How to Price Lawn Care Jobs: Per Visit, Per Hour and Per Acre

How should I price my lawn care services?

Price every lawn from the time it takes you and what an hour of your business costs, then add margin. Time on site and driving to it are both paid hours; equipment and insurance are overhead you recover per hour; fuel is a per-visit cost.

The going-rate advice in most guides (“find what others charge and pick the middle”) tells you what the market pays, not whether you make money at that price. Use it as a check after you know your own number. I'm not a lawn care operator — I build pricing math — so every rate below is an assumption you replace with yours.

How do I quote a lawn mowing job? A worked example

Time the lawn, add the drive, cost the hours, add fuel, divide by one minus margin. Here a solo operator pays themselves a $25 wage, carries 30% burden for payroll-type costs and insurance (an assumption), and mows a 35-minute lawn 10 minutes from the last stop.

Break-even: 0.75 × $32.50 = $24.38 labour, plus $3.00 fuel, plus 0.75 × $11.72 = $8.79 overhead, = $36.16. Price: $36.16 ÷ 0.65 = $55.64. Run your own lawn in the calculator — enter the hours (minutes ÷ 60), fuel and your rates.

Note on the table: its yearly markup figure multiplies by 52 weeks. For a 32-week season, the loss from marking up instead of pricing on margin is $6.82 × 50 visits × 32 weeks = $10,912.

Seasonal overhead: the number most mowing prices get wrong

Divide your yearly overhead by the hours you can actually sell in the mowing season, not by a 52-week year. The truck payment and insurance run all year; the mowing income does not.

With 160 billable days (an assumed 32-week season × 5 days), overhead is $15,000 ÷ 1,280 hours = $11.72 an hour. Spread it over 220 days instead and it looks like $8.52, which prices the same lawn at $51.95 instead of $55.64. The shortfall shows up in the off-season when the bills keep coming. If you do winter work (leaf cleanups, snow), add those days back in.

Drive time and route density

Drive time is paid time, so the same lawn should cost more when it is out of the way. Either charge it per visit or build tight routes and keep the saving as margin.

A full week in the example is about 50 of these visits (50 × 0.75 = 37.5 hours). At $55.64 each, that is $2,782 of weekly revenue — but only if the lawns are close together. For the route-level view, add every lawn's time and drive, then check the week's revenue against the week's break-even.

Lawn care price per acre (and how to get minutes per acre)

Minutes per acre come from cut width and speed: acres per hour = mph × cut width in feet × 5,280 × efficiency ÷ 43,560. Efficiency covers overlap, turns and obstacles; 70% is an assumption to replace with your own timed acre.

For one open acre with a 60-inch deck: 28.3 minutes mowing, plus an assumed 20 minutes trimming and blowing and a 10-minute drive, is 0.97 hours, with $6 of fuel.

That prices one open acre at $75.22. Obstacles, slopes and beds cut efficiency hard, so a wooded or heavily landscaped acre can take far longer; time it rather than trusting the per-acre figure.

Is $100 an hour too much for landscape work?

It depends on who is working. With the example's costs, an hour of one person's time breaks even at $44.22 and prices at $68.03; a two-person crew hour prices at $118.03.

So $100 an hour is above the example's solo price (a 55.8% margin) but below its two-person crew price. That answers the related questions too: 2 hours of solo yard work prices at $136.06 and 3 hours at $204.09 on these rates. Check the loaded rate in the labor burden calculator.

Weekly vs bi-weekly, the 1/3 rule and monthly plans

Price bi-weekly visits by their own (longer) time. The University of California IPM program advises cutting no more than one-third of the grass blade at a time, so two weeks of growth usually means a slower cut or double-cutting — time it, don't assume the weekly minutes.

Monthly billing is the per-visit price times visits. At $55.64 a visit, a weekly lawn is $222.56 in a 4-visit month and $278.20 in a 5-visit month, or $241.11 a month if you level it (× 52 ÷ 12) over a year-round plan. So whether $200 a month is good depends on how many visits it buys and how long each takes.

The mistake: marking up instead of pricing on margin

Adding 35% to cost gives $48.82 on the example lawn, not $55.64. Markup keeps 25.93%, not 35%, and it is $6.82 short on every visit.

The same trap hits materials on landscape jobs: marking up mulch 20% keeps only 16.7% of its price. The markup vs margin calculator converts any percentage, and the landscaping estimate template guide shows margin applied to an install job.

Lawn care pricing calculator vs template vs going rates

Use a calculator to get one price now and a template to keep every property's price, time and route in one place.

What to put in your lawn price sheet: minutes on site and drive per property, visit frequency, fuel per visit, your season length, and the price per visit it produces. The lawn care pricing template works in Excel and Google Sheets and shows both the margin and the markup number.

Step-by-step: How to Price Lawn Care Jobs: Per Visit, Per Hour and Per Acre

1. Time the lawn. Record minutes on site for mowing, trimming, edging and blowing on the first two visits.
2. Add the drive. Add the average minutes from the previous stop on your route; convert the total to hours.
3. Cost the hours. Multiply hours by your loaded labour rate plus overhead per hour, using season days for overhead.
4. Add per-visit costs. Add fuel and wear per visit, plus any materials such as fertiliser.
5. Price on margin. Divide the break-even by (1 − target margin) and round to a clean per-visit price.

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