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Landscaping costs

What will your yard project actually cost?

Tell us what's in the project and we'll give you a range — plants, hardscape, mulch and edging, priced DIY or installed, and nudged for your region. Every band comes from a published 2026 US cost guide or a real retail listing, cited line by line.

This is a ballpark, not a quote. We have not contacted a contractor, nursery or supplier about your yard, and we never will on your behalf. Use this to know whether you're looking at a $2,000 weekend or a $20,000 project — then get real bids.

Describe the project

Fill in what you know. Anything you leave blank we assume — and we tell you exactly what we assumed, next to the number.

Plants — how many of each?
Hardscape & features

Tick what's in the project. Size drives the price more than anything else here, so put a real number in if you have one.

Beds & materials
Where, and who does the work
Cost basis

DIY is materials only — it excludes tool and equipment rental and your own time. Installed is materials plus contractor labour.

Ballpark range

Tell us what's in the project

Add a plant count or tick a hardscape job on the left and a cited range appears here — with every line, every assumption and every source behind it.

See it before you price it — free

Upload a photo of your yard and get a photorealistic redesign with a real plant list — then this same estimate, built from the plants we actually counted in it.

The real levers

What actually drives a landscaping bill

Six things move the number, and they are not the six things most people worry about.

Labour, far more than plants

HomeGuide's 2026 guide prices both halves of the same job: a landscaper charges $25–$85 to plant a shrub including the plant, while the shrub on its own is $5–$35. The working rule is that an installed plant runs about two to three times its retail price, with a rough $20–$25 per-plant labour floor. Crews bill $50–$120 an hour, and that rate varies more between states than material prices do.

Source: HomeGuide 2026 landscaping-installation-cost; Techo-Bloc April 2026 report (800+ contractors)

How big the plant is the day you buy it

This is the biggest lever you personally control. A 15-gallon tree at roughly 6–8 ft is about $100–$300; the same species bought at 10–20 ft is $250–$800 before anyone plants it, and $400–$1,300 installed. Buying small and waiting three years is often the difference between two budgets.

Source: HomeGuide 2026 cost-to-plant-a-tree

Area, not ambition

Hardscape is sold by the square foot, so the size of the shape on the ground sets the price almost by itself. A paver walkway runs about $9–$20 per sq ft installed; a paver patio about $8–$24. Doubling the patio very nearly doubles the bill — which is why a calculator that guesses your area for you is guessing your whole answer.

Source: HomeGuide 2026 paver-walkway-cost and paver-patio-installation-cost; LawnStarter and Lawn Love, Dec 2025

What's under the surface

Headline per-square-foot numbers almost never include site prep. Excavation is $1–$5 per sq ft, regrading $0.40–$2, permits $200–$1,000, and bulk delivery adds roughly $0.50 per sq ft or a $50–$150 flat truck fee. On a sloped or compacted site this is where a quote quietly doubles.

Source: HomeGuide 2026; Lawn Love 2025-12-27

Where you live

Regional indices put most states within roughly 13% either side of the national average. The catch is that the spread inside one state is bigger than the spread between regions: San Francisco runs about 28% above the national average while Fresno sits right at it. Treat any ZIP-level adjustment — ours included — as a nudge, not a number.

Source: Craftsman National Construction Estimator area modification factors; BEA Regional Price Parities 2024

When you buy

Nursery retail is seasonal in a way cost guides rarely mention. Container stock is routinely discounted 30–50% by early autumn, which is also a perfectly good time to plant most trees and shrubs. Our plant bands are peak-season retail, so an autumn project can land under the low end.

Source: Retail listings at Green Acres Nursery & Supply, Pike Nursery, Home Depot and Lowe's

Why a range

We will not show you one number

Every other yard-cost tool hands you a single figure because a single figure feels like an answer. It isn't one. Our own sources disagree with each other by wide margins on the same job — two respected guides put metal bed edging at $2–$6 and $5–$11 per linear foot, and we could not resolve which is right, so our band spans both and says so on the line.

A range that contains the truth is more useful than a point estimate that doesn't. Where we are on thin evidence, the line is tagged thin data. Where we guessed a quantity rather than a price, it's tagged approximate and named in “What we assumed”.

DIY vs installed

Two questions, two answers

DIY is materials only. It excludes tool and equipment rental, delivery, and your weekends — which is why we do not use the DIY totals some guides publish, since those bake in a plate compactor and a saw and end up higher than the same guide's installed average.

Installed is materials plus contractor labour. It still excludes permits, demolition, excavation, regrading, drainage, irrigation, electrical, tax and disposal — the list sits under every estimate, in full.

We never blend the two, and we never quietly move you from one to the other.

Sourcing

Where these numbers come from

Price tables last reviewed 2026-08. Retail plant prices are the fastest-moving figures here and we re-check them each spring. Each line of your estimate names its own source; the full set is:

  • HomeGuide 2026 cost guides — landscaping installation, cost to plant a tree, palm tree cost, paver walkway, concrete sidewalk, paver patio, outdoor landscape lighting, mulch prices, landscape curbing, water fountain.
  • Lawn Love and LawnStarter, December 2025 — walkway, paver patio, landscape lighting, mulch, landscape edging, water fountain.
  • Angi 2026 — outdoor water fountain and pondless waterfall installation. Homewyse, May 2026 — landscape lighting national averages. Fixr, January 2025 — fountain installation.
  • Techo-Bloc, April 2026 landscaping cost report — crew rates from more than 800 contractors.
  • Retail nursery and big-box listings read in August 2026 — Green Acres Nursery & Supply, Pike Nursery, Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart.
  • Regional adjustment derived from the Craftsman National Construction Estimator's area modification factors, cross-checked against the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024.

Planters are deliberately left out of the estimate: pots run from about $20 to $500 and we have no researched band for them, so inventing one would be exactly the mistake this page exists to avoid. Outdoor furniture, fencing, decking, irrigation and lawn or turf work are unpriced for the same reason.

See it first

Price the yard you actually want

Upload one photo and YardRemake redesigns it with real, named plants that suit your growing zone — then counts every specimen in the render and runs this same estimate off the true quantities, with a shopping list to match.

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