Can you remove a stump yourself?

Yes, for some stumps. A conifer or fruit tree stump under about 25 centimetres across, in open ground with nothing buried near it, is a genuine weekend job with a mattock and a sharp spade. Beyond that the honest answer gets less encouraging: hiring a stump grinder costs a large slice of what a specialist would charge to turn up and do the whole thing, the machine is the one most likely to injure a DIY user, and the time involved surprises almost everyone. Here are the three routes, what each costs and takes, and where the line sits.

This guide is general information, not legal advice.

Route 1: dig and cut

The oldest method and still the cheapest. You dig a trench around the stump to expose the main roots, sever them with a bow saw or an old chisel, lever with a crowbar to find what is still holding, cut that, and work the stump out. The RHS confirms the stump and main roots of small trees can usually be dug out with a pickaxe and a sharp spade.

You need a mattock or pickaxe, a sharp spade, a bow saw you do not mind blunting on grit, a crowbar, gloves and eye protection. It costs nothing if you own the tools, and takes a couple of hours on a small stump or most of a day on a medium one. On a mature hardwood stump you will stop before it does.

Route 2: hire a stump grinder

The fastest DIY route and the one with the most to go wrong. Costs quoted online for UK stump grinder hire generally sit around £150 to £250 a day, with delivery on top and a damage waiver often added, though those come from comparison sites rather than a local depot, so ring two yards near you. At the smaller end, HSS lists a portable stump grinder and chipper at around £175 excluding VAT with an average hire of three days.

Put that next to our price card, where a single stump under 30cm is £120 to £180 done for you and a 30 to 60cm stump is £180 to £280, and the arithmetic often stops being interesting. Hire makes sense when you have several stumps to do in one hire period, not one.

What a hire shop will want from you:

• A vehicle that can take it. Even the small folding machines are heavy; HSS gives 61kg for its portable unit and still says you need a vehicle at least the size of a truck to collect it. Anything self-propelled needs a trailer and, depending on weight, the right licence entitlement for towing.
• PPE. Hire terms for the portable machine list steel toe protection, gauntlets or rigger gloves and earplugs as a minimum. HSE guidance for mobile stump grinders goes further, listing a safety helmet, hearing and eye protection, protective boots, gloves with reinforced palms and fingers and non-snag outer clothing, plus a first aid kit including a large wound dressing.
• ID and a deposit, usually a driving licence and a card, and fuel, because petrol is not supplied and has to be carried in an approved container.
• A handover, not training. Most depots demo the machine. A demo is not a qualification, and nobody is checking whether you understood it.

Route 3: chemical

Cheap, legal and slow. Garden stump killers are now mostly glyphosate-based, applied to a freshly cut surface or into drilled holes, best used in late summer or autumn while the stump is still drawing sap, and usually repeated. Ammonium sulphamate, the product older gardeners remember using, lost its herbicide approval in the EU in 2008.

A stump killer kills, it does not remove, so in twelve months you still have the stump and now it is drier and harder to dig. The RHS does not support the use of weedkillers either, recommending cultural methods first. The real use case is a species that suckers hard, where killing the root system saves you mowing shoots off the lawn for years.

How long it really takes

A rough guide, by the width across the top of the stump.

Add travel, collection, fuel, cleaning the machine and returning it. A one-day hire is often five hours of usable work.

The safety issues

• Thrown debris. A grinding wheel flings chips, grit and stones sideways at speed. That is what the eye protection is for, and why windows, cars, greenhouses and anyone watching need to be out of the arc or screened.
• Kickback and loss of control. The wheel wants to walk. Taking too deep a bite, letting the machine climb the stump or working on a slope is how people get hurt.
• Buried services. Grinders work at 15 to 30 centimetres below ground, exactly where garden water pipes, shed feeds, telecoms ducts and lighting cable run. Read does stump grinding damage pipes and cables first, and remember the water supply pipe from the boundary into your house is yours to repair.
• Hidden concrete and stone. Old stumps near boundaries often sit alongside a rubble footing, a buried path or a lump of concrete from a long-gone post. Carbide teeth do not like any of it, and you pay for the damage.
• Noise and vibration. Hearing protection is not optional, and hand-arm vibration limits how long you should run a machine in a day.
• Lone working. Nobody should run a grinder with no one else on site. Keep a phone on you, and keep children and pets indoors.

When DIY is sensible, and when it is not

Reasonable to do yourself: a small softwood or fruit tree stump, in open ground, well away from walls, drives and boundaries, with no shed, pond, outside tap or garden light near it, and nothing buried that you know of. Also fine: killing a suckering stump chemically and living with it for a year.

Get someone in: large or wide hardwood stumps; anything within a couple of metres of a house wall, a drive, a boundary wall or a drain run; stumps near known or suspected services; stumps on slopes; a row of hedge stumps, where multi-stump pricing makes professional work cheap per stump; and any stump where the tree might have been protected. Our card prices two or three stumps at about 1.8 times a single stump and four or more at about 2.5 times, usually less than a weekend of hire.

Making the ground good afterwards

Grinding leaves a crater of chippings and soil, and the level drops as the remains rot, so do not turf straight over a full hole and expect it to stay flat.

• Rake out most of the chippings if you want to plant. Woody material dug into soil causes temporary nitrogen lock-up, which the RHS notes can last up to two years. On the surface as a mulch it is fine.
• Fill with good quality peat-free topsoil, tread it down firmly, rake level and leave it a few weeks to settle before seeding or turfing.
• Expect to top it up once, two or three months later.
• Spare chippings are good on paths, and a pile of the bigger bits in a quiet corner makes a decent wildlife habitat.

We are an introducer: we pass your enquiry to one vetted local specialist covering your area, and they confirm a fixed price. If it turns out not to be a DIY job, start with stump grinding and the stump grinding cost guide, or stump removal if the roots need to come out entirely. How much does it cost to remove a tree stump compares all four methods.