How to price landscaping and lawn care jobs
A repeatable way to price work so every job covers your costs and leaves a margin — without guessing.
Most landscaping businesses do not lose money on the work itself — they lose it on prices set by gut feel. The fix is a simple, repeatable formula you apply to every quote so the number always covers your costs and leaves a profit.
The four parts of every price
Whatever the job, your price needs to cover four things. Add them up, then add your margin on top.
- Labor — crew hours on site times your fully-loaded hourly rate (wages plus payroll taxes and workers' comp).
- Materials — mulch, sod, plants, chemicals, disposal, anything consumed on the job, at your real cost.
- Equipment & overhead — fuel, mower wear, insurance, software, the truck — spread across your billable hours.
- Margin — the profit you keep after everything above is paid.
Step 1: Know your hourly cost
Take a crew member's wage and add payroll taxes, workers' comp, and a share of overhead. A $20/hour mower can easily cost you $30–$35/hour once everything is loaded in. If you bill at the wage you pay, you are working for free. Set a billable rate above your loaded cost — that gap is your margin.
Step 2: Estimate the hours honestly
Walk the property (or use a map) and estimate crew-hours, then add drive time and setup. New crews are slower than you remember — pad the first few jobs and tighten the estimate once you have real numbers from similar properties.
Step 3: Price per visit for maintenance, per project for installs
Recurring mowing and maintenance work best as a flat per-visit price the customer can predict — say $65 a cut for a standard lot. Installs, cleanups, and one-off work are priced per project from the four parts above. Build both from the same price list so your numbers stay consistent.
A worked example
A weekly mow takes a two-person crew 30 minutes on site plus 15 minutes of drive and setup — about 1.5 crew-hours. At a $35 loaded cost that is roughly $52 in cost. Price it at $65 and you keep about $13 a visit; across 30 weekly lawns that is real money, every week, predictably.
Step 4: Put it on a price list and reuse it
The owners who price consistently keep a price list of their common services and materials, then build each quote from it. It removes the guesswork, keeps margins steady across crews, and turns a 20-minute estimate into a two-minute one. That is exactly what GreenStack's quoting is built to do — assemble a professional quote from your price list, offer the customer options, and turn an accepted quote into a scheduled job and an invoice.
Run the work, not the paperwork.
GreenStack puts quotes, scheduling, and invoicing in one place built for landscaping crews.