How Much to Charge for a Yard Cleanup

The short answer

A quarter acre move-out cleanup runs about $100, or $130 if the grass is high, and up to about $200 if you are doing it with a push mower.

Those are three prices for the same yard, from one operator working at $80 an hour. The $200 is the ceiling he gave, not his typical push-mower price, and the job he described was a move-out rather than routine maintenance.

Run it back:

The equipment you show up with roughly doubles the job, which is how the operator put it: about 2x on identical work. Same grass, same edging, same hedge, same trimming. A push mower turns a one hour job into a two and a half hour job, and if you quoted it off a price per property instead of off your own hours, you ate the difference and called it a bad day.

That is the whole shape of cleanup pricing, and almost every "lawn care pricing" article on the internet will hand you a price per property instead.

The mistake that costs more than the rate: one number for two different jobs

Here is a real one.

An operator quoted a property manager $505. One line. Inside that number were two completely different businesses.

Recurring work: mow, weedeat, blow.

One-time work: mulch install, hedge trim, vine removal.

Recurring work is priced on route density. One-time work is priced on hours and materials. They do not behave the same way, they do not carry the same risk, and they do not renew. Bundled into a single figure, three things go wrong at once.

You cannot renew it. Next month the property manager expects $505 again, and next month there is no mulch, no hedge, and no vines. You either eat a conversation you should have had at the quote, or you keep doing one-time work for free.

You cannot defend it. If he pushes back on $505 you have no idea which half he is pushing back on, and neither does he.

You cannot check your own margin. The mulch was the only line in the whole job with a real materials cost, and it was the only line he had never priced before. It was buried inside a number that looked fine.

Write the recurring work and the one-time work as separate lines. Even at the same total. Especially at the same total.

Mulch: the two conversions nobody memorizes

Mulch is where cleanup quotes lose money quietly, because quantity is a calculation and most operators eyeball it.

At three inches deep, which is the standard install depth:

• Bagged, 2 cubic foot bags: square feet ÷ 8.
• Bulk, cubic yards: square feet ÷ 108.

A 400 square foot bed is 50 bags, or 3.7 yards. Both of those come out of the same volume, so they agree with each other. The arithmetic is three inches is a quarter of a foot, 400 times a quarter is 100 cubic feet, 100 divided by 2 is 50 bags, 100 divided by 27 is 3.7 yards.

Tree rings are bigger than they look. A three foot radius ring is about 28 square feet, which is three and a half bags. Area goes up with the square of the radius, so doubling a ring quadruples the mulch. Six rings at three feet is 21 bags before you have touched a bed.

That 28 square feet is arithmetic run on one operator's own stated dimension, not a figure anybody reported.

Measure the beds. It takes four minutes and it is the only line on the job with a hard materials cost attached.

Your materials markup is probably too low

We held a 30 percent default markup on materials. One operator reports marking mulch up three times cost.

That is not a small correction. Selling at three times cost against selling at 1.3 times cost is roughly 2.3 times the price on the same bag. One operator is not a market, and it is a long way from where we were.

We are publishing that our own number was wrong because it was, and because the direction matters: if you are running a percentage markup you inherited from a spreadsheet, the number underneath it was probably set for a trade with different handling. Mulch is not a low touch material. Somebody buys it, loads it, hauls it, unloads it, and spreads it, and a 30 percent markup on the bag pays for none of that.

There is a separate hole here worth naming. Almost nobody carries a line for the time spent acquiring materials, as distinct from the markup on the materials themselves. The trip to the yard, the loading, the waiting. It is not markup. It is hours, and it belongs with your hours.

Minimums, and why they are not rudeness

$70 is a real floor on small cleanup work, from the same operator working at $80 an hour. That is about 52 minutes of billed time. We have not collected a figure for how long the drive, unload and reload actually take in lawn care, so we are not going to tell you the floor covers them.

Further up the scale the same logic gets blunter. A landscape operator running a two man crew will not send that crew out for under $1,500, even for an hour of work. Two people, a truck, and a day fragment is not recoverable by billing an hour of it.

A minimum is not a negotiating position. It is the point below which the job costs you money to accept.

The recurring half: route density is the number, not the mow

If you are pricing the mowing side, the mow itself is close to irrelevant.

