Fall cleanup pricing calculator: what to charge for a leaf cleanup

Leaf cleanups are the job small crews underbid worst, and it isn’t bad math. The variable that decides the price — leaf load — is invisible when you quote. Square footage you can see. Beds you can count. How much leaf the property drops, and whether it lands dry or wet and matted, you can’t.

This fall cleanup pricing calculator prices the job the way it costs you: crew hours driven by leaf load, plus beds, hauling and dump fees. Then it shows the hourly rate that price earns — now, not at the transfer station.

It’s free. No account, no email, no limits. Type your numbers, get your price.

What this calculator does

It answers one question: what do I charge, and what will I make per hour doing it?

• The cleanup price for the property
• Estimated crew hours, and how they split across the crew you’re sending
• Disposal cost — dump fees and the loading time behind them
• Your effective hourly rate — what the price you’re about to say pays per man-hour

That last number is the point. A cleanup price with no hourly rate next to it is a guess.

How it works

1. Enter property size. Enter the area in square feet. Nothing is measured for you — you enter what you know.
2. Pick the leaf load — light, medium or heavy. Each is described so you pick honestly: light blows clear in one pass; medium is full cover, still loose; heavy is wet, matted, ankle-deep, under mature hardwoods.
3. Enter your hourly rate and minimum charge. No rate you trust? Run the Landscaping Hourly Rate Calculator first and bring the number back.
4. Open “Adjust for this property” for the four things that move the price most: beds to clear, haul-away versus mulching in place, disposal and dump fees, crew size.

Steps 1 to 3 give a price in under a minute. Step 4 is where a cleanup stops being generic.

How to calculate a fall cleanup price

Property size and leaf load set the crew hours. Beds and hauling add hours on top. Hours times your rate gives the labor price, dump fees are added as a pass-through, and the total is checked against your minimum charge. Then the price less disposal costs is divided by the man-hours to show what you earn.

A worked example

Ray runs a three-man crew at $75 per man-hour. The property: 12,000 sq ft, heavy load under mature oaks, four beds, transfer station 15 minutes out at $45 a load.

The suggested clearing pace is 10 man-minutes per 1,000 sq ft for light leaves, with leaf-load factors of 1, 1.6 and 2.4. Each bed adds 18 man-minutes. Hauling adds 25% to collection time and 75 man-minutes per load for loading, driving and tipping. Replace these time allowances with your own experience.

Haul it away:

Here’s the trap. If Ray says $750 because $750 is the labor number he ran in his head, the $90 in dump fees comes out of his labor. His rate drops to $66 per man-hour — a 12% pay cut, agreed to in the driveway.

Mulch it in place:

No loading, no driving, no tipping. Six man-hours instead of ten, nothing at the gate.

Same property, same crew, $390 apart. Mulching in place isn’t the cheap option — it’s a different job with less of your day in it. Quote both and let the customer pick. Never let a haul-away price get anchored to a mulch-in-place number.

One cleanup or three visits?

Owners argue about this every October, so the fall cleanup pricing calculator prices both.

Ray’s single final cleanup is $840 and 10 man-hours in one heavy day. Splitting the same seasonal leaf load and two disposal loads evenly across three visits adds 120 man-minutes of setup for each additional visit: $1,140 and 14 man-hours, or $380 per visit. This is an even allocation of the seasonal estimate; change the workload and loads if the property needs more work. The minimum charge applies to each visit.

More money, more hours, three drives instead of one. What you get: no monster day running into dark, smaller dump loads, cash across the season instead of one November invoice. What you risk: a customer who thinks visits two and three were in the first price. Put the visit count in writing.

Who this is for

Owner-operators running 2–5 person crews who price cleanups between jobs, on a phone, on the property. Also the solo operator adding a helper for the season.

It is not a homeowner cost guide. It prices from a contractor’s costs, not a national average of what someone paid last year.

Related calculators

• Landscaping Hourly Rate Calculator — the rate every price here is built on
• Landscaping Job Bid Calculator — one-off jobs with materials, dump fees and markup
• Aeration and overseeding — the other fall add-on for mowing customers
• Snow removal — the work that starts the week the last leaf comes up
• All Okason pricing calculators — the full set, free and ungated

Keep the price so next October isn’t a guess

Where our suggested numbers come from. We built these tools because “what do I charge?” is the question two-to-five person crews ask each other most. The starting figures behind every input come from our own service-pricing research, reviewed each year and whenever the prices inside Okason change. They are national starting points, not your market. Replace them with your own numbers and the answer gets sharper.

Got a price you trust? Copy the result, then enter it as a service price in Okason so next October the number is waiting, not invented in a driveway.

More on pricing the work: how to calculate landscaping job costs, how to bid a landscaping job step by step, and how to price landscaping jobs for beginners.