Most new landscapers do not lose money because they work slow. They lose money because they guessed at the number before they ever picked up a shovel.
Learning how to bid landscaping jobs is really two skills. First, figuring out how many man-hours the work actually takes. Second, turning those hours plus materials into a price that leaves you something after payroll. Almost every guide online covers the second half and skips the first, which is exactly the part that sinks new crews.
Here is the whole thing, with real numbers and a full sample bid at the end.
The formula every landscaping bid comes down to
Strip away the software and it is this:
Labor + Materials + Equipment + Overhead recovery + Profit = Your bid
That is it. The trouble is that four of those five are invisible until you go looking for them. Let’s take them one at a time.
Step 1: Know what an hour of your labor actually costs
Start with the wage. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS data, landscaping and groundskeeping workers earn a mean of $19.66 an hour nationally, with a median of $18.31 across roughly 943,000 workers. That is your starting point, not your cost.
Your real cost is the wage plus burden: payroll taxes (FICA 7.65%, plus FUTA and state unemployment), workers’ comp (which runs high in landscaping), and any benefits. A common rule of thumb in the trade is to add 25% to 35% on top of base wages. Level CFO uses roughly 1.30x wage as its benchmark and points out that costing crews at base wage understates every single job you bid.
So a guy you pay $20 an hour costs you about $26 an hour the second he steps on a property.
Step 2: Figure out how long the job actually takes
This is where new landscapers get destroyed. Walking a property, squinting at it, and saying “that’s about two days” is not estimating. It is gambling.
Use production rates instead. SingleOps publishes a baseline table in their public docs that gives you a real starting point:
- Spreading mulch by hand: 2.5 cubic yards per hour
- Mowing with a 21″ walk-behind: 12,500 sq ft/hr (easy), 10,000 (moderate), 7,500 (difficult)
- Mowing with a 36″ walk-behind: 25,000 / 22,500 / 20,000 sq ft/hr
- Mowing with a 52 to 61″ rider: 65,000 / 57,500 / 50,000 sq ft/hr
- Hard edging: 9,000 linear ft/hr. Soft edging: 4,000 linear ft/hr
- String trimming: 1,500 linear ft/hr
- Blower cleanup: 25,000 sq ft/hr
- Weeding shrub beds: 6,000 sq ft/hr. Slopes: 3,000 sq ft/hr
- Shrub pruning: 3,000 sq ft/hr, or about 10 medium shrubs per hour
- Granular fertilizer with a push spreader: 43,000 sq ft/hr
SingleOps says it straight in their own docs, and you should hear it: do not use these rates for bidding until you have verified they work for your company. Treat them as a first draft. Time your own crew on the next three jobs and replace these numbers with yours. That is how you build a rate table nobody can underbid you on.
Step 3: Add the 10% to 25% almost nobody bills for
Production rates cover production. They do not cover drive time, loading the trailer, running to the supply yard, waiting in line at the mulch pile, dump runs, setup, or cleanup.
SynkedUP puts real numbers on it: these details can add an additional 10% to 25% of man-hours on top of the actual job time. On a 14 man-hour job that is 1.4 to 3.5 hours you either bill for or eat.
Eat it enough times and you are working for free by August. Add the percentage.
Step 4: Price materials, then mark them up correctly
Two rules here.
Add 5% to 10% for waste. Jobber recommends it and it is right. You will spill mulch, break a paver, and short yourself half a yard of topsoil. Order for that.
Then understand that markup is not margin. This trips up more contractors than anything else in bidding. If you want a 30% margin, you do not add 30%. You add 42.9%. The formula:
Markup % = [desired margin ÷ (1 − desired margin)] × 100
Aspire works this out in detail and lands on typical material markups of roughly 17.6% to 33.3% for residential work (targeting 15% to 25% margins) and 11.1% to 17.6% for commercial (targeting 10% to 15%). Commercial takes less markup because the volume makes up for it.
If you are still working off a napkin, our free pricing calculator will run these numbers for you, and the material calculator tells you how many yards of mulch or topsoil the job actually needs.
Step 5: Recover your overhead
Overhead is everything that costs money whether you work or not: truck payment, insurance, phone, software, shop rent, your accountant.
The math is simple. Monthly overhead ÷ billable man-hours per month = your overhead rate per man-hour. If you carry $4,000 a month and your crew bills 320 man-hours, that is $12.50 per man-hour that has to come off the top of every job.
SynkedUP frames it perfectly: if your overhead costs are not paid by the customer, then they are paid by you.
Step 6: Add profit, and know what “normal” looks like
Profit is not the money left over. It is a line item you put in on purpose.
Jobber suggests 5% to 20% net. Level CFO’s benchmark data is more precise: median net profit margin around 12%, with the bottom quartile under 5% and the top quartile above 15%. For perspective, BrightView, the biggest publicly traded pure-play landscaping company in the country, nets about 2% because they actually book the full cost of management.
One warning from that same data that every new owner needs to hear: your P&L looks better than it is if you never booked your own salary as an expense. That is not profit. That is you working cheap.
The shortcut: an all-in man-hour rate
Once you know your loaded labor cost, overhead rate, and target margin, you can roll all of it into a single number and stop rebuilding the math every time.
