Landscaping profit margins

The IRS reports what one-owner businesses filing Schedule C earn, by sector. Landscaping falls under Administrative and support services. For tax year 2023, 3,118,914 returns reported $114.4 billion in receipts, $17.9 billion in cost of sales and $24.2 billion in net income less deficit (the table gives thousands of dollars):

The owner's own draw is not an expense on a Schedule C, so that net margin is mostly the owner's wage, not profit on top of it.

Landscape maintenance is labor, fuel and equipment wear; installs add plants, stone and disposal. Drive time between properties is the hidden cost.

For a worked example, our lawn care cost calculator puts mowing, 1/4 acre lawn at $33 to $61 a visit, typical $47, and treats about 80% of that as labor. On the typical price, that is about $37 of labor and $9.35 of materials, equipment and everything else, before your overhead and profit.

• Routes with long drives between stops
• Mowing prices not raised in years
• Extra work done without a change order
• Equipment downtime in peak season
• Disposal fees on cleanups

Ways landscapers raise margin: tighten routes so stops are close together; raise maintenance prices every season; sell installs to maintenance customers first; write a change order for every extra.

The typical national prices from our sourced calculators are a check on whether your prices leave room for margin:

Work out the margin on each line of your menu, not just the big jobs. The usual landscaping menu: weekly mowing, small lot; shrub and hedge trimming; mulch refresh; bed weeding and edging; seasonal color planting; dethatching; soil test and ph correction; sod repair; french drain, shallow; artificial turf, polyethylene; planting beds; sod install; land clearing, brush and small growth.

Overhead comes out of the margin before profit. In landscaping it includes general liability insurance, which Insureon's customers who are landscaping businesses pay an average of $51 a month for; commercial auto at $204 a month on the same figures.

Put one recent landscaping job into the calculator above, or switch it to "My margin for the year" to set your year next to the IRS benchmark. A 50% markup is a 33% margin; the markup calculator shows the rest.