How to Price Landscape Design and Install Jobs

You drew the plan, walked the client through it, and won the job. Then the crew hit clay under the sod, the dump run cost more than you guessed, and the design hours you gave away for free never showed up anywhere on the bill. The job looked great. Your bank account didn’t.

This guide shows you how to price landscape design and install jobs step by step: a design fee, man hours by phase, materials, equipment, overhead, and profit margin. Then it shows you how to split a big job into phases with deposits and change-order terms, so your margin holds on work that runs all year. It ends with a full worked example of an estate quote.

Why Landscape Design and Install Jobs Get Underbid

Big installs scare owners in two directions at once. One owner on Reddit put it plainly: “How do I go about building a quote that gives me a healthy profit without being absurdly priced.” They had landed a client who could keep them busy “for at least a year to finish 4 phases of this estate design.” The work itself wasn’t the worry. The price was.

That fear shows up in every pricing thread. In a Facebook landscaping group, another owner asked: “I have about $650 total in material costs and I’m figuring a day in my price. Told the customer $1500. Does this seem about right?” Nobody can answer that without knowing the crew, the wage, the drive, and the dump fees.

Most underbids come from the same five habits:

• Giving the design away. Hours spent measuring, drawing, and revising get buried or skipped.
• “Double the materials.” It’s an old rule of thumb from forum threads. It works on a mulch job and falls apart on a patio, where labor dwarfs materials.
• Pricing on wage, not burdened cost. Payroll taxes, workers’ comp, and drive time don’t show up in the hourly wage.
• Confusing markup with margin. A 20% markup is not a 20% margin. More on that in Step 7.
• Desperation discounting. As one YouTube business coach put it: “make sure to price for profit from day one. I get it, man. It’s so easy to just I’ve got to have the job.”

The fix is to build the price from your own costs, in order, every time.

Step 1: Walk the Site and Lock the Scope

Every bad number starts with a fuzzy scope. Before you price anything, walk the property with the client and write down exactly what’s in and what’s out.

• What’s the budget for the whole property, and for this year?
• Which areas matter most? (That’s usually Phase 1.)
• Who’s handling permits, HOA approval, and utility locates?
• When do they need it done?

Asking about budget up front isn’t rude. It saves you from drawing a plan nobody can afford.

Site Conditions That Change Labor

Photograph these. They’re where hours disappear:

• Slope. A pitched yard means more grading, more base, maybe a wall you didn’t plan.
• Access. Can a skid steer fit through the gate, or is everything going in by wheelbarrow?
• Soil. Clay, rock, or roots slow digging and change base depth.
• Drainage. Standing water today means drain work tomorrow.
• Tear-out. Old pavers, stumps, and overgrown beds all have to go somewhere, and that costs money.

Step 2: Price the Design as Its Own Line

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: the design is a product, so charge for it. A plan you hand over for free can be shopped to the cheapest bidder in town.

Flat Fee vs. Hourly vs. Percent of Install

For most 2–5 person crews, a flat fee is easiest. Price it from your hours: site visit, measuring, drawing, one round of revisions, and the presentation meeting. Cap revisions in writing, then bill extra rounds hourly.

Credit the Fee When They Sign

A clean way to sell the design fee: collect it up front, then credit part of it back if the client signs the install within a set window, such as 30 days. The client feels like the plan was “free” if they hire you. You’re paid either way if they don’t.

What Design Typically Runs

Use these only as a sanity check after you’ve priced your own hours:

Step 3: Figure Your Real Landscape Labor Rates

Your crew’s hourly wage is not your labor cost. To find the real number, you add what each hour actually costs you, then account for the hours nobody bills.

Burdened Wage

Add payroll taxes, workers’ comp, and any benefits on top of the wage. Get real numbers from your payroll provider and insurance agent. Workers’ comp alone can surprise you. One owner shared that adding a seasonal service would push their premium “$250 to over $1700.” If you haven’t checked your class code rates lately, our guide on workers’ comp for landscapers walks through it.

Illustrative: $22/hr wage + 20% burden = $26.40/hr.