SynkedUP’s benchmark tiers, drawn from company budgets they have built:
- $60 to $70 per man-hour: startups, minimal equipment, low overhead. Their note is that dropping below $60 rarely leaves a profit.
- $70 to $90 per man-hour: the average tier, where a lot of $500K to $2M companies land.
- $90 to $130 per man-hour: high-end design and build with real equipment and bigger crews.
Pick your tier honestly. Then bid: man-hours × your rate + marked-up materials.
A full sample bid, line by line
Job: 3,500 sq ft of neglected shrub beds at a small office park. Clean out the weeds, cut a hard edge, spread 3 inches of mulch.
Materials
- Mulch at 3″ over 3,500 sq ft = 32.4 cubic yards. Round to 32.
- Add 7% waste, order 34 yards.
- At $40 a yard delivered, cost = $1,360.
- Mark up 25% (a 20% margin) = $1,700
Man-hours
- Spread 32 yards by hand at 2.5 yd/hr = 12.8 hrs
- Weed 3,500 sq ft of beds at 6,000 sq ft/hr = 0.6 hrs
- Hard edge 400 linear ft at 9,000 ft/hr = 0.1 hrs
- Blower cleanup 3,500 sq ft at 25,000 sq ft/hr = 0.2 hrs
- Production subtotal: 13.7 man-hours
- Add 20% for drive time, three mulch runs, setup and cleanup = 16.5 man-hours
The bid
- 16.5 man-hours × $75 = $1,237
- Materials = $1,700
- Total: $2,937. Bid it at $2,950.
Now cross-check it from the bottom up. Two guys at $20/hr loaded to $26 = $429 in labor cost. Materials cost $1,360. Overhead recovery at $12.50 × 16.5 = $206. Breakeven is $1,995. At a 20% margin that is $2,494.
The two methods gave you $2,950 and $2,494. That gap is not an error, it is information. Material-heavy install work runs thinner gross margins than maintenance by nature, so on a job that is more than half materials, the bottom-up number is usually the honest one. Bid somewhere in that range and you are fine. Bid $1,800 because a guy on Facebook said he would do it for that, and you just paid for the privilege of working.
Five ways new landscapers lose money on bids
- Eyeballing the hours. Covered above. Use rates, not vibes.
- Forgetting the dump fee and the supply run. That is the 10% to 25%.
- Using last season’s material prices. You quote $5,000 in materials, the invoice comes back $6,000, and you just donated $1,000.
- Matching a competitor’s lower number without asking what was in it. Their bid might not include cleanup, warranty, or insurance. Yours does. That is not the same product.
- Taking a job that is too big for your crew. Adam Sylvester of Charlottesville Lawn Care put it well in an interview with Jobber: stretching yourself too much is a mistake because you underestimate how much tools and equipment you need to do just one more thing.
Should you charge for estimates?
For a $500 cleanup, no. A $75 consult fee on a small job feels ridiculous to a homeowner and you will lose leads over it.
For high-ticket design and build work, it is worth a look. SynkedUP’s argument is that the fee is a filter, not a revenue line: someone who will not commit $100 to have you come out is not likely to commit to a $50,000 project. On a job that size, $150 is a rounding error.
If you are not ready to charge, a lighter version works. Set defined consult windows (Tuesday and Thursday afternoons only, nothing after 5pm) so estimate visits stop eating your production days.
Getting the bid accepted
Send it fast. SynkedUP’s position is blunt: the longer you take to turn around a quote, the less likely it turns into a job. Jobber recommends following up if you have not heard anything in one to two weeks.
For context on whether you are doing well, Level CFO’s benchmarks (from NALP’s financial benchmark study) put the median close rate at 55%, with the bottom quartile under 40% and the top quartile above 70%. If you are closing 8 out of 10, your prices are probably too low. If you are closing 2 out of 10, you are bidding the wrong jobs, not pricing wrong.
And put it in writing. A verbal yes is not a contract. Grab our landscaping contract template and send the bid and the agreement together so scope creep has nowhere to hide.
Where to actually find jobs to bid on
Once you can bid, you need something to bid on:
- Government and municipal work: sam.gov for federal, plus your city and county procurement pages. Slow to pay, but steady and they re-bid on a schedule.
- Commercial bid boards: PlanHub, BidNet Direct, Construction Bid Source, Dodge.
- Property managers and HOAs: the highest-value cold outreach in landscaping. One property manager can hold a dozen properties.
- General contractors doing new residential builds who need the final grade and landscape package.
- Lead marketplaces like Thumbtack and Angi, which are fine to start with and expensive to stay on.
If you are still getting the business itself off the ground, start with our guide on how to start a landscaping business and come back to bidding once the truck, the insurance, and the LLC are handled.
The short version
Bid from numbers, not from your gut. Time your own crew and build a real production rate table. Load your labor 30%. Add 10% to 25% for the time nobody bills. Mark up materials by the margin formula, not the margin number. Put overhead and profit in on purpose. Then send it the same day.
Do that on the next ten bids and you will find out something uncomfortable and useful: the jobs you were most excited about were usually the ones you were about to lose money on.
