Will Kelly explains why charging $25 an hour for lawn mowing will bankrupt you. You're not accounting for fuel, insurance, equipment wear, vehicle mileage, and unpaid admin work like quoting and scheduling. Calculate your actual per-job costs first, then price well above that baseline.
Stop pricing off your paycheck. Here's what I mean. A lot of new owners that are getting into this as a side hustle or a side gig have a day job. I did too. Say they make $25 an hour there at their job. So when they start mowing lawns, they think, hey, I already make $25 at my job, let me charge, you know, $25 or $30 an hour for this too. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? It's not. That $25 number has nothing to do with what it costs you to run a lawn care business and mow yards. Here's what it doesn't cover: fuel for your trucks and your equipment, insurance, wear and tear on the mower, the trimmer, the edger, the mileage you racked up on your vehicle every single day, time spent quoting new customers, scheduling, following up, billing customers, dealing with cancellations. Now here's the fix that I promised you. Add up your fuel, your insurance, your equipment replacement cost over time, your mileage, your Unpaid admin time. Divide that across your jobs. That number is your real cost to deliver a lawn. If your price doesn't sit well above that number, you're not running a business. You're funding a very expensive side gig hobby that happens to make you very tired and get you a lot of exercise.
