PunchTime Tracking for Tree Service Crews (Arborist Payroll Guide 2026)
Time Tracking for Tree Service Crews (Arborist Payroll Guide 2026)
The short answer: A tree service crew works three or four properties a day, loads a chipper and a bucket truck at the yard before the first one, and doubles its hours the week after a storm. Punch records every piece of that day: a geofenced punch-in at each property, paid drive time between jobs, lunch breaks, and weekly overtime that comes out right when a storm week runs to 58 hours.
Tree trimmers and pruners held about 70,600 jobs in 2025 at a median wage of $24.50 an hour in May 2025, and employment is projected to grow 4 percent through 2035, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That makes climbers some of the best paid workers in the grounds maintenance field, and it makes every mistaken hour on a timesheet expensive. The work is also among the most dangerous in the country. The BLS counted 222 fatal workplace injuries in the tree and landscape services industries in 2022, from falls, struck-by incidents, electrocution, and heat, as reported by OSHA. A tree company that cannot say who was on which property, and when, has a payroll problem and a safety problem at the same time.
A Tree Crew's Day Is Four Places, Not One
A typical day does not start at the first tree. The crew meets at the yard, fuels the saws, hitches the chipper, and loads rigging. Then it drives to a removal, runs a tailboard safety talk, works the job, cleans up, and drives to a pruning job across town. By the end of the day the same three people have worked two or three properties and hauled a load of chips to the dump.
A single punch-in at 7:00 and a punch-out at 4:30 tells an owner almost nothing. It cannot show which job ran long, whether the estimate was right, or how much of the day went to driving. Punch treats each property as its own job site, with its own address and geofence. The crew punches in on arrival, and Reports show hours by person and by job. That is the number a tree company needs to price the next removal instead of guessing.
For the full method, see our guide to labor cost per job for field crews.
Yard Time, Tailboards, and Drive Time Are Paid Work
Three parts of a tree crew's day are easy to leave off the clock, and all three usually count as hours worked under federal law.
- Loading at the yard. Once the workday starts, it runs continuously until the last principal activity ends. Under the continuous workday rule in 29 CFR 790.6, fueling saws and hitching a chipper at the yard before the first job are part of the paid day, not a favor to the company.
- The tailboard safety meeting. A required safety briefing at the start of a job is work. Required meetings and training during working hours count as hours worked under 29 CFR 785.27.
- Driving between jobs and to the dump. Travel from one job site to another during the workday is paid, as 29 CFR 785.38 makes clear. The ordinary commute from home to the yard generally is not.
Punch records travel between job sites as its own category, at its own rate if you pay one, and still counts those hours toward the weekly overtime threshold. We cover the full rules in do you have to pay employees for travel time.
Storm Weeks Break Every Paper Timesheet
A tree company's busiest weeks are the ones it cannot schedule. After a windstorm or an ice storm, crews run from first light until dark, six or seven days in a row, and the phones do not stop. That is exactly when paper timesheets fall apart, and exactly when overtime adds up fastest.
Tree crews are almost always owed overtime. The FLSA does contain a narrow exemption for forestry and logging operations with no more than eight employees, set out in 29 CFR Part 788. It is written for timberland work: tending forests and felling timber for the mill, as the definition in 29 CFR 780.215 describes. Pruning, removing, and grinding stumps on homes, businesses, and city streets is a different business. Federal rules also say planting and tending trees on residential, business, or public property is generally not agriculture when the employer did not grow the trees, under 29 CFR 780.206. Plan on paying time and a half after 40 hours, and get advice from counsel before relying on any exemption.
Here is a storm week for one climber paid $26 an hour who worked 58 hours:
- Straight time: 40 hours × $26 = $1,040
- Overtime rate: $26 × 1.5 = $39
- Overtime: 18 hours × $39 = $702
- Total: $1,742
Now a ground worker at $20 an hour who also worked 58 hours and earned a promised $50 a day storm bonus for five days. A bonus announced in advance is nondiscretionary, so it goes into the regular rate before overtime is figured:
- Straight time: 58 hours × $20 = $1,160
- Bonus: 5 days × $50 = $250
- Regular rate: $1,410 ÷ 58 hours = $24.31
- Overtime premium: $24.31 × 0.5 × 18 hours = $218.79
- Total: $1,628.79
Leave the bonus out of the regular rate and that ground worker is shorted $38.79 for the week, across every worker on every storm week. Punch captures the hours that every one of these numbers depends on, applies your overtime preset, and hands payroll a clean total. The full method is in our regular rate of pay guide.
