How to set pricing for a growing lawn care business with employees?

Labor (you or employee): $20–$30/hr

Gas + equipment wear: $5–$10 per lawn

Travel time between jobs

Maintenance (blades, oil, repairs)

👉 A typical 30-minute lawn might cost you ~$15–$25 to service.

So your minimum charge should realistically be $40–$50 just to stay profitable.

2. Use Tiered Flat Pricing (NOT hourly)

Customers hate hourly. You want simple, predictable pricing.

Example Structure:

Small yard (under ¼ acre): $40–$50

Medium yard (¼–½ acre): $50–$70

Large yard (½–1 acre): $70–$100+

Adjust based on:

Grass height

Obstacles (trees, fences)

Terrain (slopes = more time)

3. Charge for Condition (Most people miss this)

You should NOT charge the same for:

Weekly maintained lawn

vs

Overgrown jungle

Add-ons:

Overgrown fee: +$20–$50

First-time cleanup: +$50–$150

Bagging clippings: +$10–$20

This protects your time and equipment.

4. Push Recurring Contracts (This is where money stabilizes)

One-time cuts are inconsistent. Weekly/biweekly is where you build real income.

Offer:

Weekly: Slight discount (ex: $45 instead of $50)

Biweekly: Standard rate

Monthly: Higher (more work each visit)

👉 Goal: Lock in predictable routes

5. Route Density = Profit

Driving kills your margins.

You want:

Multiple houses in the same neighborhood

Back-to-back jobs with minimal travel

👉 Example: 5 lawns in one street at $50 each = $250 in ~2–3 hours

That’s how you scale.

6. Upsells (This is how you increase ticket size)

Basic mowing alone is low-margin. Add:

Edging: +$10–$20

Weed eating: often included, but price accordingly

Leaf removal: $75–$200 seasonal

Mulching: $100–$500+

Hedge trimming: $50–$150

7. Simple Pricing Formula

Price = (Time × Target Hourly Rate) + Difficulty + Travel Adjustment

If your target is $60/hour:

30-minute job → $30 base → charge $45–$55

1-hour job → charge $60–$80+

8. Positioning Strategy

You have two paths:

Budget Volume Model

Lower prices

High volume

Tight routes

That’s a great problem to have—growth is good, but pricing will make or break you at that stage.

The biggest thing that helped me was stopping guessing and building everything off my hourly rate.

I sat down and figured out what it actually costs me to run the business:

• Labor (including payroll taxes)
• Equipment (owned + financed)
• Fuel, maintenance
• Insurance
• Office/admin (your office employee included)
• Overhead + profit

Once you know what you need to make per hour as a company, everything gets simpler.

From there, I price based on time. For recurring lawn care, I already know roughly how long a property takes based on size/layout. If it’s a 30-minute yard, I charge my hourly rate accordingly. Same thing for mulch, cleanups, installs—estimate the time, apply the rate.

Where it really starts to click with a team like yours (4 guys + office) is efficiency. If a job used to take 30 minutes solo, now you can run a crew and either:

• Knock it out faster
• Or stack more jobs in the same time window

That’s how you increase revenue without just raising prices.

One thing that’s helped me on the labor side is running a flat rate pay structure with a bonus pool. The job gets priced based on time, we hit it efficiently, and then any extra margin can go into a pool that gets split up. Payout is based on role and responsibility—foreman gets a higher percentage, then techs, then laborers. It creates buy-in, rewards efficiency, and keeps everyone focused on getting the job done right and on time.

For Jobber specifically, I’d recommend:

• Build price tiers based on property size/time
• Create standard service packages (weekly mow, cleanup, mulch per yard, etc.)
• Track your actual times for a few weeks and adjust—this is huge

It feels complicated at first, but once your hourly rate is dialed in, it becomes a repeatable system.

Most guys undercharge because they don’t truly know their numbers—don’t fall into that trap.

Yes I agree with huge Home Pros the chat GPT is a great idea. And it's so easy once you get your list put together if you're out doing something like he said you can always add that to the list just go back and tell it to put it on the list and it'll revise them list automatically for you I use it and it works very well also it's good to establish a minimum amount charged like smaller yards that would fall under a lower price like mine is a $45 minimum no matter what and that's just the mowing part good luck my business is also growing very fast I like to see other Lawn Care businesses grow also God Bless America!

If you know your hourly charge rate, and how long different tasks take - I would basically brain dump the things you would charge for and how long they take in to Chat GPT. Have it write out the complete line items with titles and how much to charge. You can do this by talking in to chat GPT so that would take less time. Review it once it spits it out and verbally tell it what to change. Then either enter it yourself or do a couple on loom and hire a VA to do them. My advise is enter the line items with pictures. 

Then as you are bidding out jobs, if you see stuff missing make a note of it somewhere then add those line items all at once. 

Also this is a big task so just start it somewhere. If you mess it up, you can always fix it!