Landscape & Lawn Care Job Pricing Calculator

How to use it

1. Start from a real past job, not a guess. Pull the actual hours and materials from a job you've finished, run it through, and compare the price the calculator gives you with what you charged.
2. Use your burdened labor cost. If you enter the bare wage, every price this gives you will be too low.
3. Get your overhead number once, then reuse it. Add up last year's overhead and divide it by the labor hours you billed. You only need to redo this when the business changes.
4. Pick the margin before you look at the price. Deciding what you need to keep first, and then seeing the price, is the whole point. If the price feels too high, the next step is to look at the costs, not to shave the margin.

Pricing lawn care (mowing and recurring service)

Recurring work is priced with the same formula as any other job. The difference is that you run it per visit, and then decide how the customer pays for those visits.

1. Time one visit, drive included. Clock a real visit from the moment the truck parks to the moment it leaves, then add the drive from the previous stop. Enter it per person in Hours on site. If you already count travel in your overhead rate, leave the drive out here, so you don't count it twice.
2. Use the burdened rate for each crew member. Wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits and paid time off.
3. Add equipment and fuel for one visit. Fuel, mower and trimmer wear, blades and line, spread across a normal visit.
4. Add the visit's share of overhead. The same per-labor-hour figure you use for everything else.
5. Set the margin, then read the price. That price is the lowest you can charge for this visit and still keep what you decided to keep.

A worked example

This is an illustration of the formula, not a market rate. Put your own numbers in the calculator.

• A 2-person crew, 35 minutes on site plus 10 minutes of drive from the last stop: 0.75 hours each
• Burdened labor cost: $28 an hour
• Equipment and fuel for the visit: $6
• Overhead: $10 per labor hour
• Target net margin: 15%

Labor is 2 × 0.75 × $28 = $42. Direct cost is $42 + $6 = $48. Overhead is $10 × 1.5 labor hours = $15. Total cost is $63. Price is $63 ÷ 0.85 = $74.12 per visit, which leaves $11.12 of net profit, a 35.2% gross margin and $49.41 per man-hour.

Now leave the 10 minutes of drive out. The same steps give $59.22, and against the visit's real cost of $63 that's a net margin of about −6%. The crew still gets paid for the drive. Only the price forgot it.

Per visit, monthly or seasonal

Work out the per-visit price first in every case. The billing plan only changes how the same money is collected.

• Per visit fits when the schedule changes with the weather or the customer's requests. You bill what you did, so a skipped week costs nobody anything. The trade-off is uneven cash flow and an invoice every visit.
• Monthly fits a fixed schedule. Weekly service is about 4.33 visits a month (52 ÷ 12), so the example becomes $74.12 × 52 ÷ 12 = $321.19 a month. Your cash flow evens out, and the customer stops weighing each visit.
• Seasonal fits when you and the customer agree the number of visits up front. Multiply the visits by the per-visit price, then divide by the number of payments: 30 visits × $74.12 ÷ 8 payments = $277.95 a month. Write the visit count into the agreement, so an extra visit is paid for and a missed one is clear.

Where lawn care pricing leaks

• Drive time. It's paid, it isn't on the property, and it's the first thing left out of a price. Tight routes shrink it. Scattered stops grow it, and the price has to say so.
• Skipped and rained-out visits. On a flat monthly price, the visits you skip can go uncounted and the ones you make up can go unpaid. Decide in writing what a skipped visit means before the season starts.
• Add-ons priced by feel. Edging, cleanups, leaf removal and extra trimming each take crew time. Run each one through the calculator the same way, instead of quoting a round number on the spot.
• Last year's price, carried forward. When labor or fuel costs rise and the visit price doesn't, the margin you set is quietly gone. Re-run your visits once a year.

Markup vs margin (the mix-up that costs money)

Markup is what you add on top of your cost. Margin is what's left of the price after your cost. They use the same numbers, but they aren't the same percentage.

Say a job costs you $1,000 all in:

• Add a 50% markup and you quote $1,500. Your margin is $500 out of $1,500, which is 33%, not 50%.
• To keep a 50% margin, you'd need to quote $2,000.

If you set prices with “cost plus 30%” and believe you're making 30%, you're actually keeping about 23%. That's why this calculator works from margin: price = total cost ÷ (1 − margin).

What goes in overhead

Overhead is every cost that stays with you whether or not a particular job happens:

• Office rent, utilities and phones
• Insurance that isn't job-specific (general liability, vehicle)
• Software and subscriptions
• Vehicle payments and upkeep not charged to a job
• Salaries for the office, estimators and managers, and the owner's pay
• Marketing and advertising
• Accounting, legal and bank fees
• Equipment that isn't billed to jobs, and its upkeep
• The hours your crews are paid but not billable: travel between jobs, rain days, shop time

The most common mistake is leaving the owner's own pay out of overhead. If you don't pay yourself through your prices, the profit number you see is partly your wage.

When to walk away from a job

The calculator shows you the number you need. Sometimes the customer's number is lower, and the useful question is whether to take the job anyway:

• Walk away when the price that covers your costs and margin is higher than the customer will pay, and the job doesn't lead anywhere: no repeat work, no referrals, no route density.
• Think twice when the job only works if nothing goes wrong. If one rain day or one callback puts the net margin below zero, the price is too thin.
• Taking it on purpose can make sense when it fills a real gap in the schedule and still covers its direct costs. But decide that knowingly, with the number in front of you, not by accident.

If turning work down is the hard part, the Lucrative Landscaping Book covers how to get better clients.