What you're pricing in lawn care and garden maintenance
Lawn care and garden maintenance is the regular work: cutting, edging, hedges and tidying, usually weekly or fortnightly through the growing season. One job means cutting, edging and tidying a garden. How often a customer comes back: every week or fortnight from spring to autumn, and monthly or paused in winter. That pattern decides how you should think about price.
The method is the same as for any round (see how to price a round): work out what your time has to earn, find out how long a job takes, and add what it costs you. This page shows it with numbers for lawn care and garden maintenance.
What moves the price
- Lawn size and how much of the garden is awkward: slopes, beds and obstacles
- How often: weekly visits are cheaper per cut than a one-off overgrown clear
- Edging, hedges, strimming and weeding on top of the cut
- Whether you take the clippings and green waste away
- How overgrown it is at the start
Example: pricing one garden
- 40 minutes on site + 10 minutes getting there and setting up = 50 minutes
- 50 minutes at £30 an hour = £25
- Add £3 for materials and fuel = £28
Price: £28 per garden
Set a minimum
Set a minimum visit price, because getting the mower out for a tiny lawn still takes the same set-up. If a customer won't pay it, they're costing you more in time than they pay you, and the round is better without them.
How many jobs that means
With that example price, here is what earning £2,000 a month looks like once you've covered the costs of running the business.
| Monthly cost (example) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Public liability insurance | £20 |
| Van or trailer, fuel and servicing | £200 |
| Mower and tool repayments and servicing | £80 |
| Rounds software | £35 |
| Advertising | £30 |
| Total running costs | £365 |
- Income wanted: £2,000 + running costs £365 = £2,365 a month
- At £28 a job: 85 jobs a month
If a regular customer comes about 26 times a year, that's about 40 customers on the books
Customers come back often, so a regular book of a few hundred gardens can fill a working week. A tight, well-priced round matters more than any single job.
Raising your prices
Review your prices at least once a year. Tell customers in writing, give them a few weeks' notice and name the new price and the date it starts. The message to copy is in how to price a round.
Run your lawn care and garden maintenance in WorkWise
A repeating diary: Each customer has how often you go and a next visit, so fortnightly gardens repeat across the week without rebuilding it.