What does it actually cost to deliver a forestry project?

Before you can know if $25/acre works, you need to know what a timber cruise, management plan, or sale administration job actually costs you to deliver. Three buckets cover almost everything.

1. Your loaded hourly rate. This is not what you'd like to make. This is not your billable rate. It's what an hour of your time needs to bring in to cover salary, benefits, licensing, insurance, and overhead and covering for bad weather days and vacation.

Once you have your Billable Rate set, then count every hour a project consumes:

• Windshield time, portal to portal

• Field time: cruising, inventory, line verification

• Desk time: GIS, cruise data, writing the plan or report

Desk time is the one people forget. The report doesn't write itself and clicking around on your computer is still eating time, and those hours cost the same as field hours.

2. Mileage at a real rate. Logging roads eat trucks. Use a per-mile figure that covers fuel, depreciation, and your commercial insurance, not the number you'd use for a commute.

3. Consumables. Paint, flagging, signage, data access. Small per job, real over a year.

How to calculate a per-acre rate from your costs

Take a typical 60-acre mixed hardwood tract at a $120/hour internal rate:

• Drive time: 2 hours round trip = $240

• Field time: 4 hours = $480

• Desk time: 4 hours = $480

• Mileage: 100 miles at $0.80 = $80

• Consumables: $20

Base cost: $1,300.

Add a margin. Something goes sideways on enough jobs that pricing at cost is pricing at a loss. 10-20% is a reasonable floor:

$1,300 x 1.20 = $1,560 minimum contract value

Divide by acreage and you have a per-acre rate you can actually defend:

$1,560 / 60 acres = $26 per acre

That's the number the client sees. But you got there by backing in the scope and your costs, not from a hunch. If someone asks how much a timber cruise costs per acre in your area, you can answer with math instead of guessing and praying it works.

Why small tracts lose money at market rates

Here's where flat rates quietly kill margins. Take a 20-acre parcel with the same drive and the same desk work. Most of your costs don't shrink with the acreage. The truck drives the same distance, the report takes the same time.

$1,300 base cost / 20 acres = $65 per acre just to break even.

Charge the "market rate" of $25/acre on that tract and you collect $500 on a job that cost you $1,300. You just paid $800 for the privilege of managing someone else's land. Do that a dozen times a year and it's a real number.

Should you have a minimum project fee for small tracts?

Yes. Something like: $x/acre, with a $y project minimum. Big tracts price normally. Small tracts stop subsidizing themselves out of your pocket.

Landowner-facing pricing guides already tell people to expect minimum charges on small acreage, so this isn't a hard conversation. You can explain it in one sentence, because it's true: the drive and the paperwork cost the same no matter the acreage.

Per-acre vs hourly vs percentage: where does cost-plus fit?

Consulting foresters bill hourly, per acre, per project, or on a percentage of sale value, and the right structure varies by service. This audit isn't an argument for any one of them. It's the layer underneath all of them.

The cost-plus math gives you your floor, the point below which you cannot take the job without losing money. It does not give you your price. Your ceiling is set by what the work is worth to the client. A management plan that gets a landowner into a current-use tax program isn't a document, it's a tax reduction that recurs every year. Price against that, and against your local competition, and land somewhere between the floor and the ceiling based on the job.

But you can't do any of that positioning until you know the floor. Most foresters are negotiating without one.