Most gardeners I know can put a price on a job. Far fewer can tell you what their business needs each working hour to bring in for the year to work out. If you're busy, you're earning, and you still have a nagging feeling that the numbers don't quite add up, this is the page I wish I'd read ten years ago. It walks through one calculation, done once, that tells you what your work has to recover. Then it shows you how to hold any job up against it.
This builds on the fourth of the four pricing questions in the main UK pricing guide: not what gardeners charge, but what your business needs the work to earn.
I’m not writing this from theory. I run a real, fully booked gardening business in the UK. I’ve made pricing mistakes, undercharged early on, and learned the hard way what works.
Everything on this site is based on real experience: quoting jobs, managing customers, covering costs, and building a sustainable round.
When a gardener says they "earn" a certain amount, they usually mean one of three different things without realising it. There's the money that comes into the business over the year, which is turnover. There's what the business costs to run, which comes out of that. And there's what's left, which is the only one of the three you can actually live on, and even that is before tax. Mix those up and you'll either think you're doing better than you are or price yourself as if you had no costs at all.
I show the chain with numbers in the earnings guide, so I won't repeat it here. This page is about the step before that: working out what the chain needs to look like for your business to be worth running, and then making sure your work produces it.
This is the first number to decide, and it’s an easy one to overlook. It’s tempting to just take whatever is left. The trouble with "whatever is left" is that it's a result, not a plan. If you don't name the figure the business has to provide for you over a year, you have nothing to price against and no way of knowing whether a quiet month is a blip or a problem.
So pick a number. It's the amount you need the business to produce for you across the year, before tax, to live the way you need to live. It isn't a wish and it isn't what someone else earns. It's yours. For the worked example on this page I'm using £30,000, which is the same illustrative figure I used in the hourly rate guide. It's a number for the sake of the example, not a suggestion. Yours might be well above or below it.
Every pound of this has to come in before you see anything. For a solo gardener the list usually looks something like this: fuel; the van, whether that's finance, repairs, tyres, MOT or all of them; public liability and vehicle insurance; equipment, both buying it and replacing it when it dies; servicing, blades and parts; consumables like strimmer line, fuel mix and bin bags; tip fees you absorb rather than charge on; and the phone, software and other small costs of actually running a business rather than just doing the work.
Write your own list and add it up honestly, including the things that only happen every few years. A mower that lasts five years still costs something every year. In the worked example I use £8,000 a year as a single illustrative lump. I'm not going to break that into typical figures per category, because there aren't typical figures. A gardener with a paid-off van and hand tools sits in a different world to one financing a truck and a ride-on. The main pricing guide explains why all of this has to be inside your price rather than coming out of your pocket afterwards.
Here's the bit that took me longest to understand. Say the business brings in enough to cover its running costs and to provide your figure for the year, and not a penny more. On paper that works. In practice you're one blown engine, one wet spring or one lost regular customer away from going backwards, because there's nothing in the business to absorb it. A business that only ever covers its costs and pays its owner has no breathing room.
So there's a third number: an amount you deliberately want the business to hold back over the year rather than pay out. For this example, the gardener decides they want the business to keep £4,000 towards unexpected costs, quieter periods and future equipment replacement. That £4,000 is this gardener's choice. It is not a recommended amount and it is not any kind of benchmark. Another gardener could reasonably pick a very different figure, or build it up over a couple of years. The principle is the same either way: decide how much room the business needs before you decide what you're taking out of it.
One honest note on words. If you're a sole trader, everything left after allowable business costs is generally treated as profit, whether you spend it on yourself or leave it in the business. The split I'm making here between "the amount for you" and "the amount held back" is about how you plan to use the money. It isn't two different tax categories. Tax may then be due on what remains, and that's as far as this page goes on tax.
Now the other side of the calculation, and the side most gardeners get most wrong. If you work a 40-hour week you do not have 40 hours to sell. Some of every day goes on driving to the first job and between jobs, loading and unloading, quote visits, replying to messages, sending invoices, tip runs, sharpening and fixing things, and the odd gap when a job finishes early and the next one isn't ready. None of that is wasted. All of it is unpaid. The main pricing guide calls this chargeable versus non-chargeable time, and it's one of the biggest reasons gardeners undercharge without knowing it.
Then there's the year itself. Nobody works 52 weeks. Take out holiday, the odd week of illness or injury, the Christmas fortnight when nobody wants a gardener, and the days the weather simply wins, and 52 weeks shrinks fast.
Here's how I built the hours for the example gardener, and why. I've assumed 46 working weeks, which allows six weeks across the year for everything above. Five working days a week. And an eight-hour working day of which about six hours are genuinely billable, with the other two covering the travel, loading, quoting and admin that come with them. That's 46 weeks, times five days, times six hours: 1,380 billable hours a year. It's an illustration, not a rule. If you run a tight local round you might do better than six hours. If your customers are spread out or you do a lot of one-off work with long quote visits, you might do worse. The lawn mowing guide goes into how much route density alone can move this.
The point isn't to copy my 1,380. It's to build your own number the same way, and to be honest about it. When you do this properly, the number can be smaller than you expect.
Put the two sides together and you get the number this whole page exists for. I'm calling it the recovery requirement, because that's what it is: the average amount each genuinely billable hour has to recover for the annual numbers to work.
