How much do landscapers make? The owner side

How much landscapers make depends on which of three people you are asking about, and page one only answers for one of them. On our model an employed crew member takes home about $19 an hour, a solo operator with a full tight route earns roughly $44 an hour once you count the hours nobody bills for, and an owner running one two person crew lands near $24. The person on the tools is not the person taking the most risk, and on these numbers they are not the worst paid either.

We build the software that small local trades run their bookings and rebooking on, so treat this as our view rather than neutral advice. Every figure below is our own arithmetic on a stated model, not a borrowed average. Put your own prices, minutes and wages in and re-run it.

All figures are in US dollars as a reference point. The arithmetic works the same in any currency.

How much do landscapers make per hour, day, week, month and year?

The model, stated so you can argue with it. A standard residential maintenance visit priced at $55, taking 45 minutes on the property, with about $2 of card processing, so $53 of contribution per visit. A tight route of eight properties inside one neighborhood. A seven hour working day, five days a week, across a 36 week season. Those are the same assumptions we used in how to start a landscaping business, so the two posts add up.

One column is not like the others, and it is the first row. The employed crew member is paid for every hour in it. The other two are not, so their hourly figure is income divided by every hour actually worked, quoting and invoicing and servicing machines included. That is the comparison that matters and it is the one no salary page runs.

Before going past page one, a check that our model reproduces it. Nineteen dollars an hour over a full 52 week year is $39,520, and the US government's occupational wage figures put the median for landscaping and groundskeeping workers at about $37,360 a year, or $17.96 an hour. Close enough that the wage side of this is not in dispute. What follows is.

Why the annual salary figures are too high for most of the country

Every published landscaper salary is an hourly rate multiplied by 52 weeks. Outdoor maintenance in most climates is not a 52 week job.

Run it both ways. At $19 an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, a full year is $39,520. The same rate across a 36 week season is $27,360. That is a $12,160 difference produced by nothing except the calendar, and it is the single largest error in the numbers a person reads before deciding to take this work.

The correction runs both ways and we would rather say so. In a mild climate where maintenance runs 44 or 48 weeks, the annual figure climbs back toward the published one. Count your own working weeks first, then multiply.

What a solo landscaper actually earns per hour

Take the full tight route. Eight properties a day at $53 of contribution is $424 a day, and 180 working days in a 36 week season gives $76,320. Fixed costs of about $480 a month run for all twelve months, because insurance and software do not pause when the grass stops, so subtract $5,760. That leaves $70,560 before tax.

That is a steady year rather than a first one. The startup post puts the same route at $64,650, which is the identical model carrying the one off $5,910 of equipment. From year two the kit is paid for and the difference comes back.

Now divide it by hours instead of days, which is where it gets uncomfortable.

• Seven hours on the clock across 180 days is 1,260 hours. That is $56 an hour.
• Add roughly eight hours a week of quoting, invoicing, buying parts and servicing machines across 44 weeks of the year and you add 352 hours. Total 1,612.
• $70,560 divided by 1,612 hours is $43.77 an hour.

Both numbers are true and only the second one is honest. It is still more than double what the same person earns on someone else's payroll, which is the fair conclusion, but it is thirteen dollars an hour below the figure they would quote at a barbecue.

If your first year runs lower than this, the gap is almost never the price. It is the diary. Route density is worth about $19,000 a year at identical prices on our model, worked through in the landscaping startup post. The grooming version of the same arithmetic is in how much dog groomers make and the mobile version is in how much car detailers make.

Is $100 an hour too much for landscape work?

It is a fair crew rate and a misleading personal one, and that confusion is why the question keeps getting asked.

A $55 visit taking 45 minutes bills at about $73 an hour of time on the property. Put two people on the same property and the visit takes roughly 25 minutes, so it bills at about $132 an hour of clock time while costing about $46 an hour in wages once payroll costs are added. A customer looking at $100 an hour is looking at what the crew hour is priced at, not at what anybody is paid. The rest of that gap is not profit. It is drive time, fixed cost, the machine that failed in July, and every minute of the day nobody is billed for.

