Texas pays contractors to mow the grass beside its highways. The price is competitively bid, by the acre, and over the last two years the state has bought 2,238,108 acres of it. The median winning bid is $38.00 an acre. Which means the grass on an ordinary suburban lawn is worth about four dollars to cut.More
So when you are quoted $50, you are not being charged $50 to cut grass. You are being charged about $4 to cut grass and about $46 for the truck to arrive, the trailer to be unloaded, the trimmer to go round the fence, the edger to do the path, the blower to clear the drive, the gate to be opened and closed, and the twenty minutes of driving to the next house. Once you see it that way, three things that look like rip-offs stop looking like rip-offs. The minimum charge is not greed, it is the visit. The price barely moving when your lawn is a bit bigger is not laziness, it is because the grass was never the expensive part. And a big lawn being cheaper per square foot than a small one is not a mistake. It is what has to be true. Now: a highway shoulder is not your garden, and this page says so at length rather than hiding it. There is no fence on a highway, no gate, no flower bed, no dog, and the contractor is already standing there with a mower that cuts a hundred acres in a pass. It is a different job. That is precisely why it is the right yardstick, because it separates the cost of the cutting from the cost of the visit, and the visit is what you are buying.
What you are paying for the visit, not the grass
$46
The grass, at the price Texas pays to have grass cut by the acre$4
The visit: the drive, the trailer, the trimming, the edging, the gate$46
The grass is almost free. You are paying for the truck to arrive. Texas buys highway
mowing by the acre, competitively bid, and has bought 2,238,108 acres of it in the last two years at a median of
$38.00. At that rate the grass on an ordinary five-thousand-square-foot lawn is worth about four dollars and
thirty-six cents to cut. The rest of your quote is the drive, the trailer, the trimmer, the edger, the blower, the
gate, and the twenty minutes to the next house.More
Which makes three things stop looking like rip-offs. The minimum charge is not greed, it is
the visit, and the visit costs what it costs whether your lawn is small or tiny. The price barely changing when your
lawn is a bit bigger is not laziness, it is because the grass was never the expensive part. And a large lawn costing
less per square foot than a small one is not an error: it is what has to be true when the
fixed cost dwarfs the variable one.
A HIGHWAY SHOULDER IS NOT YOUR GARDEN, and we are not going to pretend it is. There is no fence to
go round, no gate to open, no flower bed to avoid, no path to edge, no clippings to bag and no dog. The contractor is
already standing there with a batch-wing mower cutting a hundred acres in a single pass. It is a different job, done
at a different scale, and $38 an acre is NOT what your lawn should cost per acre. That is exactly why the comparison
works: it isolates the price of the CUTTING, and everything left over is the price of the VISIT, which is the thing
you are really buying.
So what should you do with this? Stop negotiating the lawn and start negotiating the visit. Ask for
fortnightly instead of weekly. Ask what it costs if you skip the edging, or do the trimming yourself. Ask whether
they are already on your street that day. Those are the levers. Arguing that your lawn is small is not, because the
lawn was never what you were paying for.
§ 02 What you are actually buying
Your lawn, in acres0.12
What the grass is worth to cut, at Texas's bid rate$4.36
Share of your bill that is the VISIT, not the mowing91.3%
Minutes of billed crew time that buys, at the trade's own $74.15 an employee-hour$40
What you will pay across the year$1,300
The $38.00 an acre is a competitively bid, published, winning price for cutting grass at scale beside a Texas highway. It is NOT a residential rate, it is NOT national, and it is NOT what your lawn should cost. It is on this page for one reason: to isolate what the CUTTING costs, so that the rest of your bill, which is the visit, becomes visible. The $74.15 an employee-hour is the landscaping industry's own receipts over its own hours: a CLASS average, gross of fuel and machines, and not a ceiling on the firm quoting you.
Recommended next steps
The great majority of what you are paying for is the visit rather than the grass. That is normal, it is not a scandal, and it tells you where the negotiation is: frequency, edging, and whether the crew is already on your street. Arguing about the size of the lawn will get you nowhere.
