Garden maintenance contracts: how to price and run them

A garden maintenance contract is a written agreement to visit the same garden on a regular schedule, do the same set of jobs each time, and charge the same price. Work out the price from your hourly rate and the time a visit really takes, then write down how often you come, what each visit covers, what costs extra, and what happens when either of you wants to stop. That is most of it. The rest of this piece covers the choices that trip people up: weekly or fortnightly, a price per visit or a monthly fee, and rain.

What to put in the contract

It does not need to be long. One page that the customer reads and agrees to is worth more than five that nobody opens. Cover these:

• How often you visit: weekly, fortnightly or every four weeks, and roughly which day.
• What each visit includes, written as jobs: mow, edge, strim, weed the borders, blow the paths, take the clippings away.
• When the season starts and ends, and whether there are winter visits.
• What costs extra, such as hedge cutting, pruning, leaf clearance, green waste beyond the usual, or feed and weed treatments.
• Access: gate codes, where the key is, whether someone needs to be in, where you can park, and whether you can use their outside tap or brown bin.
• Price and payment: the price per visit or per month, when you invoice, when payment is due and how you want to be paid.
• Cancellation and notice: how much notice either side gives to end it. Four weeks is easy to live with.
• Price review: when you will review the price and how much notice you give before it changes.

Write the visit in plain words the customer recognises. "Mow front and back lawns, edge, strim round the borders and clear the paths" leaves less room for argument than "general garden maintenance".

This is not legal advice. If you agree contracts in customers' homes, consumer law can give them a cancellation period, and GOV.UK and Citizens Advice both explain the rules.

Weekly or fortnightly

Weekly visits suit lawns that people care about and gardens that grow fast. Each visit is quicker because there is less to cut, and the garden never looks untidy. Fortnightly suits most domestic gardens where the customer wants it kept, not perfect, and it is the rhythm most garden maintenance rounds settle into.

The price per visit should reflect the difference. A fortnightly cut in May takes longer than a weekly one, the grass is heavier and there is more to clear. Price it on the time it actually takes, not on the weekly price.

Many rounds change frequency with the season: weekly in the flush of spring growth, fortnightly through summer, every four weeks in autumn. If you do this, write it into the contract so the customer is not surprised when you turn up more often in May.

Price per visit or a monthly fee

Both work. The choice is about cash flow and how much admin you want.

Price per visit

You charge for each visit you make. It is simple to explain and fair to both sides: no visit, no charge. The downside is that your income follows the grass. It is high in May and June and thin in winter, and the customer's bill changes from month to month, which some find annoying.

An example, in round numbers. Say your hourly rate comes out at £36, and a garden takes an hour on site plus 20 minutes of travel and loading. That is 1 hour 20 minutes, or £48. Call it £50 a visit.

A monthly fee

You total the visits for the season and spread the cost across the months. The customer pays the same every month, and you get steadier income and fewer invoices.

Working the same example through, fortnightly from March to October is about 17 visits. At £50 a visit that is £850 for the season. Spread over the eight months of the season, it comes to about £106 a month. Spread over twelve months, about £71.

These are worked examples, not market prices. For weekly visits, multiply the visit price by 52 and divide by 12 to get an even monthly figure, and remember that some months have five visits.

Spreading the fee across twelve months has a catch. By the end of summer the customer has had most of the visits but paid only part of the cost. If they cancel in September, you are out of pocket. Either keep the monthly fee to the months you work, include some winter visits (leaf clearance, a hedge cut, a tidy-up) so the winter payments pay for something, or put a line in the contract about settling up if the contract ends early.

Whichever you choose, start from your own costs rather than someone else's price list. The hourly rate calculator gives you the minimum you need, and lawn mowing prices across the UK shows where a mowing-only price might sit against it.

Rain and missed visits

You will lose days to rain, and cutting a wet lawn does it no favours. Say in the contract what happens when a visit cannot go ahead, so you are not making it up each time.

A simple rule works: if a visit is rained off, you move it to the next dry day that week, and if you cannot fit it in, the round carries on as normal from the next visit. On a price per visit, a visit that did not happen is not charged. On a monthly fee, you either credit it or make it up later in the season. Pick one and write it down.

Holidays and illness are the same problem with more notice. Tell customers in advance, and if you have a second person, say whether they cover your round or the visits move.

When a wet week pushes Tuesday's gardens to Thursday, you want to move one visit without breaking the rest of the round. Paper diaries make that painful. Whatever you use, check that moving one visit leaves the others where they were.

Invoicing per visit or in a monthly batch

Invoicing after each visit gets the money in fastest, and it suits customers who pay by bank transfer on the day. It also means a lot of small invoices, and a lot of small payments to match up.

Invoicing once a month for every visit you completed that month is less admin for both of you. The customer gets one bill listing the dates, and you check payments once. It suits a monthly fee as well, since the invoice is the same each month.

Either way, put the visit dates on the invoice. When a customer asks whether you came on the 14th, the answer is already there.

Notes for every garden

A round only runs smoothly if whoever goes knows the garden. Keep notes for each property: the gate code, where the key is hidden, which bin the clippings go in, the dog that must stay in, the bed they do not want strimmed near. Keep them where you will see them on the day, which means on your phone, not in a notebook in the van.

Notes also protect the contract. If a customer asks for something extra on the doorstep, write it down with the date and the price you agreed. At the end of the season, those notes tell you which gardens took longer than you priced them for and need a price review.

Putting the round on a calendar

Once the contracts are written, running them is mostly admin: the right gardens on the right days, visits moved when it rains, and invoices out on time. TradeSender does that for gardeners; the page for gardeners shows how. You set each garden to every week, every fortnight or every four weeks, with an end date if the contract has one, and the visits fill the calendar. The scheduling features cover moving visits, and you can invoice visit by visit or raise one invoice for every completed visit not yet billed. Repeating rounds are on Pro at £19 a month for up to five people; the free plan covers one person and 30 visits a month without repeating visits. Pricing has the details.