Landscaping is one of the most seasonal trades in the country, and the payroll data shows it. BLS monthly employment at landscaping services firms ran from 756,000 in January 2025 to 1,014,200 in July, a 34 percent swing, roughly ten times the swing at plumbing and HVAC contractors.1 Most of what you sell is crew time, and crew time leaks: to drive time, to properties that take longer than you priced, and to "while we were there" work nobody billed.
This hub is for owners who want the business side to be as solid as the work: who you compete with, what labor costs, how to price by the man-hour, the visa and safety rules that shape staffing, and how to pick software.
634,541
Landscaping services businesses: 117,969 with employees (2023) plus 516,572 without
How a landscaping business makes money
Most landscaping companies run three revenue lines, and they behave differently.
Maintenance is the base: mowing, edging, trimming, bed care and cleanups on a weekly or biweekly schedule. It is recurring and predictable, and it keeps crews busy. Margins are usually thinner because the work is competitive and easy to compare.
Enhancements are the extras sold to maintenance customers: mulch, seasonal color, pruning, drainage fixes, small plantings. These are often the most profitable work you do because the customer already trusts you and there is no drive-out cost to win the job.
Installs and hardscape (patios, walls, full landscape installs) bring big tickets and big risk. A well-run install crew can carry the company. A badly estimated patio can wipe out a month of maintenance profit.
In colder markets, snow and ice removal fills the winter and keeps your best people on payroll. BLS notes that some grounds work is seasonal, available mainly in spring, summer and fall, and that some workers move to snow removal in winter.2
A healthy landscaping company knows which line pays for what. Maintenance covers overhead and keeps the team together; enhancements and installs produce most of the profit.
The market in numbers
Census files landscaping and lawn care together under landscaping services (NAICS 561730). Put the employer and nonemployer counts side by side and the shape of the industry is clear:
| Landscaping services, 2023 | Count | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Businesses with no employees | 516,572 | Average receipts of $36,041: mostly one person and a trailer |
| Establishments with employees | 117,969 | 802,899 employees, about 6.8 per establishment |
| Employer establishments under 5 employees | 83,241 (70.6%) | Even most employers are small |
| Employer establishments with 50 or more | 2,377 (2.0%) | The regional and national players |
| Annual payroll per employee | $51,286 | Includes owners on payroll, managers and office staff |
Sources: Census Nonemployer Statistics 20233 and County Business Patterns 2023.4
About 81 percent of landscaping businesses have no payroll at all. That is your price competition, and it is why selling on price is a losing game for a company with crews, insurance and a shop. The 2 percent of large employers set customer expectations for commercial work: documentation, reliability and clean invoicing.
BLS employment data also shows who owns these businesses. In the projections matrix, 46.8 percent of first-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers are self-employed, compared with 20.2 percent of the workers themselves.5 In other words, a lot of owners are working crew leads.
The biggest single jump is March to April: 118,300 jobs in one month. That is the hiring crunch every owner feels.
| Jan | 756,000 |
|---|---|
| Feb | 781,400 |
| Mar | 812,100 |
| Apr | 930,400 |
| May | 984,800 |
| Jun | 1,013,300 |
| Jul | 1,014,200 |
| Aug | 1,002,300 |
| Sep | 980,100 |
| Oct | 965,400 |
| Nov | 933,100 |
| Dec | 848,200 |
Source: BLS CES, series CEU6056173001
Labor: wages, visas and safety
Wages. The national median for landscaping and groundskeeping workers was $39,150 a year in May 2025, and first-line supervisors earned a median of $58,430.6 State medians run from $31,630 in Mississippi to $48,670 in Massachusetts; in the biggest states, California is $45,560, Florida $37,100 and Texas $36,740. Use your state's figures, not national ones, when you build a man-hour rate.
H-2B. Many landscape companies fill the spring jump with seasonal workers on H-2B visas. Landscaping and groundskeeping workers were the largest H-2B occupation in fiscal 2025, with 89,013 certified positions, 38.3 percent of the 232,434 total.7 The statutory cap is 66,000 visas a year, split into 33,000 for jobs starting October through March and 33,000 for April through September.8 Certified positions far exceed the cap, so a labor certification is not a guarantee of a worker. Plan a domestic hiring track either way.
Safety. BLS puts the 2024 fatal injury rate for grounds maintenance workers at 20.9 per 100,000 full-time workers, more than six times the 3.3 rate for all workers.9 Mowers on slopes, chainsaws, trailers and traffic are the daily exposures. Crew training and a written tailgate talk are cheaper than the alternative.
Licensing. BLS notes that most states require licensing for workers who apply pesticides, and that licensing for fertilizer work varies by state.2 EPA's federal standard sets 18 as the minimum age for certified applicators of restricted use pesticides and a maximum five-year recertification interval.10 Some states also license landscape contractors or irrigation work; check with your state before you sell weed control or build a wall.
Running the day
The day starts with crew assignments and ends with a question most companies can't answer: did each property take the time we priced it at?
Good operators group properties by area so trucks spend their time on lawns, not highways. Each property has notes the crew can see on site: gate codes, the dog, which beds the customer cares about, what is and isn't in scope. Crews take before and after photos, which settle "you didn't trim the back" disputes in seconds.
Extra work gets logged on site as an add-on for approval rather than done for free. Rain is the other daily problem. Decide in advance how you roll work forward: push everything one day, or have crews double up on the next dry day. Then tell customers before they call you.
