The price starts from area, not from hours. The calculator takes the mowable square footage, divides it by 1,000 and multiplies by your price per 1,000 sq ft. The default is $4.50 per 1,000 sq ft on a 1/4 acre lawn, which is the common residential lot.
That rate is not flat across sizes. The drive, the unload, the trimming and the edging cost you the same on a small lawn as on a big one, so the per-1,000 rate falls as the lawn grows. With the default rate in place it works out to $5.94 per 1,000 sq ft on a 1/8 acre lawn, $4.50 at 1/4 acre, $3.41 at 1/2 acre, $2.58 at a full acre, and it stops falling at $2.48, its floor, from about 1.1 acres up. Change the default and every one of those moves with it.
Frequency then multiplies the per-visit price. Weekly is the base. Biweekly is 1.2 times weekly, and monthly or one-time visits are 1.5 times, because the longer the grass goes between cuts, the longer each cut takes. On a 1/4 acre lawn that is $49 weekly, $59 every other week and $74 for a monthly or one-time mow.
Extras are added after, as flat lines you can see and explain: $40 for an overgrown lawn, $20 for edging and $15 for bagging clippings. All three are editable.
Your minimum charge is the floor. It defaults to $40, and when a visit adds up to less than that, the minimum replaces the whole price instead of being added to it. That is why a 1/8 acre weekly lawn shows $40: the mowing line alone lands under the minimum. For recurring service the calculator also shows a monthly total, based on about 4.33 weekly visits or 2.17 biweekly visits per month.
Under the price you will see a line that says what the job works out to per hour. That figure is a check, not the basis for the price. It comes from your mowing speed, 20,000 sq ft per hour by default, plus your drive and setup time, 15 minutes by default. Neither number changes what the customer pays. They exist so you can hold the price up against the roughly $60 per man-hour benchmark the industry uses. At the defaults, a 1/4 acre weekly lawn works out to about $61 an hour, a 1/2 acre lawn about $56 and a full acre about $46. If you run a bigger deck on big lawns, raise the mowing speed and those hourly figures rise with it.
- Pick a lawn size preset or enter the mowable square footage. An acre is 43,560 square feet.
- Choose the frequency: weekly, biweekly, monthly or one-time.
- Tick the extras that apply to this property: overgrown, edging, bagging.
- Open Your rates and set your price per 1,000 sq ft, your minimum per visit and what you charge for each extra.
- Set your mowing speed and your drive and setup minutes if you want the hourly readout to match how you actually work.
- Read the per-visit price and the monthly total, and check each line so you can explain it to the customer.
- Tap Make this an estimate to open the invoice generator with the lines already filled in.
A time-based calculator needs one number before it can do anything: how many square feet you mow in an hour. The published figures disagree badly. Exmark's mower productivity chart puts a 21 inch walk-behind at about 29,600 sq ft per hour, while operators reporting their real numbers on residential lots come in at 8,700 to 13,000 sq ft per hour. That is a gap of about 2.7 times. Any default we picked would be wrong for most of the people using this page, and it would be wrong in a way that is hard to notice until the season is over.
Area is different. It is the one number you can actually measure, from a satellite map or a walk of the property, and it does not change because your mower is faster than someone else's. So the calculator prices from area and uses your own rate per 1,000 sq ft to turn it into money.
It also matches how residential work is really sold. Housecall Pro's guidance and the quotes most homeowners see are flat prices per visit, set by the size of the lawn, not hourly bills. Per-acre pricing is the commercial and HOA model, where lots are large, open and uniform, and it does not translate well to a fenced back yard with a play set in it.
The hourly figure has not disappeared. It sits under the price as a sanity check, which is exactly where experienced providers keep it.
Lot size is where most people start, but it is not what you mow. A 1/4 acre lot with a house, a driveway, a patio and garden beds may have well under half of that in turf. Enter the grass itself, since that is what drives your time and your price.
