Lawn Care Pricing Calculator

How to price lawn care jobs with this calculator

A lawn care price is minutes on site, minutes in the truck, your loaded labor cost, equipment, overhead and margin, in that order. The calculator runs that chain from the lawn size and shows every step, so the number you send is one you can defend when the customer says the kid next door does it for $25.

1. Type the lawn size. Square feet or acres, grass only. The county parcel size includes the house and the driveway, so knock those off.
2. Describe the visit. Grass condition (regular, overgrown, first cut), obstacles to trim around, feet of fence and foundation to trim, feet of driveway and walk to edge. Turn off any service you don't do. Bagging adds 15% to the mowing time.
3. Pick the schedule. Weekly, biweekly or one-time. Biweekly adds 15% to the visit price because the grass is taller every time; one-time adds 30%.
4. Check your numbers. Open "Your numbers" and replace the mower rate, trimming speed, drive time, crew size, loaded labor cost, equipment, overhead and margin with your own. Every default is labeled an assumption.
5. Read the price. The headline is the per-visit price. Under it: minutes on site, the monthly figure, your cost, a customer-facing line list, and a "your side" panel with labor, equipment, overhead, profit and the effective hourly.

Price per visit = (labor + equipment + overhead) ÷ (1 − target margin), then add the biweekly or one-time surcharge, then take the higher of that and your minimum charge.

Divide, don't multiply. At 30% margin on $31.91 of cost, dividing by 0.70 gives $45.59. Multiplying by 1.30 gives $41.49, which is a 23% margin wearing a 30% name tag. Over 28 visits that's $115 gone from one lawn.

How much should you charge to mow a 7,500 sq ft lawn?

With the calculator's defaults, a 7,500 sq ft lawn (about a sixth of an acre) on a regular weekly cut, one person with a 36 in walk-behind, trimming, edging and blow-off included, prices at $46 a visit, $199 a month and $1,288 for a 28-visit season. Hypothetical lawn, real math.

That's $6.13 per 1,000 sq ft and an effective $46 an hour of clock time, drive included. The customer sees three lines: mowing $16, trimming and edging $25, cleanup and blow-off $5. Switch the grass to overgrown and the visit goes to $49; a first cut of the season is $53. A crew of two finishes in 22 minutes but the visit costs $55, because both people are on the clock for the drive.

Per visit, per month or per season: which price to quote

Quote the monthly figure for weekly and biweekly customers, and keep the per-visit price on the estimate so the math is visible. Monthly is per visit × 4.33 for weekly and × 2.17 for biweekly, which is what 52 weeks divided by 12 months works out to. Quoting "$46 a week" invites the customer to skip weeks; "$199 a month" reads like a service.

Biweekly is not half the revenue for half the work. The grass is twice as tall every visit, you get more clumps and a second pass, and you've lost half the route density that makes weekly lawns pay. The calculator adds 15%, so the same 7,500 sq ft lawn is $52 a visit biweekly, or $113 a month. One-time cuts get 30%, $59 here, because there's no route to spread the drive over and you don't know the yard yet.

The minimum charge exists because the stop costs the same no matter the lawn. A 2,500 sq ft patch at the defaults maths out to $32.86, but you still drove there, dropped the ramps and loaded back up. The $40 minimum kicks in and the tool tells you it did. Set yours to whatever a stop is worth on your route.

How the calculator works out mowing time

Mowing time is lawn size divided by your mower's production rate, then stretched for tall grass. The rates below are common rules of thumb, labeled as assumptions in the panel, and the fastest way to make this calculator yours is to time three lawns and type your own number.

Notice that on a small lawn the mower barely matters: trimming, edging and the drive are two thirds of the time. The 60 in zero-turn saves 10 minutes here, and the trailer it needs adds more than that to the drive. Where the big mower earns its keep is the per-acre table below.

Lawn mowing cost calculator per acre

At the calculator's defaults (36 in walk-behind, weekly, one person, trim footage guessed from the size), a quarter acre prices at $53 a visit, a half acre at $77 and a full acre at $120. The price per acre falls as the lawn grows, because the drive, the load and the blow-off cost the same on every stop.

Switch the acre to a 60 in zero-turn and the same lot drops to $72 a visit, because mowing falls from 87 minutes to 29. That's the case for the bigger machine, and the calculator makes it in dollars instead of in the dealer's brochure. Above 5 acres the tool warns you: commercial lots need a bid built on your own logged rates, not a residential rule of thumb.

Common questions about lawn care pricing