Pricing your work
Everything starts with a man-hour rate.
Man-hour rate
Here is a worked example for one three-person crew. Wages are BLS national medians; everything else is an example assumption you should replace:
| Line (example) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Crew lead, 1,800 hours at $28.09 (supervisor median) | $50,562 |
| Two crew members, 1,800 hours each at $18.82 (worker median) | $67,752 |
| Payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits (example: 20%) | $23,663 |
| Truck, trailer, equipment, insurance, office share (example) | $90,000 |
| Total annual cost | $231,977 |
| Billable man-hours (5,400 paid × 80% on site) | 4,320 |
| Cost per man-hour | $53.70 |
| Man-hour rate at a 15% net profit target | $63.17 |
From there:
- Maintenance per visit = man-hours per visit × man-hour rate + materials with markup. A crew of three spending 40 minutes on a property is 2.0 man-hours, or $126 in this example. For an annual agreement, multiply by visits per season and divide by 12 for a monthly payment.
- Installs = man-hours from your own production rates (square feet of pavers, cubic yards of mulch or plants per man-hour from past jobs) × man-hour rate, plus materials priced to your target margin.
- Materials = cost ÷ (1 − target margin). A 30 percent margin on $1,000 of stone is $1,429, not $1,300. The markup and margin calculator shows the difference.
- Equipment = an hourly charge for heavy machines, so a skid steer earns its keep on the jobs that use it.
Re-price at every renewal using last season's actual hours. "Last year plus 3 percent" carries every estimating mistake forward. If you're still bidding from a spreadsheet, the landscaping estimate template and landscaping invoice template are a clean starting point.
Marketing that works for landscaping
Landscaping is local and visual. What works:
- Google Business Profile with real job photos, service areas and steady reviews. Ask every satisfied customer, especially after installs.
- Yard signs and truck lettering. Neighbors see the work and the crew every week. Clean trucks and uniforms sell.
- Door hangers on the route. Your crews are already on the street; target the houses next to your best properties.
- Upsell the base. Send maintenance customers a spring enhancement menu: mulch, color, pruning, drainage. It is cheaper than finding new customers.
- Commercial property managers value reliability and documentation over price. Photos, on-time records and clean invoices with PO numbers win renewals.
Track where every lead came from and what it turned into. Cut the channels that bring tire-kickers.
Before the spring jump
- Re-price every renewal from last season's actual hours
- Send renewals and the enhancement menu before February ends
- File H-2B paperwork on the calendar your agent sets, and run a domestic hiring track in parallel
- Confirm applicator licenses and recertification dates for anyone spraying
- Service mowers, trimmers and trailers; replace what failed last fall
- Walk new crew members through slope, trailer and chainsaw safety in writing
Where TradesWork fits today, and where it doesn't
TradesWork is honest about this one: landscaping is a partial fit. What works today is annual maintenance agreements billed monthly with automatic card retries, a drag-and-drop schedule board with a live map and smart day planning that weighs drive time, multi-day install crews with helpers alongside their crew lead, good-better-best estimates signed on the crew lead's phone, a field app in English and Spanish that works with no signal, card-on-file, Tap to Pay, text-to-pay and net-terms billing for commercial accounts, QuickBooks Online sync and job profit on every job.
What is not built: route-day scheduling with fixed weekly sequences and rain-day roll-forward, chemical application logs, property measurement from aerial imagery, and snow per-push or per-event tracking. If a route-day board is how you run every morning, a landscape-specific tool fits better right now, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you a workaround.
Choosing landscaping software
Decide what you need most before you compare tools:
- Maintenance-heavy with tight routes? You need route-day scheduling and recurring billing. Service Autopilot, or Jobber for smaller shops, focus there.
- Install and enhancement heavy, commercial clients? You need estimating with production rates and budget-vs-actual job costing. Aspire, LMN and SingleOps are built around that. Aspire has been owned by ServiceTitan since 2021, and FieldRoutes on the lawn and pest side since 2022.
- Mixed residential work and growing fast? Look for clean estimates, agreement billing, a crew app your team will actually use, and solid payments.
Our buyer's guide and the Software Scorecard in the library help you compare on the things that matter. Starting out? Read how to start a landscaping business and the lawn care hub.
Footnotes
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BLS Current Employment Statistics, all employees, landscaping services (CEU6056173001) and plumbing and HVAC contractors (CEU2023822001), not seasonally adjusted, 2025. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CEU6056173001 ↩
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BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Grounds Maintenance Workers. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/building-and-grounds-cleaning/grounds-maintenance-workers.htm ↩ ↩2
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U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2023, national file, NAICS 56173 (516,572 establishments; $18,617,916 thousand receipts). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/data/datasets.html ↩
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U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, national file, NAICS 561730 (117,969 establishments; 802,899 employees; $41,177,464 thousand annual payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/data/datasets.html ↩
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BLS Employment Projections 2025-35, Table 1.2, SOC 37-1012 and 37-3011. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-projections-and-characteristics.htm ↩
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BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 national and state files, SOC 37-3011 and 37-1012. https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm ↩
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U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification, H-2B Selected Statistics, FY2025 (data as of September 30, 2025). https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/H-2B_Selected_Statistics_FY2025_Q4.pdf ↩
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USCIS, Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants ↩
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BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, hours-based fatal injury rates by occupation, 2024 (SOC 37-3010). https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables.htm ↩
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EPA, Certification Standards for Pesticide Applicators. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/certification-standards-pesticide-applicators ↩
