Aug 2026 Why Your Landscaping Jobs Cost More Than You Quoted
You quoted 550 labour hours for the project. It ended up taking at least 100 labour hours more than quoted.
You’ve probably experienced this several times before. You finish the job, know it dragged on longer than expected, and realise you’ve lost money.
So, let’s look at what tasks are being overlooked and how you could start including them in your quotes, so you don’t throw money away.
Where the hours actually go but don’t get quoted
When landscapers start tracking properly, the blowouts show up in the same recurring places.
Setup, set out, access, remeasuring, replanning, toolbox talks, training and explaining. The hours before any visible work happens, such as protecting areas of a client’s property, remeasuring and replanning, getting materials to the back of a site, moving equipment, talking with a client, neighbour, and/or designer, introducing the job to the team and completing the site set out, are generally not quoted.
Excavation. This is often underquoted. A provisional sum or cost-plus approach is a good solution.
Training, guiding or explaining. Time spent training, guiding or explaining are rarely quoted.
Waiting. For the concrete truck or a delivery. You don’t know it’s going to happen, so it’s hard to quote. But tracking will show you the patterns.
Variations. Most jobs have variations. The team leader may discuss it with the client before you quote it, get approval, order materials and explain it to the team. This slows productivity.
Rebuilds or mistakes. Steps that had to be rebuilt, or paving redone due to uneven grout lines. It’s uncomfortable to record, but it needs a line of its own when tracking.
Creating a defects list, clean-up and handover. The last 15% of a job routinely takes a lot longer. Site clean-ups generally take longer than expected. Fixing defects, the client walk-through and coming back to install custom pieces that were ordered all take time and are not quoted.
Paving and retaining walls. These elements can take longer, so knowing how efficient your team is will help you quote them.
Complex designer fixtures or poor communication. This requires time and slows productivity, especially if your team is building a new fixture they haven’t attempted before or the designer is difficult to work with.
You quoted as though you were installing. That’s fine if you are installing, but if it’s not you installing, you must get to know how long it takes your team to build elements of a job.
Does your team do this?
Do you get your team to complete daily timesheets and assign the day’s work to a specific project? This is the first step, because you will know the actual total hours for a job when it’s completed.
The next step is to track actual hours against tasks within a job, so you can identify the specific blowouts.
What to put in place
- Have the team leader record hours by task, daily. Not weekly, nobody remembers all the details by Friday.
- Compare during the job, not just at the end. A weekly site meeting comparing quoted hours to actual hours means you know when you’re behind while you can still do something about it. Finding out at handover is too late.
- Review every completed job. Reviewing quoted hours versus actual hours, task by task, will take 15 minutes. Do the same with material costs. Know your gross profit percentage.
What will change over the next few months
The first month may be frustrating because your team leader or team members forget to record their hours and you must repeatedly remind them. But it’s worth it until it’s a habit.
As you devote just a little time each week to tracking, you will gain clarity on what has been underestimated.
By about month four, your quotes start landing closer because you’re finally quoting the work as it happens rather than as you imagined it.
Quoting probably isn’t the most enjoyable part of running a landscaping business, but it’s one of the most important parts of running a profitable landscape construction business.
The better you understand your actual labour hours and material costs, the better your quotes become and the more profit you make.