Non-Billable Time

Loading the trailer, driving, the supply yard run, and end-of-day cleanup are all paid hours that don’t produce finished work. If a quarter of each paid day is non-billable, divide by 0.75.

Illustrative: $26.40 ÷ 0.75 = $35.20 per billable man hour.

That’s the number you multiply your hours by. Not $22.

One owner said “I try to do three to one” on labor, and a YouTube coach said to charge “at least three times what your average cost per hour for an employee is.” Those multiples work because they quietly cover burden, overhead, and profit. The steps below show you where each piece goes.

Step 4: Estimate Man Hours by Phase and Task

Break the job into phases, then each phase into tasks. Estimate man hours for each task using your own production rates, not a number from a forum.

Break the Job Into Tasks

A typical design and install phase looks like this:

1. Tear-out and haul-off
2. Grading and drainage
3. Hardscape base prep
4. Hardscape install (pavers, walls, steps)
5. Irrigation or lighting rough-in
6. Planting
7. Mulch, edging, final grade
8. Cleanup and walk-through

Use Your Own Production Rates

Track square feet of pavers set per man hour, minutes per 3-gallon shrub, and yards of mulch spread per hour. Write it down after every job. After a season, you’ll price closer than any rule of thumb.

If you don’t have rates yet, pad your first few estimates and track actual hours hard. Our guide on how to calculate landscaping job costs has a simple tracking setup.

Step 5: Add Materials, Equipment, and Dump Fees

This is where the forgotten line items live.

Materials. Price from a current supplier quote, not last spring’s memory. Add waste: pavers need extra for cuts, and plants die in the nursery truck. Then add a materials handling markup (10–15% is a common estimating choice, not an industry rule) to cover ordering, pickup trips, returns, and warranty replacements. Treat it as cost recovery. Profit comes later.

Delivery. Bulk stone, soil, and pallets often carry delivery fees.

Equipment. Charge your own equipment by the hour or day, and price rentals at what they cost you, including fuel and pickup time. Skid steers, plate compactors, and wet saws add up fast.

Dump fees. Count the loads. Old sod, concrete, and stumps all cost money to leave behind.

Taxes and tariffs. Check how your state taxes materials and installation, and watch price swings on stone, steel, lighting, and irrigation parts.

Step 6: Add Overhead per Hour

Overhead is everything you pay whether a crew is working or not: truck payments, insurance, phone, software, admin time, and standing behind your work. That same owner who uses three to one added: “I also guarantee my work for a year charge for that.” A warranty is a real cost. Price it.

To get overhead per billable hour:

Annual overhead ÷ total crew billable hours per year = overhead per hour

Illustrative: $60,000 overhead ÷ 4,200 billable hours (3 people × 1,400 hours) = $14.30/hr.

Every man hour carries that $14.30. Skip it, and your profit quietly pays the truck note.

Step 7: Set Your Margin, Not Your Markup

Now add up labor, overhead, materials, equipment, and dump fees. That’s your total cost. Profit goes on top. This is where most owners slip.

Markup vs. Margin

If your cost is $10,000 and you add 20%, you charge $12,000. But your profit, $2,000, is only 16.7% of the price. That’s markup. Margin is profit as a share of the price. The Grow Group estimates that markup-vs-margin confusion costs a $1 million company about $20,000 a year, and recommends 10–20% net margin as a baseline (Grow Group).

The Formula

Price = Total Cost ÷ (1 − target margin)

For a 15% net margin on $10,000 of cost: $10,000 ÷ 0.85 = $11,765. That’s the formula DynaScape and most estimating guides use.

Margin isn’t gouging. It pays for the bad weeks, the callbacks, and the next truck. For how margins differ across mowing, installs, and hardscape, see our breakdown of landscaping profit margin by service type.

Worked Example: Pricing an Estate Design and Install Job

All figures below are illustrative. Plug in your own wages, rates, and supplier prices.

The client owns a large property and wants four phases over the next year: front entry, back patio, lighting and irrigation, and perimeter plantings. You start with the design.

