State of the Tree Service Industry 2025

The tree care industry is large, deeply fragmented, dangerous, and — relative to its size — remarkably under-measured. There is no single government code that captures "tree service" cleanly, no mandatory industry census, and very little public data on how these businesses actually run. What follows pulls together the figures thatare public into one place, with the scope and reliability of each made explicit, so it can serve as an honest starting point rather than a marketing stat sheet.

Market size and structure

The most widely cited estimate for the U.S. tree care market comes from market-research firm IBISWorld, which puts "Tree Trimming Services" revenue at roughly$38–40 billion in 2024–2025, growing at an estimated mid-single-digit annual rate. Treat this as a directional estimate, not gospel: IBISWorld's figures sit behind a paywall, and their category definition is broad — it folds in utility line-clearance and municipal vegetation-management contracts alongside the residential and commercial arborist work most owner-operators do. The "arborist" slice of that number is meaningfully smaller than the headline.

Counting the businesses is harder still, because tree service has no standalone six-digit NAICS code. The closest public government category is NAICS 561730, "Landscaping Services," under which the U.S. Census Bureau records on the order of 113,000 firms and 740,000 employees (2020 data) — but that category spans all of landscaping, not tree work alone. Industry materials commonly reference "around 20,000" dedicated tree care companies in the U.S.; that figure circulates widely but we could not trace it to a primary government source, so we present it as an industry estimate rather than a verified count.

What every source agrees on is the shape of the market: extreme fragmentation. The overwhelming majority of firms are micro-businesses — sole proprietors and small crews well under 20 employees — with no dominant national player. That structure is the backdrop for almost everything else in this report: thin back offices, owner-operators wearing every hat, and very little standardization in how jobs are priced, scheduled, or documented. (For one slice of that problem, see our guide onhow to price tree removal jobs.)

Workforce and wages

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the occupation "Tree Trimmers and Pruners" (SOC 37-3013). Its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program reports employment in the neighborhood of 60,000–64,000 workers in that specific occupation, with a median annual wage of roughly $51,000(about $24–25/hour) in the most recent release. One important caveat: BLS OEWSexcludes self-employed workers, and tree service has an unusually large owner-operator segment — so the true number of people doing tree work is considerably higher than the occupation count suggests. When you widen the lens to all grounds maintenance workers, the broader pool runs into the hundreds of thousands.

On the demand side, BLS projects employment for grounds maintenance workers (the group that includes tree trimmers) to grow about 4% from 2024 to 2034 — "about as fast as the average for all occupations" — with substantial annual openings driven mostly by replacement, not expansion. In plain terms: steady, not explosive, demand, and a persistent hiring challenge in a physically demanding, hazardous trade. The labor math is exactly why per-seat software pricing is such a sore spot for growing crews, a point we dig into increw scheduling and dispatch.

Safety: the defining feature of the trade

If one number defines this industry, it is the risk. Tree care work is consistently among the most dangerous occupations in the United States. Using BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) data, grounds maintenance work as a whole carries a fatal injury rate several times the all-industry average — and tree trimmers and pruners specifically sit far higher still. The most-cited estimate puts the tree-trimmer fatality rate at many multiples of the ~3.5-per-100,000 all-industry baseline; we'd frame it conservatively as roughly 15–30× the all-industry average, because BLS itself cautions that it cannot compute a precise rate for this group (the hours-worked denominator is uncertain). The single "110 per 100,000" figure that circulates is a rough BLS estimate, not a hard measurement — so we cite the range, not the point.

The counts tell the same story. Industry tracking by the Tree Care Industry Association (TCIA), which compiles news reports and OSHA records, identified on the order of240+ tree care fatalities across 2020–2023 — roughly 60 deaths a year. On the non-fatal side, BLS injury data via TCIA suggests tree workers are injured at something like 2.5–3× the all-industry rate. The leading causes are consistent year to year:

• Struck-by incidents (~40%) — contact with falling trees, limbs, and equipment during felling and rigging.
• Falls (~35%) — climber falls and aerial-lift incidents.
• Electrocution (~15%) — contact with energized power lines; disproportionately lethal relative to how often it occurs.
• Chipper and equipment incidents — a smaller but severe share.

The takeaway isn't just that the work is hazardous — it's that safety documentation, job briefings, and training records are the backbone of running a defensible, insurable tree company. We cover the operational side of that in thetree service safety compliance guideand how it ties to premiums inlowering insurance costs with better documentation.

Technology adoption: the biggest data gap

Here we have to be candid: there is no reliable, publicly available, survey-backed figure for software adoption specific to tree service. The adoption percentages that float around the internet ("X% of arborists use digital tools") trace back to commercial market-research reports with undisclosed methodologies, and we won't launder those into this report as if they were facts.

What can be said responsibly: the broader field-service-management software market — covering trades like HVAC, plumbing, and landscaping — is growing quickly, and several tree-service-specific platforms now exist and compete for the segment. The absenceof good public adoption data is itself the finding. For a fragmented industry of mostly small operators, the practical reality is that a large share still runs on paper, spreadsheets, and generic invoicing apps rather than purpose-built software. That gap — between how the work is documented and how it could be — is the throughline of most of the operational challenges above. (Ourbuyer's guide to tree service softwarecompares the main platforms honestly.)

Certification and professionalization

Two organizations anchor professional standards in the industry. TheInternational Society of Arboriculture (ISA) runs the credentialing side — its ISA Certified Arborist® program is the most recognized arborist credential, with on the order of 30,000+ certified arborists worldwideand roughly 22,000 ISA members (figures from ISA's own reporting; ISA does not publish a clean U.S.-only split, so treat these as global). TheTree Care Industry Association (TCIA) anchors the business and safety side, with roughly 1,370 member companies and a companyAccreditation program. Accredited companies number only in the low hundreds — a small fraction of the estimated tree-care firms in the country, which tells you how much room there still is for the industry to formalize.

The signal in those numbers: certification and accreditation are growing but remain the exception, not the norm. In a trade this hazardous and this fragmented, the operators who invest in credentials, documented safety programs, and real systems are differentiating themselves in a market where most competitors still don't.

What it all adds up to

• A big, fragmented market — tens of billions in revenue spread across tens of thousands of mostly tiny firms, with no public census that captures it cleanly.
• Steady labor demand at modest wages, constrained by how hard and how dangerous the work is.
• Safety as the defining risk — fatality and injury rates far above the all-industry norm, making documentation and training mission-critical.
• A technology and data vacuum — so little public measurement that the gap itself is the headline.
• Slow but real professionalization — led by ISA credentials and TCIA accreditation, still adopted by a minority of firms.

For the owners and crews inside that picture, the opportunity is the same as the problem: a fragmented, under-systematized industry rewards the companies that get organized first.

Related reading:Best Tree Service Software in 2026,Tree Service Safety Compliance Guide, andHow to Price Tree Removal Jobs.