Commercial landscape maintenance pricing holds profit when you price each recurring landscape contract from the full annual cost of delivering it: labor, materials, overhead, and the time nobody bills, including drive time. Then you check actual hours against your estimate during the year, not after the renewal goes out. The contracts that quietly lose money almost always look fine on the invoice.

The invoice goes out on time. The crew shows up every week. The customer never complains. And the account is losing $6,000 a month.

One Florida landscape company found exactly this when it compared plan to actual on a contract it had held for 16 years. If you run recurring work, there is a decent chance you have an account like it on your book right now.

Recurring work never gives you a slow season to average itself out. A one-time install either made money or it didn’t, and you know by the end of the job. A maintenance contract runs for 12 months, and a small estimating miss repeats every single visit.

Tyler Reiter, Owner and Director of Operations at Florida Image Landscaping, and President of Mowtek, Inc., caught this on a 227-home HOA contract. It carried 44 cuts and 12 trims a year and brought in $315,000 annually. On paper, it was a great account. His team compared actual clock-in and clock-out hours against the estimate, and the gap showed up: a visit estimated at 7.5-8 hours for seven people was landing at 8 and sometimes 9 hours. “Week after week, it compounds and compounds and compounds,” says Reiter.

A little extra time per person, repeated across seven people and 44 cuts a year, turned the account net negative $6,000 a month. Over a year, that is $72,000 on one contract, and other accounts were quietly covering it.

The longer you hold a contract, the more complacent you get. Costs move, crews change, and the estimate you built years ago stays frozen.

Start with the four buckets: labor, materials, overhead, and seasonality. Then add the costs many operators leave out.

Labor is the biggest line, and it moves. Wages, raises, and payroll burden all change between renewals. Brian Fullerton, Owner of Brian’s Lawn Maintenance, makes a strong effort to raise wages each year to keep up with what his crew actually feels at the pump and the grocery store. If your price assumes last year’s wage, you have already lost margin.

Materials change under you. Reiter calls his growers before bidding anything seasonal to confirm pricing. A 20-30 cent move on flowers sounds small until you multiply it by four or five thousand. Fullerton saw bulk salt come in 86 percent higher in a single year.

Drive time is the quiet leak. Even veterans miss this one. Reiter, nearly two decades in the industry, ran into it on an account that was an hour away, one way. “We may think we’re doing so good on this account, and then I realize, I’m like, holy cow, they’re an hour one way to one account,” says Reiter.

If travel isn’t estimated on the job, you need to recover it somewhere else in your pricing, typically through an unbillable percentage built into your labor rate.

Unbillable time is real time. Fullerton plans a 10-hour day at 80 percent efficiency, which means billing 8 hours per person. A two-person crew bills 16 hours of work, knowing the remaining time goes to shop, lunch, and drive.

Surprises belong in the price too. Reiter’s team worked a Palm Beach Island account that required a $600 parking permit, and it was not in the contract. The lesson: do a drive-by before you bid, and look for permits, access limits, and anything else that adds time.

How you package the work matters as much as the number.

Reiter does not roll everything into one giant annual figure (maintenance, the spring mulch install, the flowers, all of it), because that hides what each piece earns.

Maintenance sits on its own line: mowing, trimming, the recurring visits. Seasonal installs and larger extras are separate items. That way, if a customer cancels in month three, you have not spent 12 months trying to recover a big up-front install out of a monthly payment. Fullerton adds a clause that all work rendered is due in full on cancellation.

Term length matters too. Both operators were tempted by multi-year contracts, because locked-in revenue sounds safe. Fullerton signed a three-year, $30,000 HOA account in late 2019. Within 24 months, his labor cost went from $14 to $20 an hour and fertilizer doubled. He likely paid to finish year three. Reiter’s contracts are now one year, with language that covers cost changes in labor, fuel, and materials. Three-year deals won him plenty of work, but the margin dwindled as costs moved.

When you price this way, a nice thing happens. You see which part of the business pays for which. “You see that your design build is actually paying for your maintenance,” says Reiter. 

It does, and the evidence is in the customer’s complaints. Reiter’s most common one is not price. “The biggest complaint we get from customers is lack of clarity,” says Reiter. 

His fix is to define the variables up front: here is what the annual contract covers, here is what happens if scope changes, here are our hourly rates. When costs move, his team sends a heads-up before the increase lands, such as a note that mulch may go up 1 percent. Nine times out of ten, he says, customers do not question it. They just do not want to be surprised.

The business case has two sides. Fullerton points out that predictable billing is a selling point: a customer who knows they will pay the same amount in a snowy month and a dry month can budget around it. Reiter’s company is word-of-mouth only, and clear contracts have helped it attract customers who value communication and consistency over the lowest price.

Do not wait for renewal season to find out. Reiter reviews his contracts monthly and compares them to previous reports, using actual clock-in and clock-out data. His rule: good data in, good data out. If crews don’t punch in and out accurately, your estimates can’t improve.

If that feels like too much to take on, use Fullerton’s shortcut:

Then decide: reprice, rescope, reroute, or let the account go. That last one is hard when the customer has been with you for years. Reiter went back to a longtime HOA and told them the contract had to change. It was an uncomfortable conversation, and they thanked him for his honesty afterward.

Price conviction matters too.

This article covers the highlights. Brian Fullerton and Tyler Reiter walked through the full conversation in “How to Price Recurring Landscape and Tree Care Work,” including the complete HOA contract breakdown, how Reiter estimates hedge trimming by linear foot, and how both operators handle extras and unbillable time. Watch the recording. If you want to see how LMN helps you build the budget, price list, and job costing behind contracts like these, book a demo.

About Tyler Reiter: Reiter is an owner and Director of Operations at Florida Image Landscaping, Inc., a family-owned Palm Beach County landscape company, and President of Mowtek, Inc., which specializes in robotic and autonomous mowing technology. He has worked in the green industry since 2007, holds University of Florida certifications in palm management and turf health, and serves on the advisory board for the University of Florida’s Commercial Horticulture program. His work with autonomous mowing has been featured by the Palm Beach Post, Landscape Management Magazine, and the National Association of Landscape Professionals, and he is recognized for his South Florida turf health expertise, including the early identification of lethal viral necrosis in Palm Beach County.