Lawn mowing price calculator
What to charge for a recurring cut, built from your mower's real output, your crew cost, drive time and the margin you want to keep — per visit and across the season.
Charge per cut
$77
$73 per man-hour · 32 min paid time
Drive time is included in paid hours because you pay the crew for it whether or not the client sees it. Two stops on the same street carry a fraction of this; one stop across town carries all of it.
Drive time is where the margin goes
It is the one cost that never appears on the invoice and always appears on the payroll.
Ten minutes between stops, twice a day, five days a week is over eight hours a week of paid time producing nothing. On a two-person crew that is sixteen man-hours you are buying and not selling.
You cannot bill it away. You can route it away — which is why crews with tight, clustered routes quietly out-earn crews with more accounts spread wider.
Route density beats mower speed
A faster mower saves minutes on the cut. A tighter route saves the same minutes on every single stop, all day, without spending anything on equipment. When you are deciding whether to take an account that sits twenty minutes from everything else, price the drive properly and the answer usually becomes obvious.
Typical mower output
| Machine | Sq ft / hour | 12,000 sq ft takes |
|---|---|---|
| 21in walk-behind | 18,000 | 40 min |
| 36in walk-behind | 45,000 | 16 min |
| 48in stander | 75,000 | 10 min |
| 60in rider | 110,000 | 7 min |
These are typical operating rates on open turf. Obstacles, slopes, wet grass and gates all pull real output down, sometimes by half — which is why the figures above are editable and why your own timed cuts beat any published table.
Common questions
- How much should I charge to mow a lawn?
- Work up from your own costs rather than copying a neighbour. Time the cut with the mower you would actually send, add trimming and blowing, add the drive, then apply your labour rate, equipment cost, overhead and target margin. That is what the calculator above does. Rates that sound right in one market lose money in another.
- Should I price by lot size or turf area?
- Turf area. A half-acre lot with a house, a drive and three beds might have a fraction of that in actual grass. Pricing off lot size overcharges open properties and undercharges busy ones, and the busy ones are the ones that take the time.
- Do I charge for drive time?
- You pay for it, so it has to be recovered somewhere. The professional answer is to price it into the visit and then attack it by building dense routes. Two stops on one street share a drive; scattered stops each carry a full one, which is why route density matters more to margin than mower speed.
- Why does mower width matter so much?
- Because cutting time is essentially area divided by width times speed. Moving from a 21-inch walk-behind to a 48-inch stander can cut mowing time to roughly a quarter on open turf. On a tight, obstacle-heavy property the gap narrows sharply — which is why the same crew should not quote every property the same way.
- How many cuts are in a season?
- Depends entirely on your climate and the service level — commonly somewhere in the mid-twenties to low thirties for a weekly account in a temperate region. Use your own history. The season total is the number that matters when you are deciding whether an account is worth keeping.
Pricing a one-off project rather than a recurring cut? Use the landscaping pricing calculator, or see how SodStack handles recurring routes.