How Much to Charge for Lawn Mowing in 2026: About $1 a Minute, by Lot Size and by Month

Charge about $1 a minute for every minute a lawn costs you

Add up the minutes a lawn costs you, driving included, and charge about $1 for each. That is $60 an hour per person. GreenPal, a lawn care platform, calls about $60 an hour per person of on-site work a fair rate, and says 78% of the more than 10,000 providers it polled charge at least that (GreenPal, September 21, 2026). LawnStarter, a lawn care marketplace, says most pros charge $32 to $68 an hour (LawnStarter, updated October 6, 2026), so $60 is near the top of that range. GreenPal counts on-site minutes only. This post charges the drive too.

For example, take a quarter-acre lawn that needs 28 minutes on site and a 10-minute, 4-mile drive from your last stop. That is 38 minutes, so $38. Add $3.04 for the 4 miles in the truck at 76 cents a mile, and the price is $41 a visit, or $178 a month for weekly cuts over a 6-month, 26-week season. LawnStarter's table puts lawns up to a quarter acre at $41 to $61.

The method is four steps:

• Count the minutes. Include mowing, trimming, edging, blowing, loading, and the drive to the lawn. With a crew, count every person's minutes.
• Multiply by your rate. This post uses $1 a minute. The next section shows how to get yours.
• Add the truck. The IRS business mileage rate is 76 cents a mile from July 1 to December 31, 2026.
• Check your minimum. A small lawn costs almost as much to reach as to mow, so no visit goes out under your minimum charge.

Numbers marked as examples are our inputs, so replace them with yours. The startup costs, and what a customer is worth over a season, are in our start-a-business guide.

Get your own rate from a year of pay, costs, and billable hours

Start with the pay you want, and make it at least what a hired landscaping or groundskeeping worker earns: a median of $18.82 an hour, or $39,150 a year, in 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics data (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Department occupation site). Add the yearly cost of mowers, trimmers, blowers, blades, their fuel, insurance, phone, software, and marketing. Leave the truck out, because the mileage rate in the route section covers it. Divide the total by the hours you can bill in a season, counting hours on a lawn and hours driving to one.

We chose the two example inputs so the answer lands near $60. Yours will differ. A short season raises the rate, because the same pay is earned in fewer hours. LawnStarter's rough season lengths are about 24 weeks in the Northeast, 26 in the Midwest, 34 in the West and Northwest, 45 in the Southeast, and 46 in the Southwest (LawnStarter). At the same 32 hours a week, 45 weeks is 1,440 hours, and $50,150 over those hours is $34.83 an hour. What one-person lawn care businesses actually take in is in our Census post.

Mowing is the short part of a visit, and you can calculate it

Ferris, a commercial mower maker, prints a formula under its mowing productivity chart: Acres Per Hour = (MPH x DeckWidth.Feet / 8.25) x Efficiency. University of Wisconsin Extension prints the same formula for farm machinery (University of Wisconsin Extension). Efficiency is the share of the full cutting rate you actually average. The chart shows 80% and 100%, and these are acres an hour at 80% (Ferris):

For example, a 48-inch deck at 5 mph covers 1.94 acres an hour. A quarter acre is 0.25 divided by 1.94, which is 0.129 hours, or about 8 minutes.

That is only the mowing. On a small lawn the trimmer, edger, blower, and gate can take longer than the mower. Measure the grass, not the lot. LawnStarter says the average lawn is 8,712 square feet, one-fifth of an acre (LawnStarter, updated October 5, 2026). Time your next five lawns and use your own minutes in place of the examples here.

An example quarter-acre lawn comes to $41, and bigger lawns cost less per square foot

Mowing minutes come from the formula above, for a 48-inch deck at 5 mph and 80% efficiency. The other minutes are trimming, edging, blowing, and loading. They are our example allowances, and they grow slower than the lawn, because the edge of a lawn grows slower than its area. Each price is the on-site minutes at $1 a minute, plus $13.04 for a 10-minute, 4-mile drive.

Mowing is 8 of the 28 on-site minutes on a quarter acre, but 62 of 107 on two acres. So a lawn eight times the size costs about three times as much, $120 against $41.

Do not use one price per square foot for every lawn. LawnStarter's page lists $0.01 to $0.06 a square foot, which is $109 to $653 for a quarter acre, and the table on the same page says $41 to $61. Here is that table, as of October 2026:

Treat the method's price as your floor. It lands in the lower half of those ranges, or below them, so quote higher when your reviews, route, and schedule allow.

U.S. searches for "lawn care pricing" ran 1,300 in December 2025 and 5,400 in April 2026 (Google Ads data through DataForSEO, October 22, 2026), so put your table on your website by March, as in our lawn care website guide.

