How to bid landscaping jobs
Hardscape installs bid at $15 to $40 per square foot; softscape and planting at $4 to $12. Retaining walls run $30 to $75 per face square foot. Crew time is $50 to $100 per person per hour, loaded.
Build the bid from your costs
The formula is not complicated. The discipline is.
(Crew hours × loaded hourly rate) + materials with markup + machinery + disposal.
A 400 sq ft paver patio, existing lawn, reasonable access:
- Excavation and base prep: 16 crew hours
- Laying and cutting: 20 crew hours
- Finishing, edging, jointing, clean-up: 8 crew hours
- 44 hours × $62 loaded = $2,728
- Materials: pavers, base, sand, edging, polymeric — $1,850 + 30% = $2,405
- Machinery: mini excavator 1 day + plate compactor = $420
- Disposal: 3 loads of spoil = $285
- Bid: $5,838 — which is $14.60/sq ft, just below the band. Easy access, simple shape.
The moment access gets tighter or the base needs to go deeper, that number moves several thousand dollars, and it should.
Price a landscaping job
Your numbers, the formula above. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs in your browser.
$8,800 base (400 square feet × $22)
This is a starting number, not a bid. Walk the property before you send it.
The loaded hourly rate is the whole bid
If you take one thing from this page: your crew hourly rate is not the wage you pay.
Wage, payroll tax, workers’ comp, liability insurance, vehicle, trailer, fuel, equipment depreciation and repair, unbillable travel, weather days, and overhead — divided by the hours you can actually bill.
Most landscapers who think they charge $55 an hour are recovering about $38 of cost and calling the rest profit. It is not profit; it is the equipment fund they will need next spring.
Work it out once a year, properly, and every bid after that is arithmetic.
What changes a landscape bid
Base preparation. The largest hidden cost. What is under the lawn decides the job.
Access. Whether a machine fits down the side, or whether every yard of base is barrowed through a gate.
Disposal. Spoil, turf, old paving. Tipping fees and truck hours.
Plant size. 3-gallon versus 15-gallon is not a small difference in either material cost or handling.
Grade and drainage. A sloped site is a different job from a flat one.
Season. Bidding your spring rate in November costs you work you could have taken.
The mistakes
Bidding off a competitor’s price. Their costs are not yours and you cannot see their overhead.
Wage instead of loaded cost. The most common and most damaging.
Folding base prep into a square-foot rate. It is the most variable cost on the job.
Free design. You are producing an asset the customer can shop elsewhere.
No allowance for weather days. Landscaping loses days every month; if they are not in your loaded rate, they come out of your margin.
Estimating faster
QuoteIQ at $29.99/mo measures beds, lawns and patios off satellite imagery, which removes the measuring step from every bid. Jobber at $49/mo produces the better-looking proposal and handles phased jobs with deposits. Housecall Pro Max presents tiered options for design-and-build work.
For true costed labour rates and job costing across a season, landscape-specific platforms like LMN exist — we have not verified their pricing, so there are no figures for them here.
Questions operators actually ask
How do I bid a landscaping job?
Build it from a costed hourly rate, not from a competitor's price. Estimate crew hours by phase, multiply by your loaded rate, add materials with markup, add machinery and disposal, then check the total against market bands — $15 to $40 per square foot for hardscape, $4 to $12 for softscape.
What should my crew hourly rate be?
$50 to $100 per person, loaded. That means wage plus tax, insurance, equipment, fuel, vehicle, downtime and overhead — not the hourly wage you pay. Landscapers who bid off wage rather than loaded cost are the ones who stay busy and never make money.
How much do I mark up materials?
20% to 50% depending on handling. Plants and stone that you source, collect, store and carry justify the higher end. Markup is not profit on top of profit — it pays for the truck, the trip and the losses.
Should I charge for design?
Yes. $300 to $2,500 depending on scope, credited against the install if they proceed. Free design means producing a plan that a customer takes to a cheaper contractor, which happens more than most landscapers admit.
Why do landscaping bids lose money?
Base preparation and disposal, almost always. Both are invisible in a per-square-foot rate, both vary enormously with what is already there, and both are what the contractor undercutting you left out of their number.