Make This Useful

Updated · Make This Useful

Landscaping cost calculator

HomeGuide lists a two-person landscaping crew at $50–$100 per crew-hour, checked October 15, 2026, which is $25–$50 for each person’s hour. Count hours per person, then put your margin on the materials as well as the labor. Plants, soil and mulch take time to buy, load, haul and spread, and a quote of labor plus materials at what you paid leaves that time unpaid.

Price a landscape job

Starting point: $37.50 per hour. Two-person landscaping crew; US guide: $50.00–$100.00 per crew-hour. Our midpoint of that range, divided by 2 people to get a labor-hour rate, rounded to cents. Labor for the whole two-person crew. HomeGuide: landscaping costs, checked 2026-10-15.

Extras, travel and minimum

Count each person's hours. Enter plants, soil, mulch and other supplies under materials; avoid counting supplies already included in your hourly rate twice.

Job price before tax—

Enter crew labor-hours.

Should you charge by the hour or by the job for landscaping?

Bill by the hour for work you can’t size in advance: garden cleanups, pruning, a bed nobody has weeded in years. Quote installs as a fixed price built from your hour estimate, because customers compare totals. HomeGuide puts small projects at $300–$800 and new installations at $3,000–$16,000, and few homeowners will sign an install that size on an open hourly rate.

A fixed price is where the site bites back. Dig a test hole before you quote anything with planting or edging, because rock, roots, clay, old irrigation lines and buried concrete all add hours you can’t see from the lawn. Put a line in the quote for conditions found below grade, billed at your hourly rate, so the surprise isn’t yours alone.

How do you price mulch per yard?

Thrive Landscape and Design in Austin charges $60–$110 a cubic yard installed, with delivery, bed prep and labor included; CheapMulch’s installation card starts at $35 a yard and bills delivery by distance. Most of that gap is scope. Edging, weeding and raking out old mulch are labor, so either price them into the yard or list them as their own lines.

Work out yards from area and depth. A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet, so at 3 inches deep it covers 108 sq ft (27 ÷ 0.25), and at 2 inches, 162 sq ft. A 600 sq ft bed at 3 inches takes about 5.6 yards. Round up for uneven beds, and set a minimum yardage or a delivery charge so a small order still pays for the truck.

What hourly rate covers a landscaping crew?

Start from what each hour really costs you. BLS puts national mean pay for landscaping and groundskeeping workers at $19.66 an hour (May 2024), and HomeGuide’s crew band works out to $25–$50 per person-hour. The gap between the two pays for payroll taxes, workers’ comp, the truck and trailer, mowers and hand tools, insurance and your profit.

Count hours from the shop and back to the shop. Loading the trailer, the supply-yard stop, driving between jobs and dumping debris are all crew time, and a quote built only on hours spent in the customer’s beds leaves them unpaid. If those hours don’t fit inside the job, add them as a line or build them into your hourly rate.

Example: a two-person planting day

Two people for eight hours is 16 labor-hours. At $30 a labor-hour all-in, labor costs you $480. Add $320 for plants and mulch and $100 for equipment rental and the dump: $900. At a 25% margin, $900 ÷ 0.75 = $1,200. The labor part works out to $30 ÷ 0.75 = $40 a person-hour, or $80 for the two-person crew, inside HomeGuide’s $50–$100 band.

Frequently asked questions

Should I charge for a landscape design or site visit?

Quote maintenance and small jobs for free; that visit is how you win them. A drawn plan for an install is real work, so charge for it and credit the fee against the job if they book you. That keeps your plan from becoming a free blueprint the customer hands to the cheapest crew.

Should I guarantee the plants I install?

If you do, price the replacements in. Say exactly what the warranty covers: which plants, for how long, how many replacements, and that it depends on watering as instructed. Leave out plants the customer supplied or moved. A plant warranty with no terms ends up covering drought, deer and the dog.

What do I say when another landscaper’s quote is lower?

Line the two quotes up item by item: plant sizes and counts, mulch depth, bed prep, edging, haul-away and any warranty. A lower price often means smaller pots or no bed prep. If the scope really matches, offer to trim the scope, such as moving the back beds to spring, rather than cutting your price for the same work.

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