The Design Fee

A master plan for all four phases: site visit, measuring, drawing, two revision rounds, and a presentation. You estimate 35 hours at $100/hr = $3,500, paid at signing. If they sign Phase 1 within 30 days, $1,500 is credited to that phase.

Phase 1: Front Entry

Scope: tear out old beds, a 300 sq ft paver walkway, a 30-foot seat wall, 25 shrubs and 3 trees, 8 yards of mulch.

Man hours

Costs

Price at 15% net margin: $14,653.50 ÷ 0.85 = $17,239. Round to $17,250.

Less the $1,500 design credit, the client sees $15,750 due for Phase 1.

What “Double the Materials” Would Have Bid

Raw materials before handling came to $5,655. Doubled, that’s $11,310. That’s $3,343 below your actual cost, before you make a dime. Win that bid and you pay to work at this client’s house. Multiply that across four phases and a “year of work” becomes a year of losses.

Sanity-Check Against Market Rates

Pull the walkway out on its own: its labor, overhead, materials, and share of equipment come to about $21.80 per sq ft after margin. That sits inside the $10–$24/sq ft paver range Billbooks lists. If your number lands way outside a benchmark range, recheck your hours. Don’t just match the benchmark. Your costs are your costs.

Phases 2 Through 4

Price each later phase the same way. But give each one its own price, valid for a set window, such as 60 days. Material prices move over a year, and a patio priced in November and built in August shouldn’t eat a stone price jump. For patios, kitchens, and fire features, our outdoor living space pricing formula goes deeper.

Deposits, Phases, and Change Orders

A job that runs all year needs payment terms that keep cash ahead of the work.

Deposits and Progress Payments

Set a schedule for each phase. Collect enough up front to cover materials, so you’re never financing a client’s patio. One illustrative schedule for Phase 1:

Large deposits paid by card carry processing fees, so count those fees as overhead or pass them on. And check whether your invoicing app adds a surcharge on top of your processor’s rate. On a five-figure deposit, that adds up.

Change Orders

“While you’re here, can you extend the bed?” is how margin bleeds out. Put this in your contract:

• Any change to scope is written up and priced before the work happens.
• The client approves it in writing.
• Change orders are billed with the next progress payment.

If you discount anything, show it as a separate line. A Facebook group member gave this advice for a nonprofit job: price labor at your normal rate on paper, then show the discount below it. The client sees the real value, and your rates don’t drop for the next job.

Turning the Estimate Into a Landscaping Quote From the Truck

The best estimate loses to a faster competitor if it takes you a week to send. Clients who just walked their yard with you are ready to say yes that day.

A good landscaping quote template for design and install work has:

• The design fee and credit terms as their own lines
• Each phase priced separately, with what’s included in plain words
• Optional upgrades listed below the base price (lighting, larger trees, a step-up paver)
• The deposit and progress payment schedule
• Change-order terms and the price-valid-until date

For a full layout, see our landscaping proposal template.

If you build estimates on the tailgate, Okason has a feature called Talk-to-Estimate. You say what each phase needs on your phone, and it builds line items priced from your own Price List. That gives every phase a consistent estimate before you leave the driveway. And when the deposit comes in, Okason adds no markup on top of your payment processor’s rate.

Whatever you use, compare estimated to actual hours on every finished job, task by task. That’s how your next estate quote gets closer.

FAQ

How much should I charge for landscape design (landscape design fee)?

Price your own hours first: site visit, measuring, drawing, revisions, and presentation. Then sanity-check it. LawnStarter lists $2,200–$6,180 per project and $50–$150/hr for designers. Simple bed plans run much lower.

What profit margin should I target on design and install jobs?

The Grow Group recommends 10–20% net margin as a baseline. Use Price = Cost ÷ (1 − margin) so your margin is real, not a markup in disguise.

How do I price a job when I’m not sure how long it will take?

Break it into small tasks, estimate each one, and add a contingency line for the unknowns you spotted on the site walk, such as rock, roots, or drainage. Then track actual hours so the next estimate is tighter.

The bottom line: price the design, build labor from burdened cost, count every dump run, and set margin with the formula. Then send the quote while the client is still standing in the yard.