One solo operator: about 50 yards, $30 to $75 per lawn, mows under ten minutes each, and roughly $125 an hour across the whole business.

Read those together and the mechanism falls out. Sub ten minute mows at $30 would be far more than $125 an hour if mowing were the job. It is not. The whole business hour includes the drive, the load, the unload, the fuel stop, the invoice, and the customer who wants to talk. Density is what closes that gap, the tighter the route, the closer your whole business hour gets to your mowing hour.

Which is why the same lawn is worth a different amount to two operators, and why "what should I charge per lawn" is a question with no answer until you know how far apart the lawns are.

For crews, one operator sells at $125 per man hour on a $35 an hour take home cost per man. That spread is not profit. It is the truck, the equipment, the insurance, the drive, and the fraction of the week nobody is on a lawn.

A related structure, from a landscaper: cost of doing business times 1.67, which is a 40 percent gross margin. A commercial cleaning operator arrived at the same method independently, dividing cost by 0.40.

Same method, different targets, and the difference is large. Dividing by 0.40 is a 60 percent margin. Multiplying by 1.67 is 40 percent. On $500 of cost that is $833 against $1,250.

What the two operators agree on is that you work backwards from a margin target rather than forwards from a rate. They do not agree on the target, and nobody should read them as one number.

The two lines missing from almost every price book

Equipment wear reserve. One lawn operator works in $20 an hour, flat, purely to replace equipment. Not repair. Replacement.

This is not a lawn care quirk. Three operators in three trades carry it: $20 an hour here, $5 per service in commercial cleaning, and a management fee funding vacuum and sprayer replacement in painting. No price book we have looked at carries an explicit line for it, ours included when the finding first landed. Your mower has a finite number of hours in it and every one of them is being spent on a customer's yard.

Drive and travel time. Also absent from most models, and in lawn care it is the bigger of the two by a distance.

At five stops a week, a thirty minute round trip is two and a half unpaid hours a week.

A warning about the number you will see quoted for this. The figure in circulation is roughly six points of gross margin, and it was calculated on a commercial cleaning model at $175 a service against a $20 an hour labor cost. Run it on lawn care numbers and it is much worse. Five cleanups at $100 is $500 of revenue, and two and a half hours against a crew cost anywhere near $35 an hour is about $88, which is closer to seventeen points, not six.

We are publishing both because the six is what our own notes said and the seventeen is what our own notes produce when you use lawn care figures. Neither is a measurement. Time your own week and use that.

Both of these are hours-side or cost-side. Neither is a rate problem. Which is the pattern.

Rented and subcontracted equipment

If the cleanup includes stump grinding, you are either renting a grinder or subbing it out, and most solo pricing has a line for neither.

For scale: a landscape job covering perimeter cleanup, mulch prep, and three stumps ground was priced between $1,000 and $3,000. That is a wide band because stump work is not proportional to the cleanup around it. It is a separate job that happens to be on the same property, and it should be a separate line with its own number.

Same for boom lifts and rental trucks. A rental is a cost of doing business on that job, not overhead you absorb.

The rate check

Do this on every cleanup quote before you send it.

1. Add your hours.
2. Take your quoted price, subtract materials at cost.
3. Divide by hours.

That is your actual rate on this job.

If it comes back low, ask which of the two it is before you touch your rate card. On the jobs we have collected it is almost always hours, and specifically it is almost always the hours you did not write down. The equipment tier. The high grass. The trip to the mulch yard. The ring you measured by eye.

Run your own number

What goes on the quote

Write the cleanup as separate lines, and keep recurring work and one-time work visibly apart.

• Recurring service, mow, trim, blow, per visit, at your route price
• One-time cleanup labor, hours at your rate, with the condition tier stated
• Materials, mulch and consumables, quantity shown, at your marked up price
• Material pickup and handling, the trip and the load, as hours
• Specialty or subcontracted work, stump grinding, hauling, lifts, each on its own line
• Disposal, if the facility charges by weight, say so

Two lines of terms that save an argument.

Recurring service and one-time cleanup are quoted separately and renew separately. Say it at the quote, not in month two.

Cleanup labor is quoted on the property's current condition. Overgrowth beyond the stated tier is billed at the same hourly. You are pricing grass you have seen. Two weeks of rain is not the same yard.

Frequently asked