Texas pays a median of $38.00 an acre to have grass mowed. It has bought 2,238,108 acres of it in two years.More
Item FULL - WIDTH MOWING in TxDOT's bid tabulations, across 243 winning bids let between July 2024 and July 2026. The distribution is tight: $29.99 at the tenth percentile and $52.31 at the ninetieth, which for a competitively tendered outdoor job is remarkably consistent. These are the prices contractors actually agreed to accept, in public, having bid against each other for the work.
At that rate, the grass on a 5,000 square foot lawn is worth $4.36 to cut.More
An acre is 43,560 square feet, so 5,000 square feet is 0.115 of an acre, and 0.115 times $38.00 is $4.36. That is the arithmetic in full and you can check every step of it. If you are being quoted $50, then roughly $4 of it is mowing and roughly $46 of it is something else.
The landscaping trade takes in $74.15 per employee-hour, and this page used to tell you that number could not be built.More
It could. The 2022 Economic Census gives what NAICS 561730 firms take in; BLS's Current Employment Statistics gives the hours they work, for that exact six-digit code, monthly since 2006 (series CEU6056173002). Divide one by the other. The wage on the other side of it is $22.67 an hour. We had checked the Census, found no hours column, and announced that nobody had the hours, which was false and which our own sod page had already disproved on this same NAICS code. What that rate means for you: a $50 quote buys roughly forty minutes of one person's billed time, or a two-person crew for twenty. That is the visit, priced from the industry's own books rather than from a highway. IT IS A CLASS AVERAGE AND IT IS NOT A CEILING on the firm quoting you: it is gross of fuel, mowers and the truck, and it is spread over every employee rather than only the crew in your garden.
The something else is the visit, and the visit is the product.More
The truck and trailer arriving. The ramps down and the mower off. The trimmer round the fence posts and the mailbox. The edger along the path. The blower clearing the drive and the pavement. The gate. The dog. The clippings. And then the ramps up and twenty minutes of driving to the next house, which is time nobody is paying for except through your bill. Two people for forty minutes, plus the drive, plus the fuel, plus the insurance, plus the mower that wears out. Now the $46 looks less like a markup and more like an invoice.
This is why the minimum charge exists, and why price barely tracks the size of your lawn.More
If nearly all the cost is the visit and hardly any of it is the grass, then the price cannot fall much when the lawn is small, and it cannot rise much when the lawn is a bit bigger. A minimum charge is not greed: it is the honest floor of turning up. And a large lawn genuinely does cost less per square foot than a small one, which sounds like a mistake and is in fact what has to be true.
A highway shoulder is not your garden, and that is exactly why it is the right yardstick.More
No fence, no gate, no flower bed, no path to edge, no bagging, no dog, and a contractor already on site with a batch-wing mower cutting a hundred acres in a pass. It is a different job at a different scale and $38 an acre is NOT what your lawn should cost per acre. The comparison is not there to price your lawn. It is there to price the CUTTING, so that everything else on the bill becomes visible for the first time.
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So negotiate the visit, not the grass.More
Ask for fortnightly rather than weekly. Ask what comes off if you skip the edging or do your own trimming. Ask whether they are already working on your street that day, because the drive is the expensive part and a crew that is already there has less of it to recover. Arguing that your lawn is small will not get you far, because your lawn was never what you were paying for.
Sourced, and there are now two of them. The $38.00 an acre: TxDOT's bid tabulations,
item FULL - WIDTH MOWING, the median of 243 WINNING bids covering 2,238,108 acres, let between July 2024 and July
2026. Tenth percentile $29.99, ninetieth $52.31. And the $74.15 an employee-hour that the landscaping
trade takes in: 2022 Economic Census receipts for NAICS 561730, divided by the hours BLS measures for that same code.
Ours: the 5,000 square feet of lawn, which is a default you should replace, and the tier boundaries.
