Commercial Landscape Maintenance Bid Calculator: annual contract price
Bid an annual commercial landscape maintenance contract from a site take-off: turf, beds, hedges and shrubs, a visit frequency per service line, seasonal rounds, materials, overhead and margin.
How this is calculated
The contract price is built cost-up from hours you measured. Four things behave deliberately: every production rate is per person, so the crew size changes how long the visit takes but not what the work costs; mobilisation is the one line the crew size does multiply, because every seat is paid; all of it is a cost, because a commercial contract has no billable share of the drive; and the margin is a share of the price, not a markup on the cost.
mow/visit = turf ÷ (mowRate × siteFactor)
edge/visit = edgeLength ÷ edgeRate
visit = mow/visit + edge/visit + blowMinutes ÷ 60 (man-hours)
mowVisits = round(mowWeeks × cutsPerWeek)
mow line = visit × mowVisits
beds = bedArea ÷ bedRate × bedVisits
pruning = (hedgeRun × height × faces ÷ hedgeRate
+ shrubs × minutes ÷ 60) × rounds
seasonal = Σ (hours × rounds)
mobilise = driveHours × crew × trips
manHours = mow line + beds + pruning + seasonal + mobilise
labour = manHours × labourCost
equipment = manHours × equipmentCost
materials = Σ (seasonal materials × rounds) + other
direct = labour + equipment + materials
overhead = direct × overheadPct
price = (direct + overhead) ÷ (1 − marginPct)
monthly = price ÷ billingMonths
per manHour = price ÷ manHoursThe worked example on this page
A two-acre office park, cut with a 52 to 61 in zero-turn at 2 acres per man-hour on open ground, 1,000 ft of trim-out at 1,000 ft per man-hour and 15 man-minutes of blow-down: that is 2.25 man-hours a visit, or 1 hour 8 minutes on site with two people. Thirty weekly cuts make 67.5 man-hours. Add 4,500 sq ft of beds at 900 sq ft per man-hour over 12 visits (60 h), a 300 ft hedge cut both faces at 4 ft high plus 120 shrubs at 8 minutes each, twice a year (48 h), 112 hours of seasonal rounds and 30 trips at a half-hour round trip for two people (30 h). The year is 317.5 man-hours.
At $32 loaded labour and $8 of equipment per man-hour that is $10,160 and $2,540, plus $3,600 of materials: $16,300 of direct cost. Add 20% overhead recovery ($3,260) and take 20% margin on the price, and the bid is $24,450 a year, $2,037.50 a month, $815 a mow visit, and $77.01 per man-hour worked. Change one rate and every one of those moves, because the rate is the only thing in that paragraph the tool did not get from you.
Where the pre-filled numbers come from, and where they do not
No market rates anywhere. Every currency field starts empty. No regulator, trade body or published survey reports commercial landscape contract prices, and the figures in circulation are vendor blogs and lead-generation pages quoting each other, so under this site's cite-or-omit rule the tool ships none of them.
The pre-filled numbers are production-rate conventions. The mower classes seed acres per man-hour, and they are the same order of magnitude as deck width × ground speed ÷ 124, the 80%-field-efficiency form of the acres-per-hour formula the mowing time estimator uses, whose efficiency factor already allows for the turns and the overlap. A 52 in deck at 5 mph is 2.1 acres per man-hour on that basis. The hedge face rate matches the ground-access convention in the hedge trimming calculator so the two pages cannot contradict each other. The edging, bed and per-shrub figures are the same kind of thing: a starting shape for "roughly how long does this take", in an editable box, to be overwritten the week you time your own crew.
The rounds per year are calendar conventions. Two leaf clean-ups, four fertilisation rounds, two irrigation visits: that is what a commercial specification commonly asks for, not what your customer's specification says. Read theirs and change them.
The site factor is judgement, and it is yours. It starts at 100%, which means the take-off is treated as open ground. Nothing is applied to your bid until you lower it, and it slows the mow line only, because an island-filled car park does not make hand weeding slower in the same proportion.
Why the cadence table does not discount the visit. The visit scope is identical in every row: the same turf is cut, the same edge is trimmed, the same site is blown down. So mowing hours and mobilisation scale with the visit count, while beds, pruning, seasonal work and materials do not move at all. Per-visit price still falls at a tighter cadence, but only because those fixed lines spread over more visits. If a higher-frequency visit genuinely covers less ground, lower the site factor or the trim-out yourself and read the table again.
Overhead and margin are separate on purpose. Overhead recovery is a cost you already carry and is a percentage of direct cost. Margin is what the business keeps and is a share of the price, which is why the formula divides rather than multiplies. Rolling them into one number is the most common way a commercial bid ends up with no profit in it at all.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
What this prices
A commercial landscape maintenance contract is sold by the year and won or lost on the take-off. Turf area, bed area, linear feet of trim-out, hedge face, shrub counts, a visit frequency per service line, the seasonal rounds the specification demands, and the drive to get there. This calculator turns all of that into annual man-hours first, then builds the contract price cost-up: your loaded labour cost, your equipment cost, your materials, an overhead recovery percentage and the net margin you intend to make. What comes out is an annual contract value, an equal monthly payment and the four figures a property manager or an HOA board will compare you on.
