Do you know if your crews are performing above or below average when it comes to completing various tasks in the landscape? You can now access key benchmarks across core services such as landscape maintenance, irrigation, hardscaping and snow removal with NALP’s Sample Landscape Production Rate publication.
“If you don’t have accurate production rates, you cannot accurately price your services,” says Rex Bishop, an industry expert associated with NALP. “If you can’t accurately price, then your profits, budgets and finances will be totally inaccurate and can lead to business failure. Every contractor, whether it be a landscaper, plumber or painter, needs to know how long it takes to do each task within their service offerings. Time measurements are essential to your production costs.”
Why Production Rates Matter
Not knowing how long it takes your team to complete certain tasks makes it impossible to accurately price your services.
“You must measure everything in order to know how long it takes,” Bishop says. “Too many landscapers or other contractors price by feel or gut, not very accurate or profitable.”
Blair Walton, founder and visionary of ELEMENT Outdoor Living, based in Wilmington, North Carolina, says improving their production rates has been a long-term initiative for them. He notes that industry production rates are hard to come by, especially ones that are standardized and widely vetted.
“While we’ll always be refining our internal numbers, it was important to have a benchmark to compare against,” Walton says. “This gives us a solid reference point to evaluate where we are and where we need to go.”
In the past, Walton says they developed their production rates through a combination of peer group conversations, internal time tracking, and job-by-job analysis.
“We’ve spent a lot of time measuring and averaging task durations through work tickets, and more recently, we’ve even started using tools like ChatGPT to help explore and model more complex production rate kits,” Walton says.
How To Make the Most of This Publication?
The production rates presented in this publication can serve as a starting point for evaluating your own production metrics. This is the first step to smarter estimating and improving your overall efficiency.
“You should do your own time/motion studies to determine how long it takes to do the task within your organization,” Bishop says. “You should time several different employees doing the same task in order to determine the average time to complete the task.”
Bishop says if your production times end up radically different, you might want to review your operational procedures. He says types of equipment, soil types, grass types, seasonality and weather conditions may all play a factor as well.
Walton says they are early in the process of implementing the information from this publication, but says it is already helping them refine their production rates.
“We’re currently working with a partner to integrate these rates into Aspire, and that’s a big step for us,” Walton says. “Even in the review stage, it’s been a valuable tool to help us validate and cross-check the rates we’ve been using internally. It’s a top priority for us this year to improve estimating accuracy, and this publication is playing a big part in that.”
Walton anticipates that as they roll out these production rates, they’ll find areas they’ll need to tighten up.
Advice for Others
Walton encourages other landscape companies to tap into this benchmarking resource.
“Even if you don’t use it exactly as-is, it gives you a starting point — a way to gut-check your numbers and improve accuracy across your estimates,” Walton says. “That kind of reference is hard to find in our industry, and it’s something I think every company can benefit from.”
Bishop adds that landscape companies should always invest in opportunities to make their organization better.
“Educational opportunities offer you the ability to learn more, thus earn more,” Bishop says. “This publication gives them insight into most of the items they must be measuring to determine if their cost analysis is accurate. Most people have heard the phrase measure twice, cut once. The same holds true for landscape production. Measure everything that you put a price on if you want your price to be accurate.”
