How do I figure out what to charge for lawn care jobs?

Start by calculating your true cost per hour: add up all monthly business expenses (fuel, equipment, insurance, materials, labor) and divide by your actual billable hours. Your price per job should cover that cost-per-hour number plus your desired profit margin. For residential work, convert hourly rates into flat per-job prices based on measured time per yard size.

Should I charge hourly or per job for lawn care?

Per job for most residential work, hourly for variable commercial projects. Residential clients prefer predictable flat prices they can budget for. Track how long each yard size takes you, then set flat prices based on your real time data. For commercial work like cleanups or installations where scope can shift, hourly or itemized bidding with sections gives both you and the client more flexibility.

How much profit should a lawn care business make per job?

A healthy lawn care business targets 40-60% gross profit margin after direct costs (fuel, labor, materials for that specific job). If a mowing job brings in $50 and your direct costs are $22, your gross margin is 56%. Track actual profit monthly using real expense and income data. FieldPlexus calculates this automatically as you log expenses and mark invoices paid throughout the month.

How do I price lawn care for property management companies?

Build itemized estimates broken into sections per property so the PM company can see and approve costs individually. Add 5-10% to your standard rates to account for Net 30 payment terms and administrative overhead. Property managers compare multiple bids, so your pricing needs to be competitive but professional. Sending clean, itemized proposals that break down each property separately builds credibility and wins more contracts than a single lump-sum number.

How often should I raise my lawn care prices?

Review pricing every 6 months against your actual cost-per-hour calculation. Fuel costs, insurance premiums, and labor rates change regularly. A $5 increase per visit across 60 weekly residential clients adds $1,200/month in revenue. Small, regular adjustments are easier for clients to absorb than large infrequent jumps, and they keep your margins from quietly eroding.

How to Price Lawn Care Jobs Without Guessing (And Actually Make Money)

Most Landscapers Guess Their Prices. That's Why Most Landscapers Can't Tell You Their Profit.

You're standing in a client's driveway, eyeballing the yard, and a number pops into your head. Fifty bucks? Sixty? You say it out loud before you've thought about what the job actually costs you. Gas to get there. The trimmer line you burned through last week. The hour and a half it took your helper, who you paid $15 an hour in cash.

That's not pricing. That's gambling. And when you price lawn care jobs by gut feel, the house always wins. You stay busy, you stay tired, and at the end of the month you have no idea whether the work actually made you money.

This guide covers how to price lawn care and landscaping jobs using real numbers instead of instinct. Whether you're mowing residential yards or bidding commercial contracts, the math matters more than the feeling.

Why "What Should I Charge?" Is the Wrong First Question

The first question most landscapers ask when they start out is "what should I charge per yard?" That question skips the only thing that matters: what does it cost you to do the work?

Pricing starts with your costs. Not your competitor's prices. Not what you think the market will bear. Your actual, real, documented costs. Everything else is built on top of that foundation.

If you don't know your costs, every price you quote is a guess. Some guesses will be profitable. Some won't. You'll never know which is which because you're not tracking the difference.

Step 1: Know Your Real Costs Per Hour

Start by adding up everything your business spends in a month. Fuel, equipment maintenance, insurance, phone bill, dump fees, trimmer line, blades, oil. Include the stuff that's easy to forget, like the trailer registration or the $12 you spent on a gas can.

Now add labor. If you have a helper you pay $15/hour and they work 30 hours a week, that's $1,800/month. If you're solo, your labor cost is what you need to pay yourself to make this worth doing.

Divide your total monthly costs by the number of billable hours you actually work. Not hours on the clock. Hours where you're doing paid work. Drive time, estimates, and admin don't count.

That number is your cost per hour. Every price you quote needs to be above it, or you're losing money on that job.

A Real Example

Say your monthly costs are $3,200 (fuel, materials, insurance, equipment, dump fees, phone, helper). You bill roughly 120 hours of actual service work per month. Your cost per hour is about $27. If you're charging $40/hour, your real margin is $13/hour. Not $40. Thirteen.

That math changes everything about how you look at a $50 mowing job that takes 90 minutes.

Step 2: Price Per Job, Not Per Hour (For Most Residential Work)

Residential clients want a flat price. They don't want to hear "it depends on how long it takes." They want a number they can budget for.

The trick is knowing how long each job actually takes, so you can set a flat price that covers your costs and leaves profit. Track your time for a few weeks. You'll find that most residential mowing jobs cluster around similar durations. A 5,000 sq ft yard takes about 45 minutes. A 10,000 sq ft yard takes about 75 minutes. Build your flat prices from those real time measurements, not from what your competitor down the street charges.

