste once it is cut and loaded.
3. What the material actually is
Disposal is charged by weight, and different materials go to different places at different rates.
- Concrete, brick and rubble
- Heavy, but among the cheapest to dispose of because it goes to a recycler rather than landfill.
- Clean soil
- Also heavy, also recyclable — provided it is clean. Soil mixed through with rubbish is neither.
- Green waste
- Bulky and light. Fills the truck long before it troubles the weighbridge, so it is priced by volume in practice.
- Mixed rubbish
- The expensive one. Light, unsortable, and bound for landfill at landfill rates.
The practical consequence: if you can separate a pile of clean concrete or clean soil before we arrive, it usually costs less to remove than the same volume mixed into everything else.
4. Stumps, slabs and anything that has to be broken out
There is a real step change in cost between clearing what is sitting on the ground and removing what is fixed into it.
Stumps get dug out rather than ground down, because grinding leaves a block full of buried timber that will be somebody’s problem when they build or landscape. A mature stump with an established root plate is genuinely slow work. Old concrete has to be broken before it can be loaded, and a slab with reinforcing mesh in it is slower again — the mesh holds the pieces together long after the concrete has given up.
5. Ground and season
Melbourne’s north is heavy clay. In February it is hard and works cleanly. In August it is saturated, and a saturated site is slower, messier, and harder on the lawn you are trying to protect.
If a clearing job can wait for a dry week, it is often a slightly cheaper and considerably tidier job. If it cannot, it cannot — but it is worth knowing that the calendar has an opinion.
6. Distance to the tip
Every load is a round trip, so the drive is part of the price. Work close to Meadow Heights, Broadmeadows or Campbellfield has short runs. Jobs further out carry more travel per load, which is why an operator based near you is usually cheaper than one who is not.
What a quote should include
Ask, and get it in writing:
- Tipping fees — inside the price, not added afterwards.
- Travel and float — getting the machine to site and home again.
- All material leaving site — or, explicitly, which material is staying.
- Levelling — whether the block gets graded flat or just cleared.
- What happens if something is found — a slab under the grass, an unmarked service, a second stump. Not knowing the answer in advance is how a fixed price becomes a variable one.
How to get a quote that does not move
Send four photos: one from the street looking down the access path, one of the narrowest point with a tape measure in it, one of the work area, and one wide shot of the whole block. Add rough dimensions and mention anything you know is buried, concreted or structural.
Almost every unpleasant surprise on a final invoice traces back to something nobody mentioned. A quote given on complete information should be the quote you pay — and if it is not, you are entitled to ask why.
Why there is no price list on this site
Because any number we published would be wrong for most of the people reading it, and the ones it was wrong for in the cheap direction would be the ones who called. Quoting a block sight unseen is guessing, and a guess that has to be corrected on the day is worse for you than no number at all.
What we will do is price it the same day from photos, for free, and stand by the number. Details of what the work covers are on the land clearing page.