Yours: the quote, because no survey prices a single visit to a single garden.More
A refusal this page had to withdraw, and it is the more useful half of this box. We used to
print that BLS gives only a groundskeeper's WAGE, that the Economic Census gives landscaping receipts "with no hours
and no unit", and that therefore no billed rate could be built at all. The first two are true. The conclusion was
false. Sector 56 of the Economic Census genuinely has no hours column, and it never has. But BLS's Current Employment
Statistics has published average weekly hours for NAICS 561730 exactly, monthly, since 2006, as series
CEU6056173002. The denominator was never missing. We had searched one agency, found it lacking, and announced a fact
about the world. So here is the rate: landscaping firms take in $74.15 per employee-hour worked,
against the $22.67 an hour they pay the person pushing the mower. Worse, this site had ALREADY worked that out. Our
own sod page derives it from these two files, on this same NAICS code, because it made the identical mistake first
and had to retract it. We then made it again, one page across.
And $74.15 is a fact about an INDUSTRY, not a ceiling on your contractor. It is receipts over hours
for a whole class, so it is GROSS, meaning it still contains the fuel, the mowers, the trailer and the truck, because
sector 56 does not break materials out. It is also spread across every employee on the payroll, not just the two
standing in your garden. Read it as a yardstick for the shape of the bill, never as what any particular firm should
charge you.
Why a state highway agency, for the other number. Because it is a place where the price of cutting
grass is competitively bid, published, and measured in a unit you can divide by. A state DOT publishes what a
contractor actually agreed to accept, per acre, in public, having competed for it. That is a better number than any
survey, and it is free.
What the $38 is not. It is not a residential rate, it is not a national rate, and it is not what your
lawn should cost. It is Texas, it is a highway, and it is bulk. Every one of those makes it cheaper than your garden.
The page uses it for exactly one purpose: to show that the CUTTING is cheap, so that the VISIT becomes visible.
And a genuine gap we are telling you about. Other state DOTs almost certainly publish comparable
mowing items and we have not opened them. If a second state disagreed sharply with Texas, we would want to know, and
so would you. We have not checked, and rather than imply we have, we are saying so.
Where every number above comes from
Highway bids
Texas Department of Transportation, Bid Tabulations (data.texas.gov). Item FULL - WIDTH MOWING, unit ACRE, winning bids only (low_bidder_flag). 243 winning bids covering 2,238,108 acres, let July 2024 to July 2026. Median winning unit price $38.00 per acre, 10th percentile $29.99, 90th percentile $52.31
US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2256BASIC, NAICS 561730 Landscaping services (receipts, payroll, employees. It carries NO hours column, which is true and is not the same thing as nobody having the hours)
BLS Current Employment Statistics, CEU6056173002: average weekly hours of all employees, NAICS 561730 landscaping services, monthly since 2006. This is the denominator we spent a version of this page insisting did not exist
Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.
The $38 an acre is HIGHWAY mowing and it is not your lawn's price. The page depends on that being understood.
Open ground, no obstacles, no edging, no bagging, bulk scale, a contractor already on site. Every one of those makes it cheaper than a garden. It is used here to price the CUTTING, not to price the job, and if anyone quotes this page as evidence that a lawn service should charge $38 an acre they have inverted the argument.
The 5,000 square feet of lawn is OURS, and it is the number that moves the answer most.
It is the GRASS, not the lot: subtract the house, the drive, the patio and the beds. No federal source measures residential lawn area. Pace it out or look at a satellite image, and replace the default.
It is Texas, and it is one state.
Other state DOTs very probably publish comparable mowing items. We have not opened them. If a second state disagreed sharply with Texas we would want to know, and we are telling you we have not checked rather than implying we have.
The quote is yours, because no survey prices a single visit to a single garden. The trade's HOURLY rate, though, is published, and we used to deny that.