Mutual Aid Crosses State Lines
Big storms pull tree crews out of their home state. A company based in one state can spend a week clearing lines two states over, and the overtime law that applies can change with the location of the work. California counts daily overtime after 8 hours. Most states follow the federal 40-hour week.
Punch ties every punch to the job site where it happened, so the record shows where each hour was worked. Overtime presets cover Federal rules, state rules, and more than 50 countries. For how the rules interact, see multi-state crews and which overtime law applies.
Backyards, Ravines, and No Signal
Tree work happens in the back corners of big lots, down ravines, and along rural roads where coverage drops to nothing. Punch keeps working there. A punch-out or a lunch tap made with no signal is saved on the device and syncs when the truck gets back into coverage, with the timestamp preserved from the moment of the tap. Nobody has to write the time on a glove and remember it later.
Punch-in is geofenced to the job site, so a climber cannot start the clock from the gas station down the road. Punch-out and lunch work anywhere, because the crew is often a hundred feet from the address when the day ends. Our guide to tracking hours without cell service covers the details.
Punch verifies a shift with a job-site geofence, never a camera in your crew's face. No photos, no face scans. A geofence is tied to the address, which is the proof that matters.
Approvals Before Payroll
At the end of the week, a crew leader or owner reviews every shift in one place. Punch shows each person's hours by day and by job, flags the long days, and lets a manager approve or reject a whole week in bulk. A missed punch gets fixed before payroll runs, not argued about after.
Then the hours go where they need to go. Punch pushes approved time to QuickBooks Online, or exports a CSV for QuickBooks or Excel. Weekly and bi-weekly pay periods are both supported. A company that also runs lawn and landscape crews can keep everyone in one workspace; our landscaping crew payroll guide covers that side.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best time tracking app for a tree service company?
One that treats each property as its own job. Look for geofenced punch-in at every job site, paid drive time between jobs, offline punching, correct overtime for storm weeks, manager approval, and a clean handoff to payroll. Punch does all of that on iPhone, iPad, and the web.
Are tree trimmers exempt from overtime?
Rarely. The FLSA's small forestry exemption covers timberland and logging operations with eight or fewer employees. A tree service working on homes, businesses, and public property generally owes time and a half after 40 hours a week, plus any state daily overtime. Confirm your situation with counsel.
Do I have to pay my crew for loading trucks at the yard?
Generally yes. Once the first principal activity of the day begins, the continuous workday rule makes the rest of the day paid time, including yard prep, driving to the first job, and driving between jobs.
How do I track hours when the crew moves between three jobs a day?
Add each property as a job site in Punch. The crew punches in at each one, and travel between them is recorded as its own category. Reports then show labor hours per job, per person, and per week.
Does Punch take photos to verify who punched in?
No. Punch uses a job-site geofence to confirm the punch-in location. There is no photo at a punch and no face scan, by design.
Can the crew share one iPad on the truck?
Yes. Kiosk mode turns a shared iPad into a punch station where each person picks their name and enters a PIN. It suits crews where not every ground worker wants the app on a personal phone.
What does Punch cost for a tree company that adds storm help?
Pricing is flat per workspace, with no per-user line item. Every plan includes every feature. Plans hold a set number of active members, so a large seasonal jump can move you up a plan. Job sites are never a billing unit, so every property you work is included.
Getting Started
Setting up Punch for a tree service takes about fifteen minutes.
- Create your organization and invite your climbers and ground crew by email or join code.
- Add your yard and your recurring properties as job sites, each with an address and a geofence radius.
- Set each person's hourly rate, and add a travel rate for drive time between jobs if you pay one.
- Choose your overtime preset and pick weekly or bi-weekly pay periods.
- Connect QuickBooks Online, or plan to export a CSV at the end of each pay period.
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