Spring Cleanup Pricing Calculator
Price a spring yard cleanup from task time, crew size, bed edging, debris disposal and optional mulch, with a per crew-hour and season capacity check.
How this is calculated
The quote is a straight build-up from time you enter. Three things behave deliberately: task times are per technician and crew size multiplies them; bed edging is measured as a length and converted to time through a minutes-per-100-feet box you control; and drive time is tracked twice, so every drive hour lands in your cost while only the share you choose to bill lands in the charge.
edgingHours = bedEdgeFeet ÷ 100 × edgeMinutesPer100 ÷ 60
mulchHours = mulchYards × spreadMinutesPerYard ÷ 60
onSite = debris + bedWork + edgingHours + firstMow + dethatch
+ extra + disposalHours + mulchHours
crewHours = onSite × crewSize
driveCrew = driveHours × crewSize
billedDrv = driveCrew × driveBillPct
labour = (crewHours + billedDrv) × chargeRate
materials = (disposalCost + mulchYards × mulchCostPerYard) × (1 + markup)
subtotal = labour + materials
quote = max(subtotal, jobMinimum)
tax = quote × taxRate
per 1,000 = quote ÷ (servicedArea ÷ 1,000 sq ft)
cost = (crewHours + driveCrew) × costRate + materialsAtCost
margin = (quote − cost) ÷ quote
capacity = floor(windowWeeks × daysPerWeek × crews × cleanupsPerDay)Worked example. A two-technician cleanup: 1.5 hours clearing winter debris, 1 hour cutting back and weeding the beds, 200 linear feet of bed edge at 12 minutes per 100 feet (0.4 hours), a 0.5 hour first mow and 0.5 hours of loading and tipping. That is 3.9 hours per technician, so 7.8 crew-hours, which at a $75 charge-out rate is $585.00 of labour. A $60 tip fee marked up 15% adds $69.00, giving a quote of $654.00 before tax. Add half an hour of unbilled round-trip drive for two people and the job actually consumes 8.8 paid crew-hours, so the real return is $74.32 per paid crew-hour rather than the $83.85 the billed hours suggest.
No price presets anywhere. Every currency field starts empty. The only pre-filled numbers are the task times, the edging minutes-per-100-feet and the mulch spreading minutes, and every one of them sits in an editable box. They are a scoping starting point, not a benchmark, and the numbers you replace them with after your first few timed cleanups are the ones that matter.
Why drive time is split into paid and billed. Spring cleanups arrive in a compressed burst, which makes the season mostly windshield. Most operators bill none of it, so most cleanup quotes lose it entirely. Here it always lands in your cost, because you pay the crew for it regardless, and only the share you nominate lands in the charge. The result is a per-paid-crew-hour figure that counts the whole day.
Two coupled effects the tool flags out loud. Dethatching generates far more debris than the rest of the cleanup put together, so booking dethatch hours with no disposal cost or disposal time raises a warning. And mulch is two things, not one: a material you buy and a couple of hours you spend barrowing it, so pricing yards with no spreading time raises a warning too. Both are the errors that turn a profitable spring quote into a long afternoon.
Why the season block asks for your own window. Spring cleanup timing follows the local thaw and the first flush of growth, and it moves by weeks between neighbouring towns, let alone between markets. Any tool that hard-coded a spring window would be wrong for most of its readers, so this one asks. That is northern-hemisphere framing in the first place; south of the equator the calendar is offset by six months.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
Spring cleanups are the year’s first real money, and they are quoted worse than any other job in the lawn and landscape calendar. The reason is simple: there is no single measurement to price them off. A fall cleanup has leaf cover, a mow has turf area, but a spring cleanup is a list of unrelated tasks that happen to share a driveway. So this tool prices the list.
Spring is not fall with better weather
The fall leaf cleanup estimator is built around leaf density, because in fall the whole job is a function of how heavily the leaves came down. Nothing falls in spring. What is waiting is a winter’s worth of sticks and matted litter, beds full of last year’s perennials and this year’s early weeds, bed edges that have crept, turf that needs its first cut, and usually a mulch order.
Those are tasks, not a density. The two tools are seasonal twins that share a crew and no formula at all, and quoting a spring visit off a fall model underprices the bed work every time.
Edging is the task that quietly loses the money
Bed edging is measured in linear feet and paid for in hours, which is exactly the kind of mismatch that eats a quote. Two hundred feet of edge sounds like nothing until you are on your knees in it. The tool takes the length, applies a minutes-per-100-feet figure you control, and converts it to hours so the edge shows up in the price as time rather than as goodwill.
The 12 minutes per 100 feet it starts with assumes an edge that has been cut before. A first cut through established turf takes considerably longer, and a stick edger changes the number again. It is an editable box in front of you for that reason, not a rate this page asserts.
The worked example, and the number underneath it
A two-technician cleanup running 1.5 hours of debris clearing, 1 hour of bed cutback and weeding, 200 feet of edge at 12 minutes per 100 feet, a half-hour first mow and half an hour of loading and tipping is 3.9 hours per technician, so 7.8 crew-hours. At a $75 charge-out rate that is $585.00 of labour, and a $60 tip fee marked up 15% brings the quote to $654.00 before tax.
Now add the half hour of round-trip drive that nobody bills. Two people in the truck makes it a full paid crew-hour, so the job actually consumes 8.8 crew-hours, and the real return is $74.32 per paid crew-hour rather than the $83.85 the billed hours suggest. That gap is the whole reason this page reports a per-paid-crew-hour figure at all. Spring cleanups arrive in a compressed burst, which makes the season mostly windshield.
Mulch is two line items, not one
The beds are open, the crew is there, and the customer is already saying yes. A spring cleanup is the cheapest mulch install of the year, which is why so many operators bundle it. But mulch is a material you buy and a couple of hours you spend barrowing it, and quoting the first without the second is the classic way a good cleanup becomes a long afternoon. The tool models both and says so out loud when the yards are priced with no spreading time booked.
Work the volume out first in the mulch calculator, then bring the yards and the delivered cost back here.
Dethatching brings its own coupled cost
Power raking is a common spring add-on and it generates more debris than the entire rest of the cleanup put together. Book dethatch hours with no disposal cost and no disposal time and the tool raises a warning, because the loading and the tip fee are not optional consequences you can discover on site.
The window decides how many of these you can actually sell
Spring cleanup timing follows the local thaw and the first flush of growth, and it moves by weeks between neighbouring towns, so the capacity block asks for your own window rather than assuming one. Enter the weeks you work, the crews you run, the days a week and the cleanups a crew clears in a day, and the tool multiplies it out to a whole-job capacity and an ex-tax revenue ceiling. If the ceiling is lower than your spring plan, the fix is the price or the route, not more hours.
The other end of the year runs on the same logic. The fall and winter service calendar for lawn and landscape lays out the seasonal sequence this cleanup opens, and the lawn care pricing calculator prices the mowing round the cleanup usually hands over to.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. Estimate only, not a binding quote.