Updated October 21, 2026
The cleanest way to work out how to price landscaping jobs is to separate the job into what you buy, how many man-hours it takes, what equipment it needs and what it has to carry in overhead. Install and hardscape bids built this way stop depending on a gut-feel number per square foot.
Quick answer: Take off materials with a waste allowance, estimate man-hours by task from your own crew history and cost them at burdened rates, add equipment and disposal, then recover overhead per man-hour. Add profit by dividing by one minus your margin, and present the result. Maintenance work uses a different, per-visit method.
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Most landscaping companies run maintenance (mowing, beds, seasonal cleanups) alongside install work (plantings, patios, walls, drainage). Maintenance is priced per visit from route time; installs are priced as projects. This guide covers installs and hardscape. For recurring mowing, see how to price lawn mowing jobs.
Divide your annual overhead (yard, trucks, trailers, insurance, office, marketing, owner salary above field work) by the field man-hours your crews will bill in a year. If overhead is $160,000 and crews bill 9,000 man-hours, every man-hour on a bid must carry about $17.78 of overhead (round it to $18) before you earn a dollar of profit.
All quantities and unit costs below are assumptions to illustrate the method. Use your supplier pricing and crew history.
| Line | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Pavers | 300 sq ft + 10% waste = 330 × $4.50 | $1,485 |
| Base gravel, 6 inches compacted | about 7.5 tons × $38 | $285 |
| Bedding sand | 1 ton | $45 |
| Edge restraint and spikes | fixed | $120 |
| Polymeric sand | fixed | $90 |
| Labor | 3-person crew × 3 days × 8 h = 72 man-hours × $32 burdened | $2,304 |
| Equipment (skid steer and plate compactor) | rental or internal rate | $450 |
| Spoils haul-off | fixed | $200 |
| Direct cost | $4,979 | |
| Overhead recovery | 72 man-hours × $18 | $1,296 |
| Price at 15% net profit | $6,275 ÷ 0.85 | $7,382 |
That is about $24.60 per square foot for this patio. On a patio with steps, curves or a seat wall, the man-hours change, and so does the price per square foot. That is the point of building it up.
For plantings, price the plant at your nursery cost plus a margin that covers loading, the plant warranty you offer and losses, then add installation man-hours by container size. If you offer a plant warranty, price its cost in; replacing a dead tree in July is not free.
Large installs can take hours of design and estimating before anyone signs. Many companies charge a design fee and credit it if the client books the work. At minimum, track estimating hours so you can see which job types are worth bidding.
Show the client the scope in plain language: the patio size, base depth, paver style, edging and what happens to the soil you dig out. Break out the bigger optional items (lighting, a seat wall, plant upgrades) so the client can adjust scope instead of asking you to cut your price. State what is not included, such as irrigation changes or permit fees, and how unforeseen conditions like buried rock are handled. Clear scope wins more installs than a lower number with vague terms.
After you send it, follow up within three days. Many landscaping bids are not lost to another company; they are simply forgotten while the homeowner gets busy.
A bid like this is easy to build at a desk and hard to build in a truck between maintenance stops. Unmanually is a 24/7 AI Office Manager you talk to on the drive: "Paver patio, 300 square feet, standard base, quote it to the Lees," and it builds the bid from your price list, sends it and follows up. It asks before anything that spends money. See what it does for landscapers, or run the calculator to see the hours of bids and invoices that become minutes of talking.
Divide annual overhead by the field man-hours you expect to bill in a year, then add that amount for every man-hour in the bid before adding profit.
Take off pavers with waste, base, sand, edging and joint sand; add man-hours at burdened cost, equipment and haul-off; recover overhead per man-hour; then divide by one minus your profit margin.
For large installs many companies charge a design fee and credit it if the client books. At minimum, track estimating time so you know which jobs are worth bidding.
Home service businesses answer only about half their calls (Invoca, July 2026), and owners spend about 11 to 16 hours/week on admin. Knowing what to do is the easy part; the money leaks out in the calls you can't take, the quotes nobody chases and the invoices that sit unpaid. Unmanually is a 24/7 AI Office Manager for landscapers that you run by voice from your phone:
Sources: Invoca, July 2026 (52% of home-service calls answered by a person, 60M+ calls); admin hours: Time etc / Censuswide 2023 and Amex SME Barometer 2026.
Unmanually is an AI Office Manager that works 24/7 and that you run by voice from your phone. Leave your mobile number and the AI Office Manager calls you right away, the same way it would call back one of your customers. That call is the demo: it answers, books you a 15-minute time with the founder and follows up.
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