You can be booked solid from April through November and still not have money in the bank by December.
This happens to a lot of landscaping operators, especially in the first few years. The schedule looks good. The invoices go out. But the margins are thin enough that a bad week or an equipment breakdown resets you to zero. Usually the problem isn't the work — it's the pricing.
Here's how to fix that.
The "Going Rate" Is Someone Else's Number, Not Yours
When landscapers ask what to charge, the internet says $50–$100 an hour, or points to the 2024 Lawn & Landscape industry average of $66/hour. Those figures average together solo operators, multi-crew companies, and businesses in different regions with wildly different overhead structures. They don't know your truck payment, your insurance premium, how many miles you drive between jobs, or what you need to actually take home.
Pricing from industry averages is like budgeting your groceries based on what the average American family spends. Maybe it fits. Probably it doesn't.
What you need instead is your loaded hourly rate — the minimum you have to bill per hour to cover costs and clear a real profit. Until you know this number, every quote you give is a guess.
How to Calculate Your Loaded Hourly Rate
Your real labor cost per hour
If you pay yourself $25/hour, your labor cost isn't $25. Add self-employment taxes (roughly 15.3% on net earnings), any health insurance you carry, and equipment wear that belongs to labor-time. A fully loaded labor cost for a solo operator paying themselves $25/hour comes out closer to $30–$33.
Your overhead per hour
Overhead is everything that costs money but doesn't show up on a specific job: truck payments, fuel, liability insurance, equipment maintenance, phone, software, and the time you spend quoting work that doesn't close.
Most operators estimate overhead at 10–15% of revenue. The real number for landscaping businesses typically runs 25–35%. Underestimate it and every job you win quietly subsidizes your overhead instead of paying you.
To calculate your overhead per billable hour:
- Add up all annual overhead costs
- Estimate how many billable hours you'll actually work this year — not total hours, just hours you can charge for
- Divide
Example: $40,000 in annual overhead ÷ 1,600 billable hours = $25/hour you need to recover just for overhead.
Add your profit margin
Covering costs isn't the same as running a business. You need profit to reinvest in equipment, survive a slow month, and build something with actual value. Target 15–20% net profit margin on top of your total cost.
Putting it together:
| Component | Per Hour |
|---|---|
| Loaded labor cost | $32 |
| Overhead allocation | $25 |
| Cost floor | $57 |
| 20% profit margin | $11 |
| Minimum billed rate | $68 |
If you've been quoting at $45–$50/hour, now you know why cash is always tight. $68 is the floor. In higher-cost markets or for specialized work, $80–$100/hour is reasonable and defensible.
Material Markup: Where Most Operators Leave Money
Labor rates are visible. Material markup is where money quietly disappears.
The common approach: charge cost plus 10%. That barely covers the time spent sourcing, loading, transporting, and unloading. You're effectively working for free on the materials side of every job.
Real markups in landscaping:
- Plants, shrubs, trees: 100–250% over your wholesale cost. A $40 wholesale plant should bill at $80–$140. You're pricing in selection expertise, sourcing time, and the warranty risk if it doesn't take.
- Mulch, topsoil, gravel: 25–30% minimum. Heavy materials with real handling time baked in.
- Hardscape materials (pavers, stone, edging): 20–30% plus a materials-handling fee on large quantities.
Also add a waste and overage factor to every estimate. Order for exactly the measured square footage and you'll either come up short or make a costly second trip. Add 10–15% to all material quantities before you calculate cost. This isn't padding — it's how jobs actually work in the field.
What You're Not Charging For (But Should Be)
This is where most landscapers lose $5,000–$15,000 a year without realizing it.
Drive time. Four jobs with 30-minute gaps between them is 90 minutes of your workday generating zero revenue. Build drive time into your daily rate, charge a trip fee, or set a job minimum that makes short stops economically viable. Just don't leave it unpriced.
Material sourcing runs. Picking up $600 in materials takes 2 hours round trip. At a $70/hour loaded rate, that's $140 in labor time. If your 25% markup generates $150 in profit, you barely broke even — on a task that ate half a morning. Add a sourcing charge to any job that requires a supply run.
Project management on multi-day work. Client calls, rescheduling, coordinating deliveries, documenting scope changes. For a single-day job this disappears into overhead. On larger projects, 10–15% of total project cost as a project management line item is standard in the industry, and most clients accept it when it's explained clearly.
Job minimums. If you're driving 20 minutes and spending an hour on-site for $80, you're losing money after overhead. Set a minimum charge — $150–$200 is a common floor for solo operators — and hold it. You'll lose some cheap customers. Good. Those customers cost you capacity for jobs that actually pay.
How to Quote a Job
Once you have your loaded rate, a quote is arithmetic.
- Walk the site. Estimate hours — then add 15–20% for unknowns. There are always unknowns.
- List all materials at your cost, apply markups, add the overage factor.
- Add any sourcing or drive time specific to this job.
- Apply your minimum if the total falls below it.
- Present one number. A fully itemized breakdown invites clients to negotiate each line. A clear project price invites a yes or no.
A real example — 10 cubic yards of mulch spread, 5 hours of labor:
| Item | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Mulch (10 yd³ × $18 wholesale) | ×1.28 markup | $230 |
| Labor (5 hrs) | ×$70/hr | $350 |
| Sourcing run (1.5 hrs) | ×$70/hr | $105 |
| Total quote | $685 |
A lot of operators would quote this at $400 and wonder why the job didn't feel worth it. The numbers above aren't aggressive. They're what it actually costs to deliver the work at a margin that keeps you in business.
Losing Bids on Price Is a Good Sign
If you win every job you quote, you're underpriced.
Operators who close 100% of their bids are either the cheapest option around or working in a market with no competition. Neither situation sustains a business for long.
Clients who pick you on price alone will leave the minute someone cheaper comes along. The customers worth keeping — property managers, homeowners who've had bad experiences with shoddy work, commercial accounts with repeat volume — aren't picking the lowest number. They're picking confidence: do I trust this person to show up, do it right, and not disappear if something goes sideways?
That confidence doesn't come from your price. It comes from how you present yourself and whether your quote explains what they're getting clearly enough that they feel informed rather than guessing.
Track What You Actually Made After Each Job
The fastest way to improve your pricing is to know which jobs made money and which didn't.
For the next 30 days: after every job, note the actual hours worked, actual materials cost, and the final invoice. Compare to what you quoted. Most landscapers who do this find two or three job types where they're consistently coming up short — cleanups that always run long, planting jobs where sourcing time isn't priced in, commercial accounts where scope creeps every visit. Fix those categories first.
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Running a landscaping operation independently means you set your own rates and control your own calendar. SideWRK is built for independent landscaping operators who want to track jobs, see which work is actually profitable, and build a business that pays what it should. Start free at SideWRK.
