This landscaping estimate template does the maths while you type. Enter the area in square feet, the crew hours per visit, mulch in cubic yards, plants and a disposal fee, then add a markup on materials, sales tax and a deposit. The live preview on the right is the exact document your client gets, as a PDF, a Word file or an Excel sheet. There is no account and no email step.
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How to Write a Landscaping Estimate
- Add your business once. Logo, name, phone and license number if your state asks for one. They stay saved in your browser for the next estimate.
- Describe the job. Client, property address, a job title and a short scope. Fill in the landscaping fields: area, visit frequency, season and hours per visit.
- Price the work. Put labor in as hours times your rate, or as a flat price per visit. Enter mulch, plants and fabric at what you pay, then set your markup. Add disposal for green waste and any equipment delivery.
- Set the terms and send. Choose how sales tax applies, the deposit to start, how long the price is valid and any warranty on plants. Download the PDF and send it.
Pick Landscaping in the Trade menu first. It loads mowing and edging, bed cleanup, mulch by the cubic yard, plants and shrubs, landscape fabric and a green waste fee, plus optional add-ons such as spring aeration and fall leaf removal. No preset fills in prices, because only you know your rates and your suppliers.
A client reads an estimate to answer three questions: what exactly will you do, what does it cost, and when does it happen. If the document answers them in that order, you spend less time on follow-up calls.
Measuring the Job
Bad measurements are the most common reason a landscaping estimate loses money. You can price everything else correctly and still lose the job on the area.
Square Feet
Most lawn and bed work is priced off area. For a rectangle, multiply length by width in feet. For an irregular shape, split it into rectangles and triangles, work out each one and add them up. Triangles are base times height divided by two. For a rough circle, such as a tree ring, use the radius squared times 3.14.
Measure the parts that get different treatment separately: lawn, beds, hardscape you only blow clean, slopes and tight spots your mower will not fit. Put each as its own line, because each takes different time and different equipment. Write the total area into the Area field so the client sees what the price is based on.
Walk the property with the client if you can. A fence, a gate that sticks or a steep bank changes the hours you need, and it is cheaper to see that before you quote than after.
Cubic Yards for Mulch and Soil
Mulch, topsoil and compost are sold by volume, and the unit is the cubic yard. The formula is plain arithmetic:
cubic yards = area in square feet × depth in inches ÷ 12 ÷ 27
The division by 12 turns inches into feet. The division by 27 turns cubic feet into cubic yards, because a cubic yard is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet.
Worked example: a bed of 1,000 square feet with mulch laid 3 inches deep.
- 1,000 × 3 = 3,000
- 3,000 ÷ 12 = 250 cubic feet
- 250 ÷ 27 = 9.26 cubic yards
You would order 9 or 10 yards depending on how your supplier loads, and on how much the mulch settles. Topsoil for a new lawn works the same way, with the depth you plan to spread. You do not have to do this by hand: type the bed area and the depth into the Mulch bed area and Mulch depth fields and the template shows the cubic yards. Enter the result as the quantity on the mulch or soil line and the unit stays “cu yd”, so the quote shows how much you are bringing.
Keep two things in mind when you price it. Your supplier may sell by the yard, by the scoop or by the truckload, so convert to the unit you are billed in. And haul and spreading time belong on the labor table, not hidden inside the material price.
One-Time Projects vs Recurring Maintenance
The same template covers both, but they are priced differently and the document should say which one it is.
One-time projects are a bed redo, a planting, a spring cleanup or a mulch refresh. You price them as a lump sum built from labor hours, materials and disposal. State exactly what is included, what is not, and what happens if you find something unexpected, such as buried roots or poor drainage. Add the deposit, because materials are bought up front.
Recurring maintenance is mowing, edging and blowing on a schedule. Here you quote a price per visit and a visit frequency, weekly or every other week, over a season. The template has fields for visit frequency, season and hours per visit, so the document shows both the per-visit price and the season it covers, for example April to October. Say what a visit includes and what happens in a rain week or a missed visit.
Put the add-ons on separate optional lines: aeration, overseeding, leaf removal, bed edging. The client can tick the extras at signing, and you can sell them without rewriting the whole estimate.
If a recurring client also wants a one-time project, make two documents. It keeps the contract for the season clean and makes each easier to approve.
Landscaping Quote and Invoice
People search for the quote, the estimate and the invoice as if they were three different things, and on a job they are three steps on the same page.
- Estimate: your best calculation of the price, based on what you could measure and see. The final bill can move if the scope changes.
- Quote: a fixed price for a defined scope, valid until a date. Use the Estimate or Quote switch above the form to title the document correctly.
- Invoice: the bill when the work is done, or the recurring bill for a maintenance contract. It carries the same client, address and lines, with the final amounts and a due date.
Because the details are already saved in your browser, you do not retype them. Once the client signs the estimate, open our free invoice generator, choose Landscaping and add the final numbers. For lawn care routes, the invoice usually repeats each month, which is where software starts to save time.
For jobs outside landscaping, the general estimate template and the contractor estimate template use the same form with different starting lines.
What Your Time Really Costs
An estimate is only as good as the hourly cost behind it. Before you set a labor rate, work out what an hour of crew time costs you once wages, payroll taxes, fuel, equipment and insurance are in. Our technician cost calculator walks through it, and you can reuse the result in this template as your labor rate. We do not suggest a rate here, because it depends on your market, your crew and your equipment.
Lawn Care Software
A template is enough when you send a few estimates a week. If you run mowing routes, bill every month and chase unsigned quotes, software starts to pay for itself: it schedules the route, lets clients approve from a phone, sends the invoice automatically and takes card payments.
Our guide to the best lawn care software compares the options for crews of different sizes, with prices read from each vendor’s own pricing page. Jobber is built for service businesses that quote, schedule and invoice, and Joist is a lighter tool built around estimates and invoices. Who should skip software: a solo operator with a handful of clients and no route to plan will do fine with this template and a PDF.
Questions people ask
Is there a free landscaping estimate template in Excel?
Yes. Fill in the form at the top of this page and press Excel. You get an .xlsx sheet with your area, labor, mulch, plants and disposal lines, every amount stored as a number so you can sort and total it. The same form also gives you a PDF and a Word file, and none of them needs an account.
How do I estimate landscape cost?
Measure the job, then price each part separately. List labor as crew hours times your rate, materials at your cost plus markup, and fees such as disposal or equipment delivery. Add recurring visits as their own line with a visit count for the season. Total it, add tax where it applies and set an expiry date. Compare the result with what the same job cost you last time before you send it.
How many cubic yards of mulch do I need?
Multiply the bed area in square feet by the depth in inches, divide by 12 to get cubic feet, then divide by 27 to get cubic yards. A 1,000 square foot bed at 3 inches deep is 250 cubic feet, which is about 9.3 cubic yards. Round up a little so you do not make a second trip for one more load.