Does hiring a crew actually make you more money?

This is the part page one does not touch, and the answer surprised us when we ran it.

Two people work a property in about 25 minutes rather than 45. In the same seven hour day, with five minutes between properties and half an hour out to the first job and back from the last, a two person crew fits thirteen properties instead of eight.

The crew produces $265 more work a day and costs $365 to do it. Across the season that is $58,320 of contribution after wages, and once $9,840 of annual fixed costs for a crew setup come out the owner is left with $48,480. Working alone on the same route returns $70,560.

So the first crew, hired at these numbers, pays the owner less than working alone did. That is not an argument against hiring. It is an argument that a crew is a capacity decision rather than an income decision, and that it converts into income at one specific point.

That point is fifteen properties a day, which is what the crew needs to reach $424. Fifteen at five minute spacing is a seven hour fifty minute day, which nobody runs five days running. Fifteen at three minute spacing is about seven and a half hours, which is workable. The crew catches up by tightening the route, not by raising the price. Fill the map before you fill the truck.

What is the highest paying landscaping work?

We are not going to publish a by region table, for the same reason we refused to when we wrote up whether you need a license to groom dogs. The published versions contradict each other and we will not invent a tidier one.

Three things move the number more than geography does.

1. Work with a certificate behind it. Chemical application, tree work and irrigation carry their own qualifications, which thins the field of people who can quote against you.
2. Contracts that repeat. A one off cleanup pays better on the day and buys you nothing on the Monday after. Thirty visits from one property across a season is what makes a route worth driving, and the wider case is in how to get repeat customers.
3. Density. It is the cheapest of the three to fix and the one most operators leave alone.

Is landscaping a high risk business?

The risk is the shape of the year, not the hourly rate.

Income arrives across roughly 36 weeks. Insurance, software, finance payments and the phone bill arrive across 52. On our model that is $5,760 of fixed cost against a season, and the four months where nothing lands have to be funded out of the four months where everything does. That is a cash flow problem long before it is a profit problem.

The second risk is quieter and it compounds. One cancelled visit a day, across 180 working days, is $9,540 of contribution gone in a year. On a crew day it costs more than that, because the wages were paid whether the customer was home or not. We wrote up the settings that move that number in how to reduce no-shows, and a deposit is the blunt version, covered in choosing how you charge.

What we do, and what we do not

Every number on this page starts with two inputs, what a visit is priced at and how long it actually takes. If those live in your head, none of it is computable. Putting a price and an honest duration behind each service is where we would start, and managing your services is where those live. Set a visit to recur on an interval and the next one falls due on a clock instead of in your memory, covered in recurring visits and rebooking.

That is one of the live storefronts we run. It is a mobile car detailer, not a landscaper, and we would rather say so than dress up a mockup. We have no landscaping storefront yet. It is the closest thing we run to a landscaping route though, a van going to the customer rather than the customer coming to a unit, and you are looking at a priced service list, a booking button and a deposit taken to hold the slot.

Three limits, said plainly, because a feature list without them is worth less.

• Our reminders go out by email, not text message. If your customers expect a text the night before, weigh that.
• We do not run payroll. Every wage and on cost figure above is yours to keep, not something our software works out for you.
• The revenue figure on your dashboard counts payments taken through Growth Onward. Cash handed over at the kerb does not appear in it, which matters more in this trade than in most, and understanding your revenue says the same thing.

You can put a test booking through the live demos if you want to see the whole loop before deciding anything.

The short version

An employed crew member earns about $19 an hour and is paid for all of them. A solo operator with a full tight route earns about $44 an hour once the unbilled hours are counted, which is the best number on this page. An owner running one crew earns about $24, until the route gets dense enough to carry fifteen properties a day.

The number that decides all three is not the price on your list. It is how many minutes of your day are spent on a property rather than between two of them. The wider version of that argument, across every local trade we work with, is in how local service businesses get and keep customers. More on this trade sits in the landscaping hub, and the money side of the other trades is in pricing and payments.