Free Landscaping Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most landscapers & hardscape crews bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

It is what sits under the grass. You price a patio excavation and find the old one had no base at all, or buried construction spoil, broken concrete, a former burn pile, or clay that holds water and will not compact. Tree roots in the wall line are the usual one, and you cannot cut the big ones without first deciding whether the tree stays.

Access sets the rest. A thirty-six inch gate turns twenty yards of mulch into wheelbarrow work and keeps the mini excavator on the trailer. A slope means everything moves twice, and a soft lawn means matting before a machine crosses it.

Weather does not negotiate either, since saturated subgrade will not take compaction, polymeric sand needs dry hours after it goes down, and sod laid in a heat wave has to be watered by somebody that evening. Then the supply house, where the caliper you specified is gone and the substitution needs the customer to look at it first — and a plant selection trip in the middle of an install is a half day the schedule never had.

This trade carries real material, and most of it is bought by weight or volume rather than by the piece, which is where the miscount happens.

Pavers get cut, so a rectangular patio needs a few percent extra and a circle, a diagonal pattern or a curving walk needs closer to ten. Base stone comes by the ton and compacts, so what the yard loads is never what the square-foot math said. Mulch and topsoil come by the cubic yard, and a yard covers roughly a hundred square feet at three inches.

Order block, cap and paver for the whole job in one go and keep the overage on site, because a dye lot bought next spring will not match the wall it is repairing. Nursery stock moves with the season and with availability, and a size or variety specified in a plan may simply not exist that year. Sod is perishable, cut to order, and dies on the pallet in summer heat. The small stuff still adds up: fabric, edging, spikes, adhesive, polymeric sand, drain pipe and fittings, and the delivery charges that arrive one per material rather than one per job.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.