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.