If the property turns out to be a house rather than an office park, the lawn care pricing calculator is the right tool. It prices one visit and quotes it per visit, per hour, per acre or per month. Different buyer, different unit of sale, and a rate-down method rather than a cost-up one.
There is no charge-out rate box, on purpose
Residential work prices rate-down: pick a rate, apply it to the visit, check the margin afterwards. A commercial bid runs the other way. You know what an hour costs you, you know what your overhead has to recover and you know what margin you need, so the price is what those three produce once the hours are counted.
That makes the revenue per man-hour an output on this page. It is also the single most useful number the tool produces, because it is directly comparable with the rate you charge on residential work: bid a 40-acre campus at a figure that returns less per working hour than your route does, and you have bought yourself a year of low-margin work with a lot of equipment tied up in it. If you have not yet set a defensible number to compare it against, the service hourly rate calculator and the labor burden rate calculator are where that figure comes from, and the equipment cost per hour calculator is where the equipment line does.
Production rates, not price per acre
Price per acre is a result, not a method. Two sites of the same acreage can differ by half in mowing hours once you count islands, gates, parked cars, slopes and pedestrian traffic, which is why this page asks how much ground one person covers in an hour and then applies a site factor you set yourself.
The mower classes seed a starting rate in acres per man-hour. They sit in the same range as deck width times ground speed divided by 124, the 80 percent field-efficiency form of the acres-per-hour formula used by the mowing time estimator, whose efficiency factor already allows for the turns and the overlap: a 52 inch deck at 5 mph is 2.1 acres per man-hour on that basis. Derive yours there from your real deck and speed, then overwrite the box. If the take-off itself is the problem, the lawn area calculator measures the turf and the production rate and job time estimator is the general form of the same conversion.
Every production rate on the page is per person, which is why the crew size changes how long a visit takes without changing what the work costs. The one line the crew does multiply is mobilisation, because every seat in the truck is paid.
The lines that decide a commercial bid
Frequency per service line. Commercial specifications rarely buy the same number of visits for everything: 30 mows, 12 bed visits and 2 pruning rounds is a perfectly ordinary year. Bid what the specification says rather than what the mow schedule implies, and the bed and pruning boxes each carry their own visit count for exactly that reason.
Seasonal rounds. Clean-ups, mulch, the turf program, irrigation start-up and winterisation, colour rotations. These are where an annual bid is won or lost, because they are large blocks of hours that never appear on a per-visit price. The hours and materials start empty because they come off your take-off of this site; only the rounds per year carry a starting convention, and that is the line the customer will negotiate. Work the mulch yardage out in the mulch installation pricing calculator and the blow-out in the irrigation winterization calculator, then bring the hours and the material cost back here.
Pruning measured properly. A hedge is priced by its face, run times height times the number of faces you cut, while freestanding shrubs are counted one at a time. The face rate here matches the ground-access convention in the hedge trimming pricing calculator, so if this site needs ladder or pole work, price the pruning there and carry the hours across.
Mobilisation. Every hour of it is a cost, because a commercial contract has no billable share of the drive: it is either priced into the annual figure or it is donated. The trip count starts at one per mow visit, since most bed, pruning and seasonal work rides along with a scheduled mow, and you raise it for the work that genuinely earns its own trip.
Why the cadence table does not discount the visit
The comparison table holds the visit scope constant across every mow cadence: the same turf is cut, the same edge is trimmed, the same site is blown down. So mowing hours and mobilisation scale with the visit count, while bed care, pruning, seasonal work and materials do not move at all. The per-visit price still falls as the cadence tightens, but only because those fixed lines spread across more visits, which is exactly the arithmetic to have in front of you when a board asks what it saves by going fortnightly in August.
From an annual number to a contract
An annual figure is not an account until someone signs for it and someone else performs it. Before either happens the buyer has to pick you, and commercial grounds work is awarded on a document rather than a handshake, so how to bid commercial landscape maintenance contracts covers what goes around this number: the three kinds of buyer, the scope response, the insurance paperwork and the exclusions list. The annual contract monthly payment calculator is where the yearly total becomes the payment schedule the customer agrees to, the lawn care service agreement template is where the term, the scope and the cancellation clause get written down, and the landscape maintenance checklist template is the per-visit scope sheet your crews work to, which is the same scope this bid just priced. If those three documents and this bid ever disagree, the bid is the one that is wrong.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. A bid worksheet, not a binding quote, and not legal or contract advice. Prevailing-wage rules, licensing, insurance requirements and pesticide applications on a commercial site are set by the specification and the regulator, never by this page.