For one-time jobs like mulch installation, hedge trimming, or fall cleanups, estimate the hours, multiply by your target rate (cost per hour plus your desired margin), and add materials at cost plus a markup.

Step 3: Price Commercial and Property Management Work Differently

Commercial clients and property management companies are a different game. They expect professional estimates with itemized breakdowns. They compare your bid to two or three other landscapers. And they pay on terms, not on the spot.

For commercial work, build your estimates with sections. A property management company with 15 properties doesn't want one lump number. They want to see what each property costs individually so they can approve, adjust, or decline specific line items.

The pricing itself should account for the payment delay. If a property management company pays Net 30, that's a month of cash flow you're floating. Build a small margin increase (5-10%) into commercial bids to account for slower payment and the administrative overhead of managing the account.

Here's where most landscapers leave money on the table: they underprice commercial work because they're excited about the volume. Twenty properties sounds amazing until you realize you quoted $35 per property when it costs you $30 in labor and fuel to service each one. Volume amplifies thin margins in the wrong direction.

How to Know If Your Lawn Care Pricing Actually Works

Pricing is only half the equation. The other half is knowing whether your prices actually work. That means tracking what goes out each month with the same discipline you track what comes in.

Most small landscaping businesses don't do this. At the end of the month, the owner checks their bank balance. If there's money in the account, they assume things are fine. If the account is tight, they assume they need more clients. Neither of those is a real answer.

Profit is income minus expenses minus labor. That's it. But you need all three numbers, tracked consistently, to know whether your pricing is working. A landscaper pulling in $8,500/month with $1,200 in expenses and $2,400 in labor costs is making $4,900 in profit. That's a real number you can make decisions with. "The bank account looks okay" is not.

How FieldPlexus Makes Pricing Work in Practice

Knowing your costs and setting smart prices is the strategy. But strategy falls apart without a system to execute it. Here's where software either helps or gets in the way.

FieldPlexus has a Services Catalog where you build your pricing menu. Weekly Lawn Mowing at $45. Hedge Trimming at $75/hour. Mulch Installation at $85/yard. When you schedule a job or create an estimate, you select the service and the price auto-fills. Consistent pricing across every client, every time, without doing the math in your head at the curb.

For commercial and property management work, Itemized Estimates let you break the bid into sections. Front Yard, Back Yard, Common Areas. Each section has line items with quantities and rates. The client sees exactly what they're paying for and can accept or decline directly from their phone. When they approve, one tap converts the estimate to an invoice.

But the part that actually tells you whether your pricing works is the Accounting module. Every time you mark an invoice as paid, that income logs automatically. Every time you fill up the truck or pay a helper, you log the expense from your phone in about 10 seconds. At any point, you can open Reports and see your actual profit. Not a guess. The real number.

Jason McCorry, a landscaper in Southwest Florida running 85+ clients and two property management companies through FieldPlexus, puts it this way:

"End of month requires no extra work. Everything is already done as materials are bought and employees are paid at the end of each day."

That's the difference between knowing your prices work and hoping they do. When every expense, every payment, and every invoice is already tracked as it happens, you see the real picture without sitting down to reconstruct it.

The Pricing Mistakes That Kill Small Landscaping Businesses

Three patterns show up repeatedly in businesses that struggle with pricing.

Pricing by competitor: You find out the guy down the street charges $45 for a standard mow, so you charge $40 to undercut him. But you don't know his costs. Maybe he owns his equipment outright and you're making payments. Maybe he doesn't have a helper and you do. His $45 might be profitable. Your $40 might be a loss. Price from your costs, not someone else's price.

Forgetting to adjust: Gas prices go up. Your insurance premium increases. You start paying your helper more. But your prices stay the same as when you set them two years ago. Review your pricing every 6 months against your actual cost-per-hour number. Small adjustments compound. A $5 increase across 60 weekly clients is $1,200/month.

Not tracking anything: This is the big one. You can read every pricing guide on the internet and it won't matter if you don't track your real numbers. Invoicing every job and logging every expense is the bare minimum. Without that data, pricing is still just guessing with extra steps.

Your Next Step

Pull up your bank statements from last month. Add up everything you spent on the business. Add up everything you paid labor. Subtract both from your total deposits. That's your profit. If the number surprises you, your pricing needs work. If you can't even do this exercise because your records are scattered across Venmo, cash receipts, and memory, that's the first problem to solve.

FieldPlexus tracks all of it from your phone as it happens, so you always know whether your prices are actually making you money. You can try it free for 14 days and see your numbers laid out clearly for the first time.