Land Clearing Cost Per Acre & Mining Feasibility Study Cost

Reviewed August 2026 against the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, AACE International’s cost-estimate classification standard, and the AusIMM Bulletin.

Try it: Enter your acreage above to see an estimate. →

Clearing land in the United States costs $600 to $8,100 or more per acre, and the number that lands in that range depends almost entirely on what’s growing there and which machine does the work — grass and light brush sit at the bottom, dense forest with large trees sits at the top. A mining feasibility study is priced on a completely different basis: not acreage, but drilling metres, metallurgical test work, and engineering hours, so a scoping-level study can be commissioned for well under $100,000 while a bankable feasibility study on a mid-size deposit runs into the millions. This guide prices both, with a calculator for the land-clearing side and a durable framework — not just a snapshot number — for judging what a mining feasibility study should cost you.

How Much Does It Cost to Have Land Cleared?

Contractor pricing guides published in 2026 (HomeGuide, Angi, LawnStarter, and OWNR OPS all converge in the same band) put full land clearing at $600–$1,300 per acre for light grass and brush, $2,100–$4,100 per acre for shrubs and small trees, $3,600–$6,100 per acre for thick mixed woods, and $5,100–$8,100 or more per acre for dense forest with large trees. Method-specific quotes run separately from those density bands: bush hogging (a rotary mower cutting vegetation at ground level, with no tree or stump removal) costs $150–$600 per acre; forestry mulching, which grinds brush and small trees into mulch left on site, costs $400–$4,000 per acre depending on trunk diameter; and bulldozing with grubbing — pushing everything into piles for burning or hauling, then pulling stumps — costs $1,000–$5,000 per acre. Brush removal alone, without full-site clearing, runs $330–$630 per acre.

In Australia, contractor guides quote agricultural land clearing at AU$3,000–AU$10,000 per hectare for medium-density plots and AU$5,000–AU$18,000 per hectare for larger, denser commercial and agricultural jobs; land that has already been cleared once and only needs regrowth control, such as grape-growing country in Victoria, can run as low as AU$300 per hectare, and prescribed burning as a clearing method costs AU$1,000–AU$1,500 per hectare.

What Actually Drives the Price Per Acre

Vegetation density sets the outer bounds of your quote, but three other factors move the number inside that band: method, debris handling, and access.

Access, permits, and debris disposal

• Access: remote parcels without existing road access add mobilization charges for heavy equipment — get this quoted as a separate line item, since it doesn’t scale with acreage the way clearing itself does.
• Debris disposal: forestry mulching leaves ground material on site as erosion-control mulch at no extra hauling charge; bulldozing produces burn piles or a haul-off, and haul-off pricing depends on distance to a disposal site or mulch buyer.
• Permits: wetlands, floodplains, and protected buffers can require a permit before a blade touches the ground — check with your state environmental agency or, in the US, your local US Army Corps of Engineers district office before booking a contractor.
• Cost-share: in the US, the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) reimburses a share of the cost for approved conservation practices, including brush management, under a payment schedule that’s republished by state and fiscal year — ask your local NRCS field office for the current schedule rather than relying on last year’s number.

Is Clearing Worth It? Cost vs. Land Value

The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service put the average value of US farm real estate at $4,500 per acre in 2026, up 3.4% from 2025; cropland averaged $6,020 per acre, up 3.3%; and pasture averaged $2,000 per acre, up 4.2%, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary, released July 31, 2026. Put those numbers next to the clearing-cost table above and a break-even problem appears immediately: heavy clearing of dense forest costs $5,100–$8,100+ per acre, while the pasture it typically produces was worth $2,000 per acre in that same report. Clearing dense forest purely to create grazing pasture can cost two-and-a-half to four times what the resulting pasture is worth on paper — a gap that only closes if the land’s better use is cropland at $6,020 per acre, or if the timber, minerals, or development value of the site covers the difference.

This comparison is a checkpoint, not a verdict: it doesn’t account for standing timber value, soil quality once cleared, water rights, or non-agricultural end uses like building sites or solar leases. The durable move is to run this same comparison with the current NASS Land Values release for your state and county before signing a clearing contract — USDA NASS republishes it annually, usually in late July or early August, at the same URL structure on nass.usda.gov.

Land Clearing Cost Estimator

Plug in your acreage, vegetation density, and method to get a cost range built from the per-acre figures cited above.

Assumptions: figures are built from the 2026 US contractor pricing bands cited in this guide. Excludes permits, land-access mobilization charges, stump grinding beyond what the selected method includes, and haul-off distance surcharges. Get a written local quote before budgeting a project.

Land Feasibility Study: The Step Before You Clear

Before a clearing contract gets signed on any sizeable parcel — agricultural, forestry, or mineral — a land feasibility study checks whether the site can support the intended use at all. It covers five areas in sequence:

• Physical & ecological: soil texture, fertility, salinity, and erosion risk; water availability, rights, and seasonal variability; climate and frost-risk data; terrain, slope, and access.
• Technical: matching crop, silviculture, or extraction method to what the physical data actually supports, then sizing roads, water systems, and storage to fit.
• Economic: capital and operating cost estimates, revenue projection against real market prices, and sensitivity analysis for price or yield shocks.
• Environmental & social: impact identification, mitigation planning, regulatory compliance, and community or landowner engagement.
• Risk & roadmap: a synthesized go/no-go recommendation with a phased implementation plan.