Price the drive, because the same lawn costs more the farther it is from your route

The same lawn takes the same time to mow whether it is 3 minutes from your last stop or 30. It does not take the same part of your day. Two published sources help you price the drive:

• A travel fee. Housecall Pro says long or inefficient routes reduce hourly revenue, so add a small travel fee for customers who cannot be grouped with nearby stops (Housecall Pro, updated October 21, 2026).
• The truck, by the mile. The IRS business mileage rate is 76 cents a mile from July 1 to December 31, 2026 (IRS). The IRS builds it from an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile (IRS), so use it for the truck and keep the truck out of your hourly rate. If your truck and trailer cost more per mile, use your own number.

For example, take the same quarter-acre lawn at 28 minutes on site, driven to at 24 miles an hour, or 0.4 mile a minute. The last column is what is left per hour after the truck at a flat $45. Stops a day are whole stops in 8 hours.

A flat price leaves you 2.3 times as much an hour when stops are 3 minutes apart as when they are 30 apart. So set a travel rule you can say in one sentence, such as $1 a minute and 76 cents a mile beyond your normal drive, or no new customers more than 15 minutes from your last stop.

Price weekly, biweekly, and monthly plans from the minutes each one takes

A weekly cut and a biweekly cut of the same lawn are different jobs. Purdue Extension's home lawn guide, revised in 2006, says to mow often enough to never remove more than 1/3 of the leaf blade (Purdue Extension). More growth between cuts means more to remove each time. Published numbers on the gap disagree:

• LawnStarter: averages of $53.55 weekly and $54.31 biweekly, and its article says biweekly costs about $1 to $4 more per visit (LawnStarter, updated April 28, 2026).
• GreenPal: biweekly usually costs 15% to 50% more per visit (GreenPal).

So time both cuts on your own lawns. For example, say the biweekly cut takes 36 minutes on site instead of 28. A 26-week season has 26 weekly visits or 13 biweekly visits, and a flat monthly price is the season price divided by the 6 months you mow.

Over the season that is $1,066 weekly and $637 biweekly, so biweekly saves the customer 40% and pays you $8 more a visit. Both prices keep you at about $60 an hour after the truck. Three more points on monthly plans:

• Level billing. LawnPro, a lawn care software maker, describes it as dividing a customer's annual cost into equal monthly payments (LawnPro). Spread $1,066 over 12 months and it is $89 a month.
• The risk. A customer who stops after 3 months of a 12-month plan has had 13 cuts worth $533 and paid $267, so bill the months you mow.
• Prepay. On a season prepay, each 5% off costs you $53.

Check add-ons, first cuts, and minimums against published ranges

Price each extra, and any landscaping job, by the time it takes, then check these ranges.

For a lawn nobody has mowed in months, Housecall Pro says to price the one visit by the time it will take, then move the customer to your standard rate once the lawn is back under control.

Small lawns need a minimum charge:

Set your minimum at what your smallest real lawn costs you, rounded up.

Tie a fuel surcharge to a public price, say so up front, and take it off

Start from four published facts:

• The price. U.S. regular gasoline averaged $4.284 a gallon on October 19, 2026, up $1.265 from a year earlier (Energy Information Administration).
• What owners did. In May 2026, KY3 reported Ozarks lawn companies adding temporary fees to customer invoices, and one owner said it was usually $5 or $10 (KY3, May 14, 2026).
• The trigger. Aspire, which makes landscaping software, wrote in April 2022 that companies point to the regional average the Energy Information Administration lists each week, not the local pump (Aspire).
• The notice. Aspire recommended telling customers before the surcharge reaches an invoice, and ContractorPlus, another software company, suggests at least 2 weeks' notice (ContractorPlus, updated September 10, 2026).

Work out the real cost first: gallons bought in a week for the mower, trimmer, and blower, divided by stops that week, times the rise in price. Leave the truck out: its gas is already in the 76 cents a mile (IRS Publication 463 lists gasoline among the costs the rate stands in for). For example:

A sample line for your price sheet (not legal advice, and rules differ by state):

Prices assume regular gasoline at or below $3.00 a gallon on the Energy Information Administration's weekly average for our region. Above that, a fuel charge of $1 a visit applies. It comes off when the average falls back. I will tell you 2 weeks before it starts.

Where ServicePro fits

ServicePro is home services software. It starts with getting you found. The Free plan is $0 with no card. It builds your website from your Google Business Profile, with five service pages and a booking page. On Free, a Powered by ServicePro.co badge stays on your site. Pro is $99 a month with no contract. It adds 25 town pages, and a toll-free number that forwards to your cell with two-way texting. Sam is the AI office manager that never sleeps. He drafts an invoice when you text him, emails it to your customer, and asks before he sends something he started himself. The Sam page shows how to get him.

ServicePro does not plan routes or write quotes. LawnPro does monthly level billing, and our lawn care software roundup compares it with the other tools for routes and billing. Get the free website.

How this post was made: drafted with AI from the sources linked on this page. Figures and links were checked on October 22, 2026.