Having a strong budget for your landscaping or lawn care business is the only way to scale for profitability and growth. In a way, a landscape or lawn care business without a budget is like a ship without a compass: you might be moving, but you don’t really know whether you’re heading toward profit or toward trouble.

Budgets guide business growth through forecasts and historical data, and maintaining a strong budget helps you make smarter decisions about hiring, materials, equipment purchases or leases, and sales goals that actually support the profit you want to see—not just the revenue you hope to hit.

From our work with thousands of landscape businesses, we see that many landscaping businesses run at around 3% net profit on average—and often less—simply because they don’t know their numbers well enough to plan for profit upfront. That’s exactly what a budget is for.

In this updated guide, we combine foundational budgeting best practices with practical insights from our latest profit planning webinar to help you build a profit‑first plan for 2026 and beyond.

In this landscaping budgeting article, we’ll cover:

Here’s a simple 5‑step process that works whether you’re in your second year or your twentieth:

Budgeting is time‑consuming, but it’s absolutely time well spent. Even when you’re not in front of a spreadsheet, the time you took to know your numbers speeds up every future decision because you know your goals, your costs, your current performance—and whether you’re on track.

Depending on the scale of the landscaping or lawn care business, budgets are often split into separate sections or pillars.

This is a forecast profit and loss statement for your whole company. It summarizes:

This becomes your high‑level landscape business plan for a profitable year.

Each division (e.g., maintenance, design‑build, snow, tree care) gets its own budget—a P&L for just that slice of the company.

With division‑level budgets, you can clearly see:

This is a P&L for a single crew. You forecast:

Crew budgets help you compare performance across crews and spot where scheduling, training, or staffing changes might unlock more profit.

Landscape business owners can only control so much in their budget as far as business growth. Being able to slightly forecast or anticipate great success or catastrophic failure allows for adjustments to be made in the budget. Businesses should still budget for growth, but sometimes budgets need to be adjusted for damage control. Here are some factors that would contribute to a landscaping or lawn care Optimistic or Pessimistic budget:

Examples of an optimistic budget:

Examples of a pessimistic budget:

We recommend setting your profit goal, then building your gross profit in the budget about 10% higher than that goal to absorb the real‑world erosion that happens during the year—extra discounts, weather delays, unplanned subcontractor usage, and more.

An optimistic budget helps you plan for growth (when to add a crew or buy another truck), while a pessimistic budget helps you decide what to cut or delay if things tighten up.

t’s easy to say “I want to make more money this year” or “I want to hit $1M.” The problem is that these vague goals don’t tell you what has to change in the business to get there.

Instead, your sales goal should be built around:

Then set a realistic target for 2026 instead of guessing.

Where you want to go:

What your local market is doing:

What you’ve done historically:

In the webinar, Noe shared that his company starts budgeting work in November, using a clean set of books and clear separation between maintenance and design‑build, along with a careful look at direct costs vs. overhead. That timing gives him enough runway to adjust crew counts, pricing, and marketing heading into the new year.

Once you have a sales goal, you can work backwards into:

A budget only works if you understand the difference between cost of goods sold (COGS) and overhead—and you assign every dollar you spend to one of those categories on purpose.

These are costs you can reasonably tie directly to jobs and that your customers effectively pay for through your pricing.

In LMN by Granum, these are the items that show up directly in your estimates and job costing reports.

Overhead is everything you need to run the business that you cannot and should not list line‑by‑line on a customer estimate—things like:

If you buy NBA season tickets to entertain top clients or give away branded merchandise at events, that spending should be in your overhead and recovered in your pricing—not just absorbed out of your profit at the end of the year.

A simple rule from the session:

If it would look weird or unprofessional to list it on a detailed estimate (“QuickBooks subscription,” “LMN fee,” “Owner salary”), it belongs in overhead and needs to be recovered through your overhead markup—not left to chance.

Most landscape business owners are contractors who became business owners—not business people who went into landscaping. That’s why overhead is the most commonly missed piece of budgeting and job costing.

When you guess at overhead—or don’t recover it at all—you end up:

Instead, you should:

LMN by Granum automates that math and applies overhead recovery as you build estimates. 

Equipment recovery costs are critical line items in estimates and budgets—but many landscapers don’t really know what their equipment is costing them, or when they can afford to upgrade.

Your equipment budget should account for:

If you price jobs correctly, your customers—not your profit—should fund equipment replacement. Think of it as a built‑in rental or kit fee for the use of your trucks and machines.

We see that most contractors don’t plan for replacement. They treat equipment as a sunk cost, and when a truck or mower fails unexpectedly, they’re forced into expensive financing or watch their margins evaporate.

A good budget:

Crew wages typically account for roughly 25% of a landscaping business budget, based on industry averages, but the real number depends on your service mix and market. Your budget should distinguish clearly between:

If your operations manager doesn’t appear on estimates and isn’t directly billable, their entire salary must be treated as overhead and recovered through your overhead markup—not as a job cost.

Your budget is the place to plan for:

One practical approach from the webinar:

You have your landscaping business budget and you know how much profit you want to make for the year—but how do you know what to charge on each job?

In landscaping, job costing is generally broken into five sections:

Keeping accurate documentation of past jobs helps you:

Three KPIs stand out as especially useful for budgeting and in‑season decision‑making:

1. Revenue Per Labor Hour

Revenue per labor hour (sometimes called revenue per man hour) is: Total job price ÷ total internal labor hours on that job (excluding subs).

You can also calculate it at the budget level: Total sales goal for the year ÷ total budgeted billable labor hours for the year.

This number:

Gross profit is: Revenue – COGS (labor, equipment, materials, subs) = Gross profit

Gross profit ÷ Revenue = Gross profit %

While every company is different, our team frequently sees long‑term targets in the 40–60% GP range, with many successful design‑build operations aiming around 50%.

Because real life erodes profit—discounts, weather delays, extra sub usage—it’s smart to build your budget assuming a higher GP (for example, 50% in the budget to land around 40–45% actual).

Ratios are great for quick check‑ins between deeper reviews:

LMN by Granum surfaces many of these ratios directly in your budget dashboard and analytics, but you can also calculate them from your P&L and time sheets.

Sticking to a budget is a universal struggle, whether it’s personal finances or running a landscape business. But the point of a budget isn’t to handcuff you—it’s to help you make better decisions, faster, with eyes open.

Use your budget to:

Review your budget regularly and be honest with what the numbers are telling you. Learn to love your numbers—they’re the clearest story of how your business is performing and where it can grow.

“Easy” is always relative—budgeting will never be a five‑minute task. But you can make it a lot more manageable and accurate with the right tools and support.

LMN by Granum helps landscape contractors:

If you’re new to budgeting, it’s easy to get lost or overlook line items that dramatically change your real profit. That’s why LMN by Granum users not only get digital budgeting tools, but can also leverage our industry experts, who regularly review budgets one‑on‑one and help fine‑tune them for profit and growth.

The most important step is the first one: start now, even if the numbers aren’t perfect yet. Perfection can wait—profit can’t.