The worked example (illustrative figures throughout, not typical ones)
The basic floor. In the hourly rate guide, this gardener's requirement was £30,000 for themselves plus £8,000 running costs, which is £38,000. Divided by 1,380 billable hours, that comes to £27.54, call it £27.50 an hour. That's the floor: the rate at which the year covers its costs and provides the gardener's figure, with nothing held back at all.
The recovery requirement. Add the £4,000 the gardener has decided to hold back and the business now needs £30,000 plus £8,000 plus £4,000, which is £42,000. Divided by the same 1,380 hours, that's £30.43, call it roughly £30.50 an hour. The difference between £27.50 and £30.50 is the price of the business having some breathing room. Charge the floor and you've got none.
What capacity does to it. Keep every pound the same but assume this gardener only manages five billable hours a day instead of six. The year drops to 46 times five times five, which is 1,150 hours. Now £42,000 divided by 1,150 is £36.52, roughly £36.50 an hour. One fewer billable hour a day moved the requirement by six pounds. That's a sensitivity, not a recommendation. It's there to show which lever is biggest.
Two things about this number. First, it is not the price you show the customer. You might quote fixed prices for one-off jobs, a day rate for clearances, or a set visit price on your round, and the hourly vs day rates guide is about choosing between those. The recovery requirement sits behind all of them. It's the thing you check your prices against, not the thing you write on the quote. Second, it's an average across the year. A quick lawn might recover far more than it. A badly priced clearance might recover far less. What matters is where the year lands.
This is why "what do gardeners charge round here" is the wrong question to settle your own prices with. Take two gardeners, equally good, doing the same work. The first has the example business above and needs roughly £30.50 a billable hour. The second lives rurally, drives further between jobs and genuinely only bills five hours a day. Same costs, same income figure, same amount held back, and they need roughly £36.50, because the same £42,000 is being recovered over fewer hours. A third gardener with an older van that's paid for and modest kit might have running costs well under £8,000 and need less than either of them.
None of them is overcharging or undercharging compared with the others. They're recovering different businesses. If the second gardener copies the first gardener's prices, they'll be busy, well regarded and quietly going backwards.
A full diary feels like success, and it can hide a lot. If prices are a few pounds an hour below the requirement, every full week locks in a shortfall. If too much of each day is non-billable, the 1,380 hours quietly become 1,150 and the requirement goes up without you changing a thing. If the round is dominated by small jobs with no minimum charge, each one looks fine and the week doesn't add up. The garden maintenance guide covers why a minimum charge exists for exactly this reason. And if tip fees, materials and the odd extra visit are being absorbed rather than priced, the running costs line is bigger than you think.
Being busy means there's demand. It doesn't mean the business is recovering what it needs. Only the numbers tell you that.
Once you know your recovery requirement, you can hold any job up against it. The test is two lines. Take the price, take off any costs that belong only to that job, and divide what's left by the billable hours the job took. Compare that with your requirement.
One job against the requirement (illustrative)
A garden tidy-up quoted at £120. It took five billable hours and there was a £30 tip fee to get rid of the waste. So £120 less £30 leaves £90 for the business, and £90 over five hours is £18 per billable hour.
Against a recovery requirement of roughly £30.50, that job is £12.50 an hour short, for five hours. It brought money in. The customer was happy. And under these illustrative assumptions, the rest of the week had to make up around £62 to cover it.
Be careful what you take off at job level. The requirement already assumes that two hours of every day go on normal travel, loading, quoting and admin. Those hours are outside the 1,380, so don't deduct them again here. Only the costs and time that belong specifically to this job come off: the tip fee, materials bought for it, a second visit it genuinely needed. Unusual extra travel or an extra tip run might deserve pricing in when you build the quote, and the quoting guide covers how.
What this test doesn't do is tell you what the tidy-up should have been priced at. That depends on how hard the job was, the access, the uncertainty, and what you've learned from similar jobs, which is the quoting guide's territory, not this page's. This is a sense-check, not a pricing method. It tells you whether a job contributed enough. It doesn't write the next quote for you.
You can do a rough version of all this on the back of an envelope tonight. It won't be perfect, and it doesn't need to be. A rough number you actually use beats an exact one you never work out.
Then start holding real jobs against it. You'll find some that recover far more than they need to and some that are quietly costing you. Both are useful to know. If you'd like a structured way to work through your own costs, hours and rates rather than doing it on an envelope, that's what the Pricing Toolkit is for.
Redo the calculation whenever something real changes: the van, the round, the hours you want to work, or the figure you need. Once a year is a sensible minimum.
This page is the end of a chain, and the rest of it is here if you came in part way through.
No. It's the average each billable hour needs to recover for the year to work. What you actually charge might be a fixed price, a day rate or an hourly rate above it. Think of it as the number you check your prices against, not the number you put on the quote.
For a sole trader, everything left after allowable business costs is generally treated as profit, including what you pay yourself. The split on this page between the amount for you and the amount held back is about how you plan to use the money, not a tax distinction. Tax may be due on what remains either way.
Nothing changes. Build the quote the way the quoting guide describes, then check it: price, less job-specific costs, divided by the billable hours it will take. If that comes out below your requirement, you know before you send it.
Whenever something real changes, and at least once a year. New van, different round, fewer hours, higher costs, a different figure you need from the business: any of those moves the requirement, and your prices should know about it.
If you want a clearer starting point, you can download the free Gardening Business Starter Toolkit below.
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