It's half three, you've been on the tools since seven, your back's killing you, and you pull up at a client's place on the way home to look at a back garden. A block rendered retaining wall, 30 square metres of exposed aggregate, some steel edging. Somewhere in that conversation the price comes up, and if you're like I was for years, you've got a number in your head that feels about right because it's roughly what everyone else seems to charge.
Then you get home, eat quickly, open the laptop and search "how to price a landscaping job Australia". Every page that comes up is written for the homeowner. Yakka Labour says hiring a landscaping business costs roughly $65 to $100 an hour per qualified landscaper, or $110 to $180 an hour for a two-person crew. Webblend reports that landscaper quotes on ServiceSeeking average $80.12 an hour, starting from $40. Those are numbers for the person paying the bill. None of them tell you what you have to charge.
We're all islands
As landscapers, we're never on site with another landscaper. Nobody tells you what they charge or how they got there. So you look at a range like that, land somewhere in the middle because it feels safe, and hope it works out.
I did that for years. The trouble is, the middle of somebody else's range has nothing to do with your ute, your insurance or how many hours you actually get to bill.
The one-hour call
Early on I rang a landscaping business coach. I told them I wasn't ready for full coaching but I'd love a chat. We spent an hour going through everything I needed to account for on a job, all the overheads I'd been quietly leaving out of my price.
It was a massive eye opener. I still refer to the spreadsheet from that call, and to be honest I can't believe what I used to charge per hour for labour. What it taught me is simple: you work up from your costs, not down from what the bloke up the road charges.
How to price a landscaping job in Australia, from the wage up
Here's the order I'd work through it. The numbers in the example are made up to show the maths. They're not a market rate, so put your own in.
1. What the guy costs you. Start with the wage. The Fair Work Commission handed down its 2026 wage decision on 2 June, lifting minimum rates of pay by at least 4.75%, applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, according to the ACA's summary. Under the Gardening and Landscaping Services Award, Yakka Labour lists minimums from 1 July 2026 of $26.44 an hour at Level 1, $29.45 at Level 4 and $30.38 at Level 5. Webblend works out that a trade-qualified award employee at $29.45 costs about $32.98 an hour once 12% super is added, before any other employment costs. If they're casual, Yakka Labour notes a 25% loading and a minimum three-hour engagement.
That's the floor, not the going rate. Yakka Labour says directly hired qualified landscapers typically earn $45 to $65 an hour and labourers $38 to $48. If you want really good guys, you need to be paying well above the award. Whatever you pay, put super on top, then workers comp, leave and everything else that comes with employing someone.
2. What it costs to be in business. The ute and trailer, fuel, rego, tools and small warehouse, public liability insurance, phone, accountant, software, and the tip fees you end up absorbing. Webblend puts it plainly: the gap between the award wage and what a business charges is what pays for the ute, insurance, tools, super, unbillable hours and the business's risk. Add up a full year. Say, as an example, it comes to $40,000.
3. Divide by the hours you actually bill. This is the one that got me. Not the hours you work, the hours a client pays for. Take out rain days, driving, picking up materials, site walks and every night at the laptop doing quotes. Yakka Labour makes the point that a sole trader charging $55 an hour but only billing 25 hours a week earns far less than the headline rate suggests.
Say you bill 30 hours a week for 44 weeks. That's 1,320 hours. $40,000 divided by 1,320 is about $30 an hour just to keep the doors open, before you've paid yourself a cent. Now do the same with your own wage. Say you want $80,000 a year: over those same 1,320 hours, that's about $61 an hour. You're already past $90 an hour for your own time, with no profit in it yet. Yakka Labour says self-employed landscapers on an ABN commonly charge $55 to $85 an hour. Run your own numbers and you might find you've been paying for part of your clients' jobs.
Quoting time is the biggest unpaid hole in that list. You can charge enough to cover it, or you can spend less time on it. I reckon you do both. That's a big part of why we built Ask Willow: it turns the voice notes and photos from your site walk into an itemised proposal before you leave the client's driveway, and it prompts you for the things that get forgotten, like soil bulking, skip bins and access. Your rate still has to come from your own numbers, though.
4. Profit, then GST. Put a margin on top. That's the business getting paid for the risk, the job that goes sideways and the wet month. Then GST if you're registered. Webblend gives the example that a $40 GST-inclusive charge is only about $36.36 once the GST comes out. Work your rate out ex GST and add it on top, so it isn't coming out of your pocket.
And remember the labour rate is only part of the bill. Yakka Labour points out that machine hire, materials and tip fees are always extra. Price them as their own line items. Don't let them hide inside your hourly rate.
The rate I couldn't say out loud
Once the spreadsheet was filled in, it was Yasmin who went through it. She had no emotion attached to it at all, and she told me the hourly rate I had to charge.
My reaction was that there was no way I could quote that to a client with a straight face. We'd never win a job.
She talked me into using it on the next quote anyway. We won it. At about $75,000, it was the biggest job I'd done at that point.
It was me stopping me. I was projecting my own thoughts about money onto the client. A lot of money to you is not a lot of money to someone who has already decided to spend it on their garden. Once I knew the number was built on real costs, I could hold it. These days when a client asks what discount we can do, I tell them we don't discount, but I'm happy to help change the scope.
Before your next quote
Sit down for an hour this week. List every cost of running the business for a year. Be honest about how many hours you actually bill, not how many you work. Divide one by the other, add what you need to pay yourself and each of the guys, put a margin on top, then GST.
Your rate isn't what the internet says or what anyone else charges. It's your costs, divided by the hours you really bill, plus a wage and a margin. Work it out once, put it on your next quote, and hold it. If you haven't worked out your labour rate in a while, use our free hourly rate calculator to check you're charging enough.