Lawn care profit per crew hour

The number to manage: revenue per man-hour

A lawn care crew is a small factory that moves between job sites. Its output is revenue, and its input is crew hours plus equipment. Revenue per man-hour (RPMH) divides the day's revenue by every paid hour of every crew member, including drive time, loading, fueling and the morning meeting. Profit per crew hour then subtracts the labor, equipment and fuel cost of that day, divided by the hours the crew was out.

Measure both. RPMH tells you whether your pricing and routing are working together. Profit per crew hour tells you whether the work pays for the trucks and mowers it uses. A crew can post a strong RPMH on paper and still lose money if it runs expensive equipment for light work.

Example: one two-person mowing crew

Example: a fictional crew of a lead and a helper works a 9.5-hour day, 1.5 hours of it driving. They complete 22 stops at an average of $48 per cut. All figures are illustrative.

Example, continued: rebuild the route so drive time falls from 1.5 to 1.0 hours and the crew fits two more stops in the same day. Revenue rises to $1,152 and fuel drops by about $10, so crew-day gross profit climbs to about $570. Across a mowing season of around 150 working days, that is roughly $15,900 more gross profit from the same crew and the same equipment.

Measure it in four weeks

1. 01

   Clock every hour

   Use the time clock in your crew app or a simple log: clock in at the shop, out at the shop. Partial-day records make RPMH look better than it is.

2. 02

   Capture drive and on-site time

   Most field apps record arrival and departure at each property. Total the gaps; that is windshield time.

3. 03

   Price equipment by the day

   For each truck, trailer and mower, add annual payment or depreciation, insurance and maintenance, then divide by working days. Assign the result to the crew that uses it.

4. 04

   Load labor honestly

   Add payroll taxes, workers' compensation and any benefits. Benefits average 30.0% of compensation for private employers overall^[2]; use your actual figure.

5. 05

   Calculate by crew and by route

   Compare crews on the same metric. Large gaps usually come from route design, not effort.

6. 06

   Review weekly in season

   Post RPMH by crew each Monday. Crews improve what they can see.

Drive time: the cost nobody invoices

Every minute between properties is paid labor, fuel and equipment wear that no customer pays for directly. Route density is the fix: more properties per street, fewer streets per day. That means saying no, or charging more, for one-off properties outside your core neighborhoods, and grouping service days by area.

• Map every recurring property and color it by service day; look for crews crossing each other's territory.
• Set a minimum price for properties outside your density zones that covers the extra drive.
• When you win a new customer, offer the day your crew is already on that street, not the day the customer prefers.
• Load trucks the night before so the first stop starts on time. See revenue per route for route-level reporting.

Equipment cost per hour, worked out

Equipment is the cost lawn owners most often leave out of crew math, because it is paid monthly or once a year rather than every day. That makes a crew running a large zero-turn and a new truck look as profitable as a crew running smaller, paid-off equipment, when it is not.

Example: a fictional company owns a truck, an enclosed trailer, two commercial mowers, trimmers and blowers for one crew. Annual payments or depreciation total $14,000, insurance $2,500 and repairs and maintenance $3,500, so the crew's equipment costs $20,000 a year. Spread across 210 working days, that is about $95 a crew day, the figure used in the crew example above. At 9.5 hours a day, the equipment costs the business about $10 for every hour the crew is out.

• Calculate the figure per crew, not company-wide, so you can see which crew carries expensive equipment.
• Include idle equipment. A spare mower that sits in the shop still costs insurance and depreciation.
• Recalculate when you buy. A larger mower that saves twenty minutes a day only pays off if those minutes become billable stops.
• Match equipment to property mix. Wide decks earn their cost on open lawns, not on small, fenced yards with tight gates.

Crew size and property mix

A three-person crew is not automatically more productive than a two-person crew. On small residential lots, a third person often waits for the mower to finish, so the crew's revenue per man-hour falls even if stops per day rise. On large commercial properties, the third person can trim and blow while two mowers run, which raises it. Test crew size by property type: run the same route with two and three people for two weeks each and compare revenue per man-hour and profit per crew hour, not just stops completed.

Property mix matters for pricing too. Corner lots, steep slopes, gates and heavy edging all add minutes. Record the actual on-site time for each property for a month; you will usually find a handful of accounts that take far longer than their price assumes. Those are your first re-price conversations.

Seasonality and the off-season cost

Landscaping employment rose from 756,000 in January 2025 to 1,014,200 in July 2025, a 34% swing^[3], and peaked again at 1,016,900 in July 2026^[3]. Landscaping services also paid only 19.3% of their 2023 payroll in the first quarter, compared with 25.9% for all industries^[4]. That cycle means your profit per crew hour in season has to carry insurance, equipment payments and key staff through the winter.

Work out the off-season gap explicitly: total the fixed costs you pay from November to February, divide by the number of in-season crew days, and add that amount to each crew day's target. Snow removal, leaf cleanups, dormant pruning and pre-paid spring contracts are all ways to shrink the gap.

Decision table: what to do with a weak property

Add-on services that raise profit per crew hour

The cheapest revenue a lawn crew can earn is work done at a property it is already standing on. No extra drive, no extra unloading, and the customer already trusts you. Aeration, overseeding, hedge trimming, mulch, bed edging, leaf cleanups and gutter clearing can all be sold to the route you already run. Schedule add-ons on the same day as the regular visit where possible, and price them per property, not per hour, so faster crews earn the benefit.

• Offer add-ons in a short seasonal message to every customer on a route, with the dates the crew will be in their area.
• Give crew leads a simple way to flag opportunities with a photo: overgrown beds, dead patches, a broken edge.
• Track add-on revenue per route as its own line so you can see which crews and neighborhoods respond.

Pricing with the market, not against it

Most lawn businesses are small. Solo operators outnumber employer establishments about 4.4 to 1^[5], and the average nonemployer landscaping business took in about $36,041 in 2023^[5]. Many price by habit and never measure their hours. You do not need to match them; you need to show customers what they get for the price, such as consistent service days, photos after each visit and a single number that answers.

When you raise prices, explain them with what has changed: wages, fuel, insurance and equipment. Rising consumer prices for lawn care services^[1] mean many customers have already seen increases elsewhere. Send the notice in late winter, before the first cut, and offer the current rate for customers who prepay or sign for the full season. Compare your result with handyman economics if you add hourly odd jobs in the shoulder months.