For mining specifically, the physical-feasibility stage adds geological survey and mineral prospectivity work — identifying ore body size, geometry, and grade before anyone commits to an extraction method. Terrain and slope-stability data feed directly into whether an open-pit, underground, or placer method is even viable on the site.

Mining Feasibility Study: Scoping, PFS, and Bankable FS

A mining feasibility study is the evaluation that determines whether a mineral deposit can be mined economically, and it isn’t one document — it’s a sequence of three studies of increasing rigor, each building on the last. The industry’s own standard for classifying that rigor comes from AACE International (the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering), whose Guide to Cost Estimate Classification Systems (Professional Guidance Document No. 01, revised August 29, 2022) sets out five classes running from Class 5 — the least project definition — to Class 1, the most. The guide is explicit that it doesn’t stamp one fixed accuracy number on every project at every class; a real range depends on a project-specific quantitative risk analysis. What’s fixed is the order: a Class 5 scoping estimate always carries the widest uncertainty band, and a Class 1 estimate, built after detailed engineering, always carries the narrowest. That ordering is the part of this system that won’t go out of date — it’s a structure, not a snapshot.

The AusIMM Bulletin describes how that classification maps onto the three named study types miners actually commission:

Every study in that sequence evaluates the same underlying factors — geology, extraction method, processing requirements, logistics, and permitting — at increasing depth. For mining specifically, that means ore body geometry and grade continuity, choice between open-pit, underground, or placer extraction, tailings management, and the specific mining laws and environmental clearances of the jurisdiction.

What a Mining Feasibility Study Costs

Companies rarely publish a feasibility-study line item separately from total project development spending, so a single universal figure doesn’t exist — but the cost drivers behind that number are well established and don’t change from project to project. Three things move the budget: the metres of core drilling needed to upgrade an inferred resource to the measured-and-indicated categories a lender will accept, the scope of metallurgical test work needed to prove a processing route, and the engineering hours behind a Class 1–2 capital estimate under the AACE framework above. A widely cited AusIMM conference paper on this exact question, Estimating the Cost of a Feasibility Study for a Mining Project (1990), put a detailed, bankable-grade feasibility study at roughly half a percent to one-and-a-half percent of the total estimated project capital cost — meaning a deposit with a $200 million capital estimate might carry a $1 million–$3 million feasibility-study bill, while a $20 million project might spend $100,000–$300,000 on its FS.

Scoping studies sit far below that: because they can be built on inferred resources with limited drilling and desktop-level engineering, they cost a fraction of a PFS or FS. That’s the entire logic of running one first — it’s the cheapest way to find out whether a project is worth spending PFS- or FS-level money on at all. This is also where satellite-based mineral targeting changes the economics before a single metre of core is drilled: narrowing the drill target with remote sensing means the scoping and early-exploration phase costs less and moves faster, which is the gap Farmonaut’s platform is built to close.

Farmonaut’s Satellite-Based Mineral Detection

Farmonaut’s satellite-based mineral detection platform sits at the scoping end of that cost curve — the phase where cutting spend has the biggest leverage on whether a project ever reaches a PFS. Using multispectral and hyperspectral satellite data, it identifies high-potential mineral zones, alteration halos, fault lines, and mineralization patterns without ground disturbance, across climates and terrains from Africa to Australia and beyond.

• Non-invasive & scalable: targeting work happens before any ground truthing, so a negative result costs desktop time, not a drilling mobilization.
• Actionable intelligence: reports include georeferenced maps, target heat maps, indicative depth and quantity, geological interpretation, and commercial conclusions to de-risk the investment decision that follows.
• Deliverables: professional PDF reports, high-resolution maps, and GIS files for technical and commercial decision-makers.

Ready to validate a site? Map your mining site here. For deeper spatial targeting and drill planning, Farmonaut’s satellite-driven 3D mineral prospectivity mapping integrates heatmapping, subsurface modelling, and TargetMax™ intelligence for higher-confidence drill targets.

FAQ

Conclusion & Next Steps

Land-clearing cost and mining feasibility study cost are priced on entirely different bases — one by the acre and the vegetation on it, one by drilling metres and engineering hours — but both reward the same discipline: get a specific number for your specific site before you commit capital, and check it against a current, named source rather than a number you saw once. For land clearing, that means three local contractor bids and this year’s NASS Land Values release for your state. For mining, that means starting with a scoping study, sized against AACE’s Class 5-to-1 framework, before paying for prefeasibility- or feasibility-level engineering.

• ✔ Match your clearing method to vegetation density using the table above, not a single blanket per-acre number.
• ✔ Compare your clearing quote to the current USDA NASS land value for your intended end use before signing a contract.
• ✔ Commission a scoping study before a prefeasibility or bankable feasibility study — it’s the cheapest way to screen a mineral project.
• ✔ Use satellite targeting, like Farmonaut’s mineral detection platform, to cut wasted drilling before formal studies begin.
• ✔ For mining projects, map your mining site here for a head start on target identification.

Need a project-specific number? Contact us and we’ll help you scope it.