What to Pay Someone for a Day of Yard Work

Two prices for the same afternoon

A landscaping company quotes the job. That price includes their crew, their truck, the material, their insurance, their overhead, and their profit, and it is a fair price for what they are selling.

Hiring the labor directly prices only the hours. You buy the mulch, you have it delivered or you haul it, and you pay somebody to move it. For a straightforward yard day that is usually the cheaper half by a wide margin.

How long yard work actually takes

Planning figures for two people with the material already on site.

• Spreading mulch, roughly two to three cubic yards an hour once they are moving.
• Clearing overgrown beds, two to four hours for a typical front yard.
• Brush and branch cleanup after a storm, half a day, more if it has to be cut up.
• Leaf cleanup on a quarter acre, three to five hours by hand.
• Anything hauled to the dump, add the round trip.

The rate to expect

Look up landscaping and general labor for your metro on the Daily Pay Finder rather than guessing. It shows the published wage for your area and what jobs nearby have been posting.

Pay at or a little above that number and your post fills the same day. Underprice it and it sits open all week, which costs you more than the difference.

What makes it take longer

A long carry from the driveway to the beds. A steep yard. Material that arrives in bags rather than a pile. Anything that needs sorting rather than hauling.

Say all of that in the post. Somebody who knows what they are walking into shows up ready, and nobody renegotiates at ten in the morning.

Have the material and the dump plan ready

The most common way a yard day goes over is a crew waiting on a delivery, or finishing with a pile nobody arranged to remove.

Get the mulch or the dumpster there first thing, and know your dump hours if it is going in a truck.

What to put in the post

The date, the start time, the hours you expect, the rate, how many people, and what the work actually is. Say whether tools are supplied or whether they should bring their own.

Your first job post is free, and local workers can answer it the same day.