How Do You Bid Commercial Landscape Maintenance?

Turn turf, beds and visits into crew-hours

Each line becomes hours through a production rate: the units one person finishes in an hour with a given machine or tool — acres mowed with a 60-inch deck, linear feet trimmed, shrubs pruned. Hours per visit are each quantity divided by its rate, plus the setup every visit carries: unloading, the walk-through, loading up. Annual hours are hours per visit times the scheduled visits, plus the periodic tasks.

The best production rates are the company’s own: on-site crew-hours by property and task on properties it already maintains, divided by those properties’ quantities. A rate from a book or a forum is a starting point, to be replaced by the company’s own after one season.

For mowing, Iowa State University Extension’s guide to field capacity gives a cross-check. Theoretical capacity in acres per hour is width in feet times speed in mph, divided by 8.25; effective capacity is that figure times field efficiency, the share left after overlap, turns and stops. Speed can be timed over 88 feet: miles per hour equal 60 divided by the seconds it takes. The guide leaves travel to and from the field out of field efficiency, one more reason to keep drive time on its own line. Its tables are for farm machines, so the efficiency on a given property is the company’s own to measure.

Illustrative example: a hypothetical office park has 4 acres of open turf for a 60-inch deck. At an assumed 5 mph and an assumed 70% field efficiency, the formula gives 5 × 5 × 0.70 ÷ 8.25, about 2.1 acres an hour, so about 1.9 hours of mowing per visit. The company’s own rates add 3.0 man-hours of trimming, edging, blowing and tight turf, 2.0 of bed work and 0.5 of setup: 7.4 man-hours a visit, about 311 over 42 visits a year. Shrub pruning four times at 10 hours, one mulch installation at 24 and twelve irrigation inspections at 1.5 add 82 more. The bid rests on about 393 man-hours a year. Every input here is invented.

Build the man-hour rate from the company’s own costs

The federal occupational definition for first-line supervisors of landscaping and groundskeeping workers says the work may involve “preparing estimates according to labor, material, and machine costs.” The man-hour rate is those costs plus overhead and profit, per hour a crew member spends on a property. Public figures give context, not the rate.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for landscaping and groundskeeping workers at $18.82 an hour in May 2025, with the lowest-paid tenth under $14.98 and the highest-paid tenth over $27.28. Across private industry in June 2026, benefits were 30.0% of employers’ compensation costs, and legally required benefits alone — Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation — were 7.2%. Neither figure is a landscaping company’s cost; the company’s own payroll register is.

Two federal rules move the labor cost. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, covered employees who are not exempt must be paid at least time and one-half their regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek. On federal service contracts over $2,500, the Department of Labor states that the Service Contract Act requires contractors to pay service employees no less than the wage rates and fringe benefits found prevailing in the locality. Which rule applies to which employee is a question for the payroll provider or an employment attorney; this is not legal advice.

The rate itself has four layers, each from the company’s own books:

• Field labor per paid hour: wages from the payroll register plus payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, benefits and, in peak weeks, the overtime premium. For example, 50 hours worked in a week are paid as 55 at the base rate, so that week’s hours cost 10% more on average.
• Paid hours off the properties: drive, loading, fueling, the shop, rain. Divide the labor cost by the share of paid hours spent on properties, or add drive time to each property’s hours, never both.
• Equipment per on-site hour. Iowa State’s machinery cost method divides ownership costs — depreciation, interest, taxes, insurance and housing — by the hours of use in a year, then adds operating costs such as repairs, fuel and lubrication per hour, and names the company’s own repair records as the best data for repairs. Mowers, trimmers, blowers, trucks and trailers all count.
• Overhead per on-site hour: office staff, estimators, account managers, supervisors not on a crew, insurance, rent, software and the owner’s pay, divided by the on-site man-hours the company expects to sell that year.

Add the layers, then divide by one minus the target margin; for example, a 15% margin on the price is a 17.6% markup on cost. Illustrative example: a hypothetical crew averages $19.00 an hour, and taxes, workers’ compensation and benefits add $4.50, so $23.50 per paid hour, or $29.38 per on-site hour with 80% of paid hours on site. Equipment adds $8.00, and overhead of $600,000 a year over 45,000 on-site man-hours adds $13.33. The cost is $50.71 an on-site hour, and at a 15% margin the rate is $50.71 ÷ 0.85, about $59.66. On the 393 hours above, that is about $23,446 a year, or $1,954 a month, before materials. Every number here is invented; the company’s own books replace each one.

