Tool 1 of the Get Paid Kit · For landscape designers

Landscape Designer hourly rate calculator

This free calculator works out the hourly rate a landscape designer should charge, starting from the income you need — then converts it into the per-plan prices this trade actually quotes. Design work runs on the seasons: consultations bunch in spring, plans are drawn through the year, and planting windows set the calendar. With the honest presets below it lands near $107 an hour: a planting plan at about ten hours prices at $1,070.

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The pricing reality for freelance landscape designers

Landscape design is outdoor work done mostly indoors: a site measured and understood, then hours at the drawing board turning levels, aspect and soil into a plan a client can plant from. The year's rhythm is set by the climate — enquiry and site visits surge as gardens wake up, and the quiet months are when next season's plans get drawn. A rate that only works in the busy months does not work.

Draw the line this trade blurs most. Design-only work ends with the plan: drawings, planting lists and specifications the client or their contractor builds from. Design plus install supervision is a second service — you on site, on the day, checking setting-out and planting — and it is priced separately, by the day, further down this page. Folding supervision silently into the plan fee is how designers end up project-managing a build for free.

The preset below starts billable time at 50%: site travel, admin, plant sourcing and the quiet season take the rest. The numbers are starting presets, not a survey: a $66,000 target income, $3,800 a year of expenses — design software, measuring kit, site travel and insurance are the shape of it — and 50% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $107 an hour.

Your numbers — landscape designer presets

Your recommended rate

$0 / hour
$0Day rate (8 hours)
0Billable hours per year
Income + expenses needed$0
Grossed up for tax$0
With profit margin$0
Working weeks0
Total working hours0
Billable hours0

Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.

Easy to miss

Costs landscape designers forget to put in the rate

  • Site visits and measuring. Every design starts with travel, a tape, a level and a notebook. The visit is skilled diagnosis, not a free look — and the return visits a sloping, shaded or waterlogged site demands are hours too.
  • The seasons. Enquiries bunch into a few months; the rate is built on 960 billable hours spread across the year. The quiet months are not a discount season — they are already inside the number.
  • Revisions against the nursery list. The specified plant is out of stock, the client swaps a tree, the bed changes shape. Redrawing planting plans is design work, repeated, and it belongs in the fee.
  • Plant knowledge. Nursery trips, supplier catalogues, knowing what survives this soil and this frost — the expertise the plan is actually made of is maintained on your time.
  • Software, kit and insurance. CAD and planting-design software, measuring and surveying kit, and the liability cover site work needs — the quiet subscriptions and renewals under every plan.
The maths

How this calculator works

Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Take 52 weeks, subtract your vacation weeks, multiply by your hours per week, then multiply by your billable percentage. With the landscape designer presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 50% billable — that is 960 billable hours a year: the design, visit and consultation hours left once travel, admin and the quiet season have taken theirs.

Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $69,800 on the presets — gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 25% estimate, divide by 0.75 to get $93,067 — then add your profit margin to reach $102,373 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $107, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.

Now convert it into the units clients buy. A full day at the preset rate is $853. A consultation plus planting plan, at about ten hours, prices at $1,070; a full garden design with construction details, at about twenty-five hours, is $2,675. And the supervision from the section above is simply the day rate — $853 for a day on site — quoted as its own line in the proposal, so the client sees the plan and the presence as the two different things they are.

Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate, not tax advice. Tax rates, deductions and allowances vary by country, state and business structure. Enter the rate you expect to pay, and check significant decisions with a qualified accountant.
Next: build a proposal with this rate Use the general rate calculator
Questions

Landscape Designer rate questions

Per plan, for most design work — clients buy a finished design, not your drawing hours. But the plan's price is converted from the hour: at the preset $107, a ten-hour planting plan is $1,070 and a twenty-five-hour full design is $2,675. Hourly billing still suits the first consultation and open-ended advice, where nobody yet knows what the design involves.
You already have: the rate divides the year's costs by 960 realistically billable hours, so the quiet months are inside the number before the season starts. Spring demand then does what it should — fill the calendar at the rate — instead of tempting you to charge less precisely when everyone wants you. If anything, a waiting list in peak season is the market suggesting the rate, not the discount.
No — price it as its own day. Supervision is a different service from design: your presence on site while the plan is set out and planted, at the day rate of $853 on these presets. Listed separately in the proposal, clients can take it or leave it; folded invisibly into the plan fee, you will be expected on site either way — and paid for it only once, inside a fee that never counted the days.

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