How much does it cost to remove an eastern hophornbeam (ironwood)?
Removing an eastern hophornbeam (ironwood) around Indianapolis typically runs $250 to $1,400, with most jobs near $550. Nearly indestructible except for one thing: Morton rates it as not tolerant of salt, so anything within splash range of a salted road, drive, or cul-de-sac turnaround browns and thins while an identical tree 40 ft away looks perfect. It is also the most misidentified tree on any quote, because "ironwood" gets applied to both this and American hornbeam and the two routinely get billed as each other.
Mature size, and the bracket it puts you in
25-40 ft tall by 15-40 ft wide with slow growth (Morton), while the largest recorded is 73 ft and 36 in dbh, so yard trees never approach that. Silvics notes losses run heaviest in trees 95 to 140 years old — a realistic ceiling set by decay rather than age — and removal falls in the small-to-mid bracket, though the wood is dense enough that haul and chip time runs longer than the trunk diameter suggests.
Condition changes the price
Forest Service silvics states its tough, resilient branches resist wind, snow, and ice damage, and it lives up to that: hophornbeam is often among the last things standing after an Indiana ice storm and rarely sheds limbs. That makes its one failure mode especially dangerous, because it is whole-tree failure from internal butt rot with no warning visible in the crown.
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