The narrow thing that is true: the Economic Census gives landscaping receipts (NAICS 561730) and carries no hours column, because sector 56 never has. The thing we wrongly concluded from it: that no billed rate could therefore be constructed. BLS's Current Employment Statistics has published average weekly hours for that exact code monthly since 2006 (CEU6056173002), so the rate is $74.15 per employee-hour and this page now prints it. What remains genuinely unpublished is the price of one residential VISIT, which is a per-job price no federal survey collects. That is why the quote is still your input, and why the page does arithmetic on the number you were actually given.
The $74.15 is a CLASS average, it is GROSS, and it is not a ceiling on anyone's quote.
It is the receipts of an entire NAICS class divided by that class's hours, so it still contains the fuel, the mowers, the trailer and the truck (sector 56 does not break materials out), and it is spread across every employee on the payroll rather than only the people in your garden. A firm charging more than $74.15 an hour is not thereby overcharging you, and one charging less is not thereby a bargain. It is a yardstick for the SHAPE of a bill, and treating an industry aggregate as a bound on one contractor is the exact error this site keeps a rule about.
Frequently asked questions
How much should lawn mowing cost?
Less usefully answered in dollars than in structure, and here is the structure. Texas buys highway mowing by the acre at a competitively bid median of $38.00, having bought over two million acres of it. At that rate the grass on an ordinary five-thousand-square-foot lawn is worth about $4.36 to cut. So a $50 quote is roughly $4 of mowing and roughly $46 of visit: the truck, the trailer, the trimmer, the edger, the blower, the gate and the drive to the next house. Whether $46 is a fair price for that visit is a judgement, and it is a much better question than the one most people ask.
What do lawn and landscaping firms actually charge per hour?
About $74.15 per employee-hour, and that is measured rather than guessed. Take what the 2022 Economic Census says landscaping firms (NAICS 561730) take in, divide by the hours BLS says those firms work (series CEU6056173002, published monthly since 2006), and that is the number. The wage on the other side of it is $22.67 an hour. So a $50 visit is buying you roughly forty minutes of one person's billed time, or a two-person crew for twenty minutes, which is about what a small lawn actually takes once you count the unloading and the trimming. Two warnings. It is a CLASS average, gross of the fuel, the mowers and the truck, and spread over every employee rather than only the crew, so it is not a ceiling on what any particular firm should charge you. And it is an industry-wide figure that covers design and planting as well as mowing. We tell you this loudly because an earlier version of this page told you flatly that this number did not exist, which was false.
Why does my lawn service have a minimum charge?
Because almost none of the cost is the grass. The expensive parts are turning up, unloading, trimming, edging, blowing and driving away, and every one of those costs the same whether your lawn is small or very small. A minimum charge is the honest floor of a visit. It is the same reason a plumber charges a call-out fee: you are buying somebody's presence, and the tap washer is nearly free.
Why doesn't the price go up much when my lawn is bigger?
For the same reason. The grass is the cheap part, so more grass adds little. At the Texas rate, doubling a five-thousand-square-foot lawn to ten thousand adds about $4.36 of actual mowing. It adds more than that in practice, because a bigger lawn takes longer and there is more to trim and more to blow, but nothing like double. This is also why a large lawn costs less per square foot than a small one, which sounds like a mistake and is in fact unavoidable.
Is $38 an acre what I should be paying?
No, and if you take one thing from this page please take this one. That is what a contractor bids to mow the open shoulder of a Texas highway, with a batch-wing mower, cutting a hundred acres in a pass, with no fence to go round, no gate to open, no flower bed to avoid, no path to edge, no clippings to bag and no dog. It is a different job. It is on this page for one purpose only: to show what the CUTTING costs, so that everything else on your bill becomes visible. Your lawn will always cost far more per acre than a highway, and that is not anybody cheating you.
How do I actually get the price down?
Negotiate the visit rather than the grass. Ask for fortnightly instead of weekly, which very nearly halves the year. Ask what comes off if you skip the edging, or trim your own fence line. Ask whether the crew is already on your street that day, because the drive is the costly part and a crew that is already there has less of it to recover from you. What will not work is arguing that your lawn is small, because your lawn was never what you were paying for.
