Free Lawn Care 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 lawn & landscape 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.

Rain runs the schedule and it costs you twice. A storm week puts you a visit behind and grows the lawn a third again, so a yard quoted at one pass takes a high cut, a second lower pass and bagging, because wet clippings clump and the customer sees rows of hay.

Access is the other one. A sixty inch rider that will not clear the side gate turns a forty minute property into a walk-behind afternoon, and nothing on an aerial measurement tells you the gate is thirty-six inches wide. On an overgrown reclaim you are mowing blind, since fence posts, rebar, landscape timbers and half a cinder block all live in knee-high grass, so you walk it first and you buy blades when you do not.

Then the yard-waste site closes at noon and the haul-off you planned for the end of the day becomes tomorrow morning. Spring and fall carry their own overruns: the first cut of the year is two cuts, leaf season doubles every property on the route, and one breakdown in peak week — a spindle, a belt, a flat on the trailer — pushes an entire day of properties into a Saturday.

Mowing is labour, fuel and blades, and there is nothing to count. The rest of the trade carries product, and all of it is sold by coverage rather than by the piece.

A bag of fertilizer is rated for a square footage at one spreader setting, so run it at a starter or pre-emergent rate and the same bag covers a fraction of that. The other shortfall comes from measuring the parcel instead of the turf, since the house, the drive, the beds and the patio are not lawn. Mulch is bought by the cubic yard and a yard runs about a hundred square feet at three inches, so beds eyeballed from the truck come up short.

Sod is less forgiving, because it is perishable, curves and edges eat several percent in cut waste, and a pallet left through a hot afternoon is gone. Seed behaves the same way on a different clock — the rate for overseeding and the rate for bare soil are not the same number, and the straw or blanket over it is a second purchase people forget. Equipment consumables are the quiet line: blades sharpened or replaced, trimmer line by the spool, belts, filters and fuel, all bought in bulk and never charged to the job that wore them out.

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.