How to price lawn mowing jobs in Australia

Most lawn care operators price by gut and benchmark — “the bloke up the road charges $80, so I charge $85.” That works until your fuel bill goes up, your offsider starts on Monday, or you trade up to a bigger mower. Then you're still charging $85 but losing a tenner a lawn without knowing it.

Here's a practical method for pricing a lawn that accounts for the costs your gut leaves out.

Step 1: Loaded labour cost

Your base hourly rate is not your labour cost. If you pay an offsider $32/hr base, the real cost is closer to $42/hr once you add:

Superannuation — currently 11.5% (rising to 12% by 2025)
Leave loading and casual loading — 17.5% on annual leave for permanents, or a 25% casual loading
WorkCover premium — around 1-3% for outdoor labour, depending on state and claims history
Public holidays and sick leave — roughly 4% effective load

Multiply your base rate by ~1.30-1.35 for a realistic loaded hourly cost for permanent staff, or use ~1.20 for casuals.

Step 2: Equipment cost per hour

A $12,000 commercial mower with a 1,500-hour-per-year useful life and a 5-year economic life is costing you roughly $1.60/hr in straight-line depreciation alone. Add fuel (around $4-6/hr for a zero-turn at full load), blade sharpening and replacement (~$0.50/hr), and routine maintenance (~$1.50/hr) and you're at $7-9/hr just to run it.

For a line trimmer or blower, the per-hour cost is lower but real. Bundle “handheld gear” into a single ~$2/hr line for simplicity.

Step 3: Vehicle and travel

The ute and trailer have a per-hour cost too — diesel, rego, insurance, tyres, servicing. Allocate it across the working hours you actually drive. For an average ute and trailer combo doing ~30,000km/yr with full running costs of around $14,000, you're looking at roughly $9-11/hr of running time.

Travel between jobs is the killer here. A 20-minute drive to a 30-minute lawn is 40% non-billable. Either tighten your routes or price the dead time in.

Step 4: Overhead

Your phone, accounting software, insurance, fuel cards, the home office desk — it all has to come out of margin. Most owner-operators underestimate overhead by 30-50%. A reasonable rule of thumb is to allocate ~$12-18/hr of overhead per chargeable hour for a small lawn business.

Putting it together: a 30-minute lawn

For one operator on a 30-minute residential lawn:

Loaded labour: 0.5hr × $42/hr = $21
Mower + handheld gear: 0.5hr × $10/hr = $5
Vehicle (incl. travel): 0.5hr × $10/hr = $5
Overhead: 0.5hr × $15/hr = $7.50

Total cost: ~$38.50. For a 25% margin you'd need to charge around $51 + GST. For 35% margin, $59 + GST. Now you can quote against a number that's yours — not the bloke up the road's.

What this method ignores (and shouldn't)

This is a back-of-the-envelope version. A real cost model also accounts for unpaid time (admin, quoting, equipment maintenance), the compounding effect of busy vs slow weeks, and the cash-flow lag of waiting on invoices. Bizzie does that maths automatically — see the ROI calculator for an estimate of how much guess-pricing is costing you across a year.