How long does garden clearance take?

Most garden clearances are done inside a single day. A light tidy in a small garden is typically two to four hours for two people, the back garden of a typical semi in a moderately overgrown state is most of a working day for a two- or three-person crew, and a heavy overgrown clearance is a full day and sometimes spills into a second. Genuinely abandoned gardens, the ones that have not been touched for a decade, run to two to four days and need someone to look at them before anyone quotes. The single biggest variable is not how much there is to cut. It is how far the waste has to travel to get to the van, and how many times the van has to be emptied.

Typical timings

These are working timings including loading, not just cutting. Prices are from our price card with waste removal included, and a £150 job minimum applies, though green waste collections are exempt from it.

How the estimate maps to crew days

Our instant estimate is built from the same numbers, so it is a reasonable proxy for how long a crew will be with you:

• £150 to £320 is up to half a crew day, so a morning or an afternoon
• £380 to £600 is about one crew day
• £650 to £1,000 is a long day or two shorter ones, usually with a bigger crew
• over £1,200, or anything marked abandoned, goes to a free survey, because guessing at that size is how jobs end up half finished

If your estimate sits near the top of a band, expect the higher end of the time range. If it has been pushed up by access or mixed waste rather than by volume, the crew may be smaller but there for longer.

What actually determines the day

Waste volume. Cutting is fast. Moving the material is slow. A heavily overgrown medium garden can produce three to five cubic metres of green waste once it is cut, which is more than a standard tipper van holds in one load. Everything else follows from that.

Access and carry distance. A crew that can reverse a tipper to a wide side gate will clear roughly twice as much in a day as one carrying the same material through a house on boards, with dust sheets down, or 30 metres up a shared alley. This is why our price card adds about 15 per cent for access through the house or a carry of more than 20 metres. On the worst access jobs, the carry is genuinely most of the day.

Tip runs. Each trip to a licensed transfer station is typically 45 minutes to 90 minutes in West Midlands traffic, including queueing and tipping. Two runs are normal on a moderate job, three or four on a heavy one. Some crews leave one person cutting while the van goes, which keeps the job moving; others stop. It is a fair question to ask when you book.

Green waste against mixed waste. Pure green waste is light, compacts well and tips cheaply. As soon as there is rubble, old fencing, a shed, furniture or general rubbish in the load, it has to be handled and often separated, and it tips at a higher rate, which is why mixed waste adds about 20 per cent. Mixed loads are also slower to fill because you cannot just throw everything in.

Machinery. A chipper turns four van loads of brash into one and can save half a day on a job with a lot of woody material, but it needs space to stand and a route to feed it. A mini digger transforms a job with stumps, roots, hardcore or a slab base, but it needs access of about a metre for the smallest machines, and it adds delivery time at each end. Neither is worth it on a small garden.

Ground and weather. Rain slows loading and makes green waste heavier, which means fewer barrow loads before the van is at weight rather than at volume. Frozen ground helps machinery and hurts digging. High wind stops any work at height. Heat shortens the working day.

Surprises. Concrete under the soil, a buried slab, a pond, a fly-tipped pile behind the shed, an old cement-fibre roof sheet, Japanese knotweed. Any of these can stop or change a job. Photographs when you book are how you avoid them.

How many people come

Most clearance crews are two or three people. Two is the common size for a light or moderate garden; three for heavy work or where there is a long carry and the van needs to keep moving. More than three rarely helps in a domestic garden, because there is only so much room to work and only one route to the van.

For tree work within a clearance, a separate qualified crew usually attends, and that is a different visit unless it was quoted together. See tree surgeon vs gardener vs landscaper for who does what.

What you need to do first

Half an hour of preparation reliably saves an hour on the day.

1. Send good photographs when you book. Stand at each corner and shoot across the garden, plus one of the access route and one of the parking. Our guide on what to photograph for a quote applies to clearance too.
2. Sort out parking. A tipper needs a legal space near the property for most of the day. If parking is permit-controlled or the road is narrow, say so when booking and arrange a permit or a cone.
3. Clear the route. Unlock side gates, move bins and cars, and take down anything hanging in a passage.
4. Mark what stays. Plants, pots, ornaments, the good fence panel, the compost bin. Put a bit of tape on it or move it. Crews work quickly and a garden that looks like nothing to them may contain something to you.
5. Say what is going. Shed, greenhouse, decking, fencing, rubble, furniture. This determines the vehicle, the crew and the tip rate.
6. Flag hazards. Ponds, drains, septic tanks, buried cables, low wires, an old shed roof, anything you suspect might be knotweed.
7. Keep children and pets indoors while machinery is running.

You do not usually need to be there all day, but be reachable, and be there at the start and the end if you can.

When a job runs over a day

Overruns almost always come from one of five things: the waste volume was underestimated from the photographs, access was worse than described, something was found under the growth, the weather turned, or the scope grew on the day because you asked for the hedge as well.

A crew running over should tell you before lunchtime, not at five o'clock, and should say what the second day costs. Where a garden is genuinely at the top end, this is precisely why anything over £1,200 or marked abandoned gets a free survey instead of an estimate. A survey takes twenty minutes and turns a guess into a fixed price and a fixed number of days.

If the job has to be split, ask for the waste to go with them at the end of day one rather than sitting in bags on your drive overnight, where it is both a nuisance and a fly-tipping magnet.

Doing it yourself instead

For comparison, a lightly overgrown small garden is typically a weekend's work for one person plus several car loads to the tip. A moderately overgrown medium garden is several weekends. That is the real trade: a crew of three with a tipper does in a day roughly what one person does in three or four weekends, mostly because of the van. Our guide on how to clear an overgrown garden covers the order of work if you are doing it yourself, and how much garden waste fits in a van will tell you how many trips you are facing.

Booking it

We are an introducer. We pass your enquiry to one local clearance specialist for your area, who confirms a fixed price and a date from your photographs.

• Garden clearance and overgrown garden clearance
• Bramble clearance for the slowest material of all
• Green waste removal if you have already done the cutting
• Shed removal and hedge trimming
• Garden clearance cost guide for what moves the price