Landscaping by the Numbers: Revenue per Man-Hour, Seasonality and a 10-Line Monthly Scorecard

Most landscaping owners know whether they had a good year by looking at the bank account in November. That is too late to change anything. Growing a 5 to 50 person landscaping company predictably requires a handful of numbers you check every month, and a pricing method that holds up when wages, fuel and materials move.

This article lays out that operating system: how to price, how to plan around seasonality, how to think about client acquisition cost and lifetime value, and what belongs on a monthly scorecard.

Start with what the industry is telling you

A few recent benchmarks are worth knowing, with the caveat that they come from self-reported surveys of participating companies and will not match every market.

• Lawn & Landscape’s benchmarking coverage (March 2026) reported that average net profit margins among respondents fell from 19 percent to 17 percent, and connected the drop in part to wage increases that owners said they felt across the board.
• NALP’s 2025 Financial Benchmark Report, based on 2024 data from 142 organizations, found that finding qualified employees was the top concern (55 percent), with maintaining profit levels second (44 percent). The same summary reported median increases of 9 percent in contract value per maintenance account and 13 percent per installation job from 2023 to 2024.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median wage of $19.27 per hour for grounds maintenance workers as of May 2025, and projects 5 percent employment growth from 2025 to 2035.

The pattern is clear: labor is the constraint and the biggest cost. Pricing and scheduling decisions should start there.

Price from revenue per crew hour

The most useful single number in a maintenance business is revenue per man-hour (or per crew hour). It connects pricing, productivity and profit in one figure.

Step 1: Calculate your fully loaded labor cost

The wage is only the start. Add payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, any benefits, paid time off, and the non-billable hours each worker spends driving, loading and at the shop.

Illustrative example (use your own numbers): A crew member earns $20 per hour. Payroll taxes, workers’ comp and benefits add 25 percent, bringing the cost to $25. If only 80 percent of paid hours are billable on site (the rest is drive and yard time), the cost per billable hour is $25 / 0.80 = $31.25.

Step 2: Add equipment, overhead and profit

Next, cover equipment (mowers, trucks, trailers, fuel, maintenance), overhead (office, insurance, software, owner salary) and your target profit. One straightforward way to express this is as a target revenue per billable man-hour.

Continuing the illustrative example: Suppose your annual numbers work out to $14 of equipment cost and $18 of overhead per billable man-hour. Your break-even is $31.25 + $14 + $18 = $63.25. To earn a 15 percent net margin, divide by 0.85: about $74 per billable man-hour.

Step 3: Price each property against that target

If a two-person crew takes 30 minutes on site at a property (one man-hour total), the visit needs to bring in about $74 to hit the target. If you are charging $50, you are either losing money on that stop or relying on other properties to cover it. Run this exercise for your 20 largest maintenance accounts. It often reveals a few long-time clients priced years ago who now cost you money.

Design/build pricing

Installation jobs need a different structure: materials at cost plus a markup, labor at your loaded rate, equipment, subcontractors, and a contingency for site surprises (rock, drainage, access). Track estimated versus actual hours on every job. If your crews consistently run 20 percent over estimated hours on hardscape, your estimates, not your crews, need to change.

Plan around seasonality, not in spite of it

BLS notes that in this occupation some jobs are seasonal, and some workers provide other services in winter such as snow removal. For a business owner, seasonality is a cash flow and capacity problem.

A simple seasonal operating calendar

Period	Sales focus	Operations focus	Finance focus
December to February	Renewals, design/build sales, commercial bids	Hiring, training, equipment maintenance	Set annual budget and prices; collect deposits
March to May	Spring cleanups, new maintenance, enhancements	Full crews, route density, quality control	Watch labor hours versus budget weekly
June to August	Enhancements, lighting, irrigation, fall project sales	Productivity, heat safety, retention of crew	Mid-year margin review, reprice if needed
September to November	Fall cleanups, aeration and seeding, next-year installs, snow contracts	Wind-down planning, winter work assignments	Build cash reserve for winter

Two levers make the biggest difference. First, level monthly billing on annual maintenance agreements smooths cash flow through the slow months. Second, a design/build backlog sold in winter means crews start spring with booked work instead of waiting for the phone to ring.

Know what a client is worth: lifetime value and acquisition cost

You cannot decide how much to spend on marketing until you know what a client is worth over time.

Lifetime value (LTV) for a maintenance client

Illustrative example: A residential full-service client pays $3,200 per year, including enhancements. Your gross margin on that work is 40 percent, or $1,280 per year. If retention is 85 percent, the average client stays about 1 / (1 – 0.85), or roughly 6.7 years. Lifetime gross profit is about $1,280 x 6.7, or roughly $8,600.

Retention has a large effect here. At 90 percent retention, the same client is worth about 10 years of gross profit, or $12,800. That is why the renewal and service-recovery work described in Article 3 of this series pays off so heavily.

Client acquisition cost (CAC)

Add up everything you spend to win new clients in a period: advertising, door hangers, software, and the portion of a salesperson’s or coordinator’s time spent on new business. Divide by the number of new recurring clients signed.

Illustrative example: $9,000 in spring marketing and sales costs produces 30 new maintenance clients. CAC is $300. Against a lifetime gross profit of roughly $8,600, each new client returns many times what it cost to win, which suggests room to spend more on the channels that work, as long as the new clients actually renew.

Calculate CAC by channel if you can. A channel with a $600 CAC that brings full-service clients in your densest neighborhoods can be better than a $200 channel that brings mowing-only clients 25 minutes off-route.

The monthly scorecard: 10 numbers

Put these on one page and review them the first week of every month. Compare with the same month last year, not just last month, because of seasonality.

1. Revenue by service line: maintenance, enhancements, design/build, snow.
2. Gross margin by service line.
3. Revenue per man-hour on maintenance.
4. Estimated versus actual hours on completed installation jobs.
5. New inquiries by source.
6. Close rate on proposals, split by maintenance and design/build.
7. Backlog: signed design/build work not yet completed, in weeks of crew capacity.
8. Recurring clients: count at month-end, gained, and lost (with reasons).
9. Accounts receivable over 30 days.
10. Cash on hand versus the reserve you need for the slow months.

What to do with the numbers

• If revenue per man-hour is falling, look at drive time, crew size per property and underpriced accounts.
• If close rate is falling, look at response speed and follow-up before blaming price.
• If backlog is under four weeks in late winter, push design/build sales and commercial bids now.
• If you are losing more recurring clients than last year, call every one who left and ask why.

Raising prices without losing clients

Given the wage pressure reported across the industry, most companies will need to raise prices regularly. A few practices make it easier:

• Raise prices once a year, at renewal, with written notice.
• Explain the method (for example, tied to cost increases) in one or two sentences.
• Pair the increase with a recap of the value delivered last season.
• Apply larger corrections to underpriced accounts identified in your revenue-per-man-hour review, and accept that a few may leave. Replacing an unprofitable stop with a profitable one on the same route is a win.

If you want a clear picture of which of these numbers you already track well and which ones are missing, Bluma’s Growth Assessment covers measurement alongside demand, conversion and retention.

Sources

1. Lawn & Landscape — Driving landscaping profit margin: How wages, pricing and customer retention impact the numbers (2026)
2. NALP — Gain competitive insights with the 2025 Financial Benchmark Report
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Outlook Handbook: Grounds Maintenance Workers