What the bid should exclude or price separately

A maintenance price covers the specs and nothing else, and the proposal should say so in a list. The work just outside the specs is where a bid that looked right on paper loses its margin in season: the crew does it because the manager asked, and nobody priced it.

• Irrigation: inspections at the frequency the specs set belong in the base price. Repairs — heads, nozzles, valves, broken lines — are priced per repair at a stated hourly rate plus parts, with the person who may approve them named.
• Storm cleanup: excluded, or included up to a stated number of man-hours per event, with an hourly crew rate and a disposal charge beyond it and the person who can approve it by text or email named.
• Enhancements: color beyond the contracted rotations, mulch beyond the contracted areas, bed renovations, plant replacement, tree work above the height the specs set. Each is a separately priced option, or a quote when asked.
• Requests from residents or tenants: routed to the property manager, and priced as extras once someone with authority approves them.
• The rate sheet: the hourly rate for extra work, any minimum charge, disposal fees and the markup on parts, printed in the proposal so every extra has a price before the crew starts.

Whether an exclusion holds in a dispute depends on the contract’s own words, a question for the company’s attorney. What the bid controls is that every exclusion is written down, and that crews have a way to get each extra to the office the day it is done.

Speed up estimates so proposals do not sit pending

A commercial bid is decided on the property’s calendar: the deadline in the request for proposal, the manager’s review, the board’s meeting, the budget the board adopts. A proposal that arrives after the shortlist is picked, or after the budget closes, can be priced correctly and still lose. Speed comes from deciding as much as possible before the walk, not from rushing the arithmetic.

• Before the walk: pull the specs and site plan, measure from aerial imagery and fill in the takeoff sheet, so the walk is a check, not a first look.
• At the walk: ask who decides, at which meeting and by what date, and agree a send date with the manager before leaving the site.
• At the desk: price from one bid sheet holding the company’s production rates and this year’s man-hour rate. The owner reviews only bids above a set size or with unusual scope; the rest go out on the estimator’s signature.
• In the log, one row per request: date received, walk date, date sent, decision date, next touch, outcome. “Pending” is not an outcome.

Every week, read three lines from the log: requests with no walk scheduled, walks with no proposal sent past the days the company allows, and proposals with no decision date. The days from request to proposal sent is the number to watch, against its own trend. For association accounts, the date that matters is when each board considers its budget, and the follow-up runs on the board’s calendar, the same way it does for enhancement proposals stuck in Pending.

Compare the bid with actual crew-hours after the first months

Set up a property code in the timeclock or field software before the first visit, so crews clock hours to this property from the first day, then compare on-site man-hours per visit with the bid’s hours after the first four to six visits and again at the end of the second and third months. How to set each property’s actual hours against its bid, and what explains a gap, is in the guide to landscape job costing by property; whatever the gap turns out to be, correct the production rate in the bid sheet so the next bid on a similar site starts from what this one took.

When this needs no outside help, and where the Review fits

Bidding by takeoff, production rate and man-hour rate is built to run in-house. A company that already codes hours to properties, keeps one bid sheet with its own rates and checks new contracts after the first visits has the routine. If its bids land near the hours the properties take, keep it.

An outside review earns its fee when bidding is one gap among several and the records do not connect: hours coded to crews instead of properties, proposals with no decision date, extras done on site and never billed, renewals priced from habit. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It works from read-only access to the company’s bid sheets, proposal log, timeclock export and invoices, sets each property’s bid hours beside its actual hours where the records support it, and counts the days from request to proposal. It writes no bids, sets no prices, walks no property, contacts no property manager and gives no legal advice. Nobody here runs a landscaping company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet. For what a landscaping business consultant engagement with us covers, see the commercial landscaping page.

If it is unclear whether any of this is worth a fee, the next step is a free 20-minute call, where a company too small for the arithmetic is told so.