Landscape Lighting Installer Hourly Rate Calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a self-employed landscape lighting installer should charge for their time, starting from the income you need, then builds the design-visit and per-fixture prices clients actually pay out of the hours each garden honestly holds. Clients buy a garden that changes after dark — the tree lit from below, the path found by pools of light, the house looking deliberate at midnight — and they picture the fittings when they picture the cost. Inside that price hides the design that decides whether the garden glows or glares: fixtures chosen and placed, cable runs trenched and buried, a transformer sized for the load, and the dusk visit at the end where every fitting is aimed in the dark it was bought for. The honest complication is that this work is judged at night and built in daylight — the aiming cannot be checked until the sun goes. With the honest presets below the rate lands near $88 an hour, $702 for a full day — and the work built from it: a design visit at about an hour and a half, $132; a ten-fixture garden designed, cabled and fitted at about nine hours, $790; a single fixture added to an existing system at about an hour, $88 — with fixtures, cable and transformers billed as their own lines, never inside the hour.
The pricing reality for landscape lighting installers
Landscape lighting is bought per garden and per fixture, and earned in design before it is earned in digging. Two gardens with the same ten fixtures work hours apart: one open lawn with a single cable run, the other terraced, planted and crossed by paths that every run must go under. The load maths rules the job quietly — voltage drops along a long run, and a fitting at the far end of an undersized cable glows at half its promise. Then the day ends with the part no schedule can move: the aiming, done at dusk, fitting by fitting, in the dark the client will actually see.
It is the low-voltage layer of the garden, designed to be safe to touch — which is exactly where it parts from the electrician, whose mains work feeds the transformer and whose ticket the supply side belongs to. The lighting installer takes it from the transformer out: design, cable, fixtures and control. It shares the garden with the irrigation installer, whose trenches sometimes run beside its own, and the same visit can serve both — but one trade answers for water and the other for light, and the client’s invoice should never confuse the two.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $54,000 target income, $9,200 a year of expenses — vehicle and fuel leads, with ladders and tools, wire, fittings and parts stock, the demo kit and samples, liability insurance, design software and training, phone and booking, quoting and admin, and marketing — a 25% tax estimate, four weeks of vacation, a 40-hour week and 55% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $88 an hour. The billable share is the shape of design-and-fit work: evening design visits, travel, and dusk aiming sessions that refuse to be hurried all take time the per-fixture price has to carry.
Your numbers — landscape lighting installer presets
Your recommended rate
| Income + expenses needed | $0 |
| Grossed up for tax | $0 |
| With profit margin | $0 |
| Working weeks | 0 |
| Total working hours | 0 |
| Billable hours | 0 |
Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.
Costs landscape lighting installers forget to put in the rate
- The design given away at dusk. Walking a garden after dark with a demo kit, placing trial fittings and showing the client their own trees lit is the skilled core of the sale — and the easiest hour in the trade to donate. A design taken to a cheaper fitter has spent your evenings for nothing.
- The dusk visit itself. Aiming cannot be done at noon. Every install ends with a return in the dark, and in summer that dark arrives late — the hour is real, unsocial and unbilled by anyone who forgot to price it.
- Cable, buried and forgotten. Runs are trenched, sleeved under paths and buried where next year’s fork will find them. Cable stock, conduit and the careful mapping of where it all lies are costs of doing the job so it survives its garden.
- Voltage drop and the far fitting. Undersized cable and overloaded transformers announce themselves as one dim light at the end of the garden. The design time that sizes the system properly — and the heavier cable it specifies — is cheaper than the return visit.
- The demo kit’s quiet burn. Sample fittings get carried, clamped, rained on and replaced as ranges change, so clients can choose by light rather than by catalogue. The kit earns the work and pays for none of itself.
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 lighting installer presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 55% billable — that is 1,056 billable hours a year: the designing, cabling and fitting clients can pay for, once quoting, travel and the dusk visits have taken theirs.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $63,200 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 $84,267 — then add your profit margin to reach $92,693 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $88, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Now translate the hour into the prices clients actually buy. The design visit stands on its own first: walking the garden, agreeing the effects and placing the runs at about an hour and a half, $132 of labour — credited or charged, but never invisible. The install is built from hours and fixtures together: a ten-fixture garden — transformer set, cable trenched and buried, fixtures fitted and aimed at dusk — at about nine hours, $790; a single fixture added to a sound existing system at about an hour, $88; the return to re-aim and adjust after the planting settles at about forty-five minutes, $66; a full day at $702. Fixtures, cable and transformers arrive on the invoice as themselves. Quoted that way, the client can see what they are buying: a garden designed for the dark, not a bag of fittings.
Landscape Lighting Installer rate questions
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