LawnBiz Tools

Build Your Own Lawn Care Pricing Chart

Most pricing charts publish someone else's prices. Enter your equipment and costs and this generates yours, ready to print and keep in the truck.

Chart basis —

Enter your numbers below.

Your equipment and costs

Pre-filled with the worked example below. Change every field to your own numbers.

21 push, 36-48 walk-behind, 48-72 zero-turn.
Overlap, turns and obstacles. 80 open, 60 cluttered.
Often 30-50% on residential lots. This is added on top.
Round trip, divided across the stop. Tight routes win here.
From the hourly rate calculator — already includes overhead and margin.
No job is worth stopping for below this.

These are your numbers, not market rates. This calculator works from the costs you enter. It does not tell you what your area pays — that varies by region, season and year, and any site quoting you a single national figure is guessing. Use this to find the price that covers your costs and target profit, then sanity-check it against what you can actually win locally.

How each row is built Show the arithmetic 
acres/hour  = (mph x deck width) / 99 x efficiency
mow time    = (sq ft / 43,560) / acres per hour
total time  = mow time x (1 + trim share) + drive time
price       = total time x your charge-out rate
              (or the minimum charge, whichever is higher)

The charge-out rate already contains your wage, payroll burden, fuel, maintenance, overhead and margin — that is what the hourly rate calculator produces. So this page only has to convert size into time and time into money.

Worked example, one row

8,000 sq ft, 36in deck, 4 mph, 75% efficiency,
40% trim share, 12 min drive, $62.54/hr

acres/hour = (4 x 36) / 99 x 0.75 = 1.0909 ac/hr
area       = 8,000 / 43,560       = 0.18365 acres
mow time   = 0.18365 / 1.0909     = 0.16835 hr  (10.1 min)
total time = 0.16835 x 1.40 + 0.20 = 0.43569 hr (26.1 min)
price      = 0.43569 x 62.54       = $27.25

Below a $40 minimum, so this lawn is charged $40.

That last line is the point of a minimum. A small lawn still costs you a stop, a ramp-down and a drive, and pricing it purely on time makes the smallest jobs the least profitable hours of your week.

Common questions

Why not just publish a lawn care pricing chart?

Because a chart of someone else's prices tells you nothing useful about yours. Two operators in the same town with different equipment, different route density and different insurance costs have genuinely different break-even prices, and a published average would be wrong for both.

Charts that quote national figures also go stale within a season as fuel and wages move. This generates a chart from your own numbers instead, so it is right for you on the day you print it.

How do I use the chart once I have it?

Print it and keep it in the truck. When you look at a property, estimate the square footage, find the nearest row, and you have a defensible starting price in seconds.

It also makes you consistent, which matters more than it sounds — inconsistent pricing across similar properties is how customers end up comparing notes and how you end up discounting the wrong jobs.

How do I estimate square footage on site?

Pace the two main dimensions and multiply — a normal adult stride is close enough to three feet for this purpose. For irregular lots, break the area into rectangles and add them.

Satellite measuring tools are more precise, but they measure the whole parcel rather than the turf you actually cut, so they usually overstate. Pacing the mowable area beats measuring the property line.

Should every lawn get the chart price?

It is a starting point, not a rule. Add for steep slopes, heavy obstacles, gates too narrow for the mower, dog waste, or long carries from the truck — all of them cut your effective acres per hour and none of them show up in square footage.

The chart prices an average property of that size. Your judgement prices this one.

Related tools

Sources