Landscaping pricing calculator
Work out what to quote for a landscaping job from your real costs: crew time, materials, equipment, overhead and the margin you actually want to keep. Change any number and the quote updates.
Quote this job at
$1,624
$135 per crew hour
A 25% margin is a 33% markup on cost. Charging 25% over cost instead would leave you -$102 short on this job.
The mistake this calculator exists to prevent
Margin and markup are not the same number, and the gap is bigger than it looks.
Markup — adding to cost
$1,000 of cost plus 25% gives a $1,250 quote. Your profit is $250, which is 20% of the price — not 25%.
Margin — a share of the price
For a true 25% margin, divide by 0.75: a $1,333 quote. Profit is $333. $83 more on every $1,000 of cost.
On a crew doing $300,000 of job costs a year, that difference is roughly $25,000 — the gap between a business that reinvests and one that never quite gets ahead.
Common questions
- How do I work out my hourly labour cost?
- Take the wage, then add payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, insurance and any benefits. A crew member on $22 an hour typically costs meaningfully more than $22 once those are included, and pricing off the raw wage is one of the fastest ways to work a full season for nothing.
- What overhead percentage should I use?
- Overhead is everything that does not belong to one job: trucks, insurance, the phone, the office, your own admin time. Add those up for last year and divide by your total direct job costs. Most crews land somewhere between 15% and 30%, but use your own number rather than ours.
- What is the difference between margin and markup?
- Markup is a percentage added to cost. Margin is a percentage of the final price. A 25% markup on $1,000 of cost gives $1,250 and a 20% margin. To actually get a 25% margin you divide by 0.75, which gives $1,333. Confusing the two is the most common pricing error in the trade, and it costs money on every single job.
- Should I charge the same rate for every service?
- Usually not. Skilled hardscaping and routine mowing carry different risk, different equipment and different competition. The way to find out is to track expenses against each job and see which services actually make margin — guessing tends to be wrong in the same direction for years.