Lawn Mowing Pricing Calculator (AU/NZ)

Australian and New Zealand mowing is quoted in one number: what the visit costs, GST included. Everything else — the per-square-metre rate, the monthly figure, the yearly value of the round — is arithmetic on that one figure, and the calculator above produces all of them from your costs rather than a national average nobody measured.

GST is the first fork in the road

Before any pricing question, there is a tax question, and it splits every operator into one of two groups.

The rates and thresholds are the published ones: business.gov.au puts GST at “a tax of 10% on most goods, services and other items sold or consumed in Australia” and requires registration at $75,000 of GST turnover; Inland Revenue charges GST at 15% and gives the inclusive-price fraction as a worked example — “$100 including GST, which is 3/23 of $100, or $13.04”. Registration in New Zealand bites once turnover was at least $60,000 in the last 12 months, or is expected to be in the next.

If you are under the threshold and unregistered, you charge no GST at all. That is not a discount you are giving — it is tax you never collected, and the calculator models it as a separate switch precisely so the two are never confused. The price your labour is worth is identical either way.

The consequence lands on the paperwork. business.gov.au is blunt about it: a tax invoice must show the words “tax invoice”, your ABN and the amount of GST payable, plus your business name, the date, a description of the work, and the buyer’s identity or ABN once the sale passes $1,000. An unregistered operator issues an ordinary invoice and “must not use ‘tax invoice’”. Same job, same customer, different document.

Per square metre is a check, not a quote

Area pricing here is metric, and it is an output you read rather than an input you quote from. Enter the mown area in square metres — or hectares for a lifestyle block — and the tool reports what the visit works out to per 100 m².

That rate compresses hard as the block grows, because most of a mowing stop is fixed. The drive, unloading, edging around beds and fences, blowing the paths and loading up again barely change between 300 m² and 600 m². Only the mowing itself scales with area, and it scales with deck width, so it scales well.

Run the calculator’s own defaults — one person, a $70 ex-GST loaded rate, 15 minutes of travel, 15% overhead, 30% margin, fortnightly — and the compression is stark. A 400 m² suburban block takes the suggested 30 minutes on site, prices at $103.50 ex GST ($113.85 with GST) and works out to $25.87 per 100 m². A half-hectare block at 5,000 m² takes 100 minutes, prices at $264.50 ex GST ($290.95 with GST) — and lands at $5.29 per 100 m², a fifth of the small block’s rate. Both stops earn the same $138 an hour. Quote the big block off the small block’s per-square-metre rate and you have just done a day’s work for a morning’s money.

Whichever number you land on, it is only as good as the area behind it. Measure the grass you actually cut, not the title area — the lawn area calculator does that, and the mowing time estimator sizes the minutes the stop will take once you know it.

Fortnightly is dearer per visit and cheaper per month

The fortnightly round is the AU/NZ default, and it confuses people because both halves of the sentence are true at once. A fortnight of growth is a heavier cut — more clippings, more edging, more time — so the visit itself is worth more. The calculator carries that as a 1.20 per-visit uplift. But there are only half as many visits in a month, so the monthly figure drops well below a weekly round’s.

Sitting alongside that is a discount many operators trade for a locked-in round against a one-off cut. That is a real market practice, so the calculator gives you a knob for it — set your own percentage, applied only to recurring cadences, never to a one-off. It is deliberately not a number this page asserts on your behalf, because the honest range depends on your route density far more than on your suburb. If a tighter round is what makes the discount affordable, the stops-per-day calculator is where that gets proved.

The loaded hourly rate is yours, and this page will not invent one

Every number this calculator produces stands on the loaded hourly rate you type in, and that rate is not a wage. It is the wage plus everything that rides on it.

In Australia, that includes superannuation: business.gov.au states that “the SG rate is 12% of your employee’s qualifying earnings”, and can be higher under an award or enterprise agreement. Add leave, workers’ compensation, the $5m / $10m / $20m public liability tiers, the ute, the trailer, the mowers, and every hour a crew is on the clock without being on a lawn. In New Zealand the floor underneath all of it is the adult minimum wage, $23.95 an hour from 1 April 2026 — a floor, not a rate, and a long way below what an hour of mowing has to earn.

Load it properly with the labour burden rate calculator and separate the machines out with the equipment cost per hour calculator. Only then does a target margin mean anything.

Your season is inverted, and it is not 28 weeks

Almost every mowing-pricing page in English quietly assumes a northern spring. This one does not. Demand here peaks September to February, troughs June to August, and a subtropical south-east Queensland round barely stops at all — which is why the mowing-weeks figure is an input rather than a constant. The default of 40 weeks is a placeholder for a temperate southern-Australian or New Zealand round, and it is there to be replaced with your own count. For the full picture of when the AU mowing season peaks and troughs — including the award rise that lands in the first month of the trough — see the calendar this input is drawn from.

That number only moves the annual total, but the annual total is the one that tells you whether the round pays for the business around it. Test that directly with the break-even jobs calculator.

New Zealand: the section, and 15%

Switch the market control to New Zealand and three things change. The currency becomes NZD. GST goes from 10% to 15%, which moves a $100 ex-GST visit from $110 to $115 — worth checking before you quote a number you read on an Australian site. And the vocabulary changes: the plot is a section, the work is section mowing or a section tidy, and the input above relabels itself accordingly.

Where this page stops

This calculator prices one recurring mowing visit for an AU or NZ operator. The US lawn care pricing calculator is the same model in imperial units and US dollars, with per-acre and per-square-foot outputs and no GST — use that one if you are pricing in the States. Running a rubbish removal side of the truck too, the rubbish removal pricing calculator applies the same GST-inclusive quoting rule applied to a rubbish removal job rather than a per-visit mowing rate. Once a price is accepted, turn it into a quote or, for a standing round, a service agreement.

Nothing here is stored, uploaded or sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser and the export is a file you keep.