Gardener Price List Template UK: Maintenance vs One-Off Pricing

TL;DR: A gardener's price list has two jobs that pull in opposite directions: pricing recurring maintenance and pricing one-off clearances. Put both on one clean service menu and you stop giving away free quotes for jobs that were never going to convert. This guide walks a UK gardener or landscaper through structuring the two, costing your day properly, and the VAT line most people get wrong.

2026/27 simplified mileage rate: For self-employed simplified expenses, HMRC's rate for cars and goods vehicles is 55p per business mile for the first 10,000 miles and 25p per business mile after that. The 55p rate applies retrospectively from 6 April 2026. Check GOV.UK simplified vehicle expenses before relying on the figures.

Most gardeners price in their head at the gate. The customer asks "how much to sort the garden?", you glance at the brambles, and you guess. More often than not, the guess under-prices a full day of clearance or over-prices a hedge that takes forty minutes, and you have spent twenty minutes on a quote that may never become work. Most disputes can be traced to that one habit: a number given before the work is understood.

The fix is not a fancier quote. It is a service menu that does the rough sorting before you ever turn up, so the time-wasters self-select out and the real jobs arrive already half-priced.

Gardening and landscaping work splits cleanly into two types, and they cannot share one pricing model.

• Recurring maintenance: fortnightly mowing, monthly tidies, seasonal hedge cuts. Predictable, repeatable, priced per visit.
• One-off projects: full clearances, turfing, fencing, planting schemes. Variable, site-specific, priced per day or per job.

A flat hourly rate tries to serve both and serves neither. Maintenance customers want to know the per-visit cost so they can budget. Project customers want a sense of scale before they commit. Your menu should answer both questions in their own sections, not blur them into a single number.

That separation also protects your routing. A van full of forty-minute maintenance stops is your reliable income; a one-off clearance is a bonus that eats a whole day. Showing them as different things on the page sets the right expectation about lead time and price.

Before you write any figure, work out what a working day costs you to run. Then everything on the menu sense-checks against it.

Here is a worked example for a sole-trader gardener. Say you bill 200 working days a year (allowing for weather, admin and slow winter weeks). Your van, fuel, insurance, mower servicing, green-waste tipping fees, replacement tools and your own pension come to roughly £18,000 a year in costs before you have paid yourself a penny. That is £90 a day in pure overhead. If you want to take home £160 a day, your day rate has to clear £250, and that is before a single hard job or a tip run that costs you an hour.

So a "full day clearance, £150" advert is not a bargain. It is a loss once green-waste disposal and your own time are counted. Price the day honestly, then break it down for the menu: a half-day maintenance round, a full-day clearance, a per-metre hedge rate.

The mileage between jobs counts too. HMRC's self-employed simplified-expenses rate for the 2026/27 tax year is 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p after that. A gardener crossing a county for a one-off can quietly burn an hour and twenty miles of fuel before lifting a spade, so build travel into project quotes rather than absorbing it.

If you want to pressure-test those numbers properly rather than guess, a gardener pricing calculator (P05 Pricing Calculator, £14.99) lets you plug in your real overheads, target take-home and billable days so the day rate on your menu is the figure the business actually needs.

A good gardener's service menu does the awkward sorting for you. Group it like this:

1. Regular maintenance: per-visit prices by frequency (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) and rough garden size.
2. One-off jobs: day rate and common project bands (clearance, turfing, hedge reduction).
3. Add-ons: green-waste removal, jet-washing, a power tool surcharge for overgrown sites.
4. One honest note: "Project prices confirmed after a site visit; based on access, waste volume and ground condition."

That last line matters more than any single price. It moves the "it depends" conversation to where it belongs and stops a customer treating your starting figure as a fixed quote. You are allowed to say a clearance depends on what is under the brambles. Just say it on the page, not at the gate.

Add-ons are where maintenance gardeners leak money. Green-waste tipping is a real, rising cost. If you remove cuttings, that is a line item, not a favour. Write it down once and your team stops apologising for it.

Plenty of established landscapers worry they should be adding VAT to every quote. Most sole-trader gardeners do not need to.

You only have to register for VAT once your taxable turnover passes the registration threshold, which is £90,000 for the 2025-26 tax year. Below that, your displayed prices are simply your prices, with no VAT line and no addition at the door. Check the current threshold on GOV.UK before you assume either way, because it can change between Budgets.

If you are VAT-registered, prices shown to domestic customers must be displayed inclusive of VAT, so the figure on the menu is the figure they pay. Keep one clean number on the public list and let your bookkeeping handle the VAT split behind the scenes.

The honest counterpoint: a clean menu is a starting position, not a contract. For larger landscaping projects you still want a written quote with scope, exclusions and a deposit before any turf is ordered. That is paperwork, not pricing, and it belongs in a proper gardener business document set (P01 Business Documents Standard, £11.99): the client-facing forms that sit alongside a price list so your quotes, invoices and terms all read as one system.

A handwritten rate sheet is fine when you have ten regulars. You have outgrown it when you are losing track of who is due, who has not paid, and which prices you bumped in spring.

At that point the price list stops being the bottleneck and the round does. Tracking visit frequency, skipped jobs and outstanding balances across a full book is its own task. Our guide to the documents UK gardeners and landscapers actually need covers the wider admin side, and a dedicated gardener round management pack (P21 Round Management Pack, £9.99) gives you an Excel workbook plus editable Word price-rise and recurring-service templates to run the book without a notebook in the van.

The menu itself, though, just needs to be clean and quick to update. That is the job of the gardener price list and service menu (P11 Price List & Service Menu, £4.99): an interactive HTML template you edit in your browser with the maintenance and project sections already structured, plus an editable DOCX as a Microsoft Word fallback and a How to Use Guide. You fill in your numbers, add your business name, and print to PDF, rather than building the layout from scratch.

If you do nothing else after reading this, copy this structure onto your next version:

1. Header: business name, "prices effective from [date]".
2. Regular maintenance: per-visit prices by frequency and garden size.
3. One-off projects: day rate and common project bands.
4. Add-ons: green-waste removal, jet-washing, overgrowth surcharge.
5. One honest note: "Project prices confirmed after a site visit."
6. Footer: area covered, cancellation terms and how to book.

Sort the two pricing logics first, cost your day second, and let the template be the easy last step. A menu that separates maintenance from one-offs answers the right questions before anyone wastes your morning at the gate.

This article is general guidance, not tax advice or legal advice for UK gardeners and landscapers. Verify current VAT thresholds and HMRC mileage rates on GOV.UK before making registration or pricing decisions.