Most mowing rounds are priced by feel — "that looks like a £25 lawn" — and feel is usually a few pounds under what the job needs. Here's a structure you can defend, whether it's thirty small domestics or a schools contract.
Start from your cost per hour, not the lawn
Before any lawn gets a price, know your loaded hourly cost: wages plus the on-costs (NI, holiday, insurance) plus a share of the van, fuel, machines and your time running the business. For a typical one-or-two-person outfit that lands somewhere between £28 and £45 per working hour once everything is counted. Your price per cut is that number × the honest minutes on site ÷ 60, plus travel, plus margin.
The trap in a mowing round isn't the mowing — it's the minutes you don't count: loading, travel between lawns, emptying clippings, the chat at the door. On a round of small domestics, 40% of the day can be everything-but-mowing. Price the stop, not just the grass.
A working size banding for domestic lawns
Bandings vary by region, but as a sanity check for 2026:
- Small lawn (under 100 m²): £15–£25 per cut — but see the minimum-charge rule below
- Medium (100–250 m²): £25–£40
- Large (250–600 m²): £40–£70
- Big domestic / small paddock: priced by time, not size
Minimum charge rule: if the stop takes 20 minutes door-to-door, it doesn't matter that the lawn is tiny — your minimum needs to cover the stop. Most rounds that "don't add up" are full of £15 lawns that each consume half an hour.
Fortnightly through the season
A UK cutting season runs roughly March to October — about 16 fortnightly visits. Two ways to charge it:
- Pay-per-cut: simple, and what most domestic customers expect. The risk is admin: 30 customers × 16 cuts = 480 invoices a season. If you're on paper, some of those never get raised. (This is exactly why SwardOps added per-cut auto-invoicing — the invoice raises and emails itself the moment the job's signed off.)
- Seasonal or monthly plan: total the season's cuts and divide by 8 months. Smooths your cash flow and their budget; you carry the risk of growth-spurt months.
Multi-site and commercial work
For a client with several sites, price each site as its own round (its own minutes, its own travel), then decide presentation: one monthly invoice covering all sites reads better to a commercial client than four separate bills. Add a management margin — commercial clients cost more in reporting and comms than domestics.
Check your numbers against reality
The fastest way to sense-check a price is to time real visits for a fortnight and compare actual minutes to what you priced. Grounds software with per-task timers does this automatically; even a notebook works. Rounds drift — hedges grow, customers add "just one more bit" — and an annual reprice against real timings is where the margin lives.
Want the arithmetic done for you? The free pricing calculator builds a suggested price from your labour and machine costs with a proper margin on top.