A satellite map is good enough for a first pass. Trace the lawn, subtract the house footprint, the driveway and the beds, and round to the nearest few hundred square feet. If you quote the same neighborhood often, measure a few lots properly once and you will be able to eyeball the rest.
When a property has a lot of obstacles, a square footage number understates the work. Slopes and ditches, trees and play sets to trim around, tight gates your mower barely fits through, fences that mean more string trimming: all of that adds minutes the area does not show. Enter a slightly larger size for that property, or set a higher rate for it, and note why on the estimate.
Grass condition comes next. Thick, wet or tall grass slows the mower and may need a second pass or a higher deck setting first. That is what the overgrown extra is for, and it is normal to charge it on a first visit or after a long gap.
Frequency changes the work per visit, which is why the multipliers exist. A weekly lawn is short and fast. A lawn cut once a month is tall and heavy, and more clippings may need bagging.
Travel is the cost that is easiest to forget. A lawn 25 minutes off your route costs you fuel and time that earns nothing. Many providers price outlying stops higher, or only take them if they can group several on the same day. Your minimum charge is the blunt tool for this, and your drive and setup minutes will show you what a long trip does to the hourly figure.
The defaults are averages, not a recommendation for your business. The cleanest way to set your own rate is to work backwards from what you need to earn per hour.
Start with your target per man-hour. GreenPal puts a fair rate for lawn care at around $60 per man-hour, and that is a reasonable place to begin if you have nothing else to go on. Then take a lawn you know well, say a 1/4 acre at 10,890 sq ft. If it takes you 48 minutes including the drive, which is what the calculator estimates at its default speed, $60 an hour means you need $48 for that visit. Divide $48 by 10.89 thousand square feet and you get about $4.41 per 1,000 sq ft. Enter that, then check the hourly readout on a few other sizes to see whether the curve still pays you on big lawns and small ones.
Your target per hour has to cover more than your own time. Work it out once a season from your own numbers: labor including payroll taxes if you have employees, fuel for the truck and the mowers, insurance, equipment and its repairs spread over its working life, overhead like phone, software and licenses, and a profit margin so you can replace a mower and ride out a slow season.
Set your minimum charge next. Most residential providers land somewhere between $35 and $50, which is roughly what it costs to drive to a stop, unload, mow a small lawn, trim and load up again. If your drive times are long, set it higher. The minimum is what keeps small lawns from quietly losing you money.
Everything you change in the Your rates panel is saved in this browser and is there the next time you open the page. Nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no account to create.
The default numbers are US national averages. What people pay for mowing in a dense, high-cost metro can be well above what the same lawn brings in a rural town. Growing season plays a part too: in warm climates with year-round cutting, customers expect a lower weekly price than in places with a short, busy season.
The simplest way to match your market is to change the price per 1,000 sq ft. Everything scales from it, so one number moves the whole price list across every lawn size and frequency. Check what established local companies charge for a lawn you know the size of, work back to a per-1,000 rate, and set yours where you want to compete.
A number on a screen is not a quote. Tap Make this an estimate and the invoice generator opens as an estimate with the priced lines already filled in. If you already have a draft saved there, it asks before replacing it. Add your business details and the customer's address, set a valid-until date and print it or save it as a PDF.
For recurring service, say clearly on the estimate that the price is per visit and how often you will come. Mention how you handle rain delays, the first cut of the season and extras like leaf cleanup, so the customer is not surprised later.
If you would rather keep the whole thing on your phone, the ToolBerry app is free and works offline. You can create and send invoices and estimates, track your jobs and clients, and record payments on iPhone, Android and the web.
For a small, flat, regular lawn, a quote from a map and a photo is usually fine. Walk the property first when the lawn is large, when you cannot see it clearly from above, when the customer says it has not been cut in a while, or when there are slopes, a pool, a dog or a lot of beds and trees. Ten minutes on site beats underpricing a lawn for a whole season.
