Charge for leaf removal by building the price from your own costs: crew hours on the property, drive time for everyone in the truck, disposal as its own line, overhead, and a margin, with a minimum charge underneath so small yards still pay for the trip. LawnStarter's 2026 leaf removal guide puts the average customer price around $170 with an $80 minimum, which is a useful gut check but tells you nothing about what your truck, your crew, and your dump cost. Price late-season wet leaves higher than dry ones, and consider selling a two-to-four-visit fall program instead of one big cleanup at the end of the season.
The rest of this guide walks one example job through the Job Profit Calculator, field by field, then changes one thing at a time: a second worker, a small yard, wet leaves, overtime, and a scheduled fall program. Every shop dollar figure below is an example number. Replace each one with your own before you quote anything.
Start with what one cleanup actually costs you
Most leaf cleanup pricing you'll find online answers the homeowner's question. Your question is different: what does it cost you to send a truck to this address, clear it, and get rid of what you picked up? That cost has five parts, and each one maps to a field in the calculator.
Labor is the time on the property multiplied by the people doing the work and their loaded hourly cost. Disposal is whatever you pay to get rid of the leaves, plus bags if you use them. Overhead is the share of your insurance, equipment wear, phone, software, and office time that each job has to carry. Travel is the drive to the property and back, including any detour to the yard-waste site. Then the calculator adds a tax allowance and your margin on top.
The example job used throughout is a suburban lot with lawn in front and back, two planting beds, and a line of mature trees along one side. The leaves are dry. A solo operator clears it with a backpack blower and a tarp, loads the truck, and hauls the load to a yard-waste site that charges a flat fee per pickup load. These are example inputs, chosen so you can follow one lot from start to finish.
Where each input comes from
Gather these before you open the calculator. For each one, there is a document that holds the real number and a fallback for when you don't have it yet.
- Estimated Hours comes from last season's job log. Look up the same property, or a similar one, and use the actual hours on site. If you don't keep a log, time your first three to five cleanups this fall from arrival to departure and write down the lot size, tree count, and whether the leaves were wet. That becomes next year's log. The example uses 3 hours.
- Hourly Labor Rate comes from your payroll report: gross wage plus employer payroll taxes, workers' comp, and any benefits, divided by paid hours. The burdened labor rate guide covers the full calculation. If you run solo and don't pay yourself a wage, use what you would have to pay a competent hire, including their burden. The example uses $40 an hour.
- Material Cost holds disposal and bags. The number comes from your dump tickets or yard-waste receipts. If the site charges by weight, average the last several tickets for similar lots. If you have no tickets yet, call the site and ask for their rate per load or per ton before you quote. The example uses a $30 flat load fee.
- Drive Time comes from your route sheet or the truck's GPS history. Count the round trip to the property plus the extra time to reach the dump and unload. If you have neither, map it and add a cushion for traffic and the wait at the scale house. The example uses 0.75 hours: half an hour of round trip and fifteen minutes for the dump detour.
- Fuel / Travel Cost comes from your fuel receipts. Divide a month of fuel spending by the miles driven in that month to get a cost per mile, then multiply by the miles for this job. Without receipts, use your truck's real-world mileage and the current pump price. The example uses $12.
- Overhead & Burden comes from your books: annual overhead divided by annual labor plus materials. The contractor overhead percentage guide shows how to calculate it. If you have never run the number, use the calculator's 15% default for now and fix it once you have a year of records. The example uses 15%.
- Desired Profit Margin is a percentage of the price, which is different from markup on cost. If that distinction is fuzzy, read markup vs margin before you pick a number. The example uses 20%.
Leave SE Tax (on costs) at 15.3% and set State Tax (on costs) to your own rate. The example keeps the default 5%. The calculator applies both to the cost subtotal as a pricing allowance, so the combined 20.3% shows up in every example below.
The solo cleanup, run through the calculator
Open the calculator, pick the Landscaper preset, and then overwrite every field. The preset loads 5 hours, 2 workers, $45 an hour, $100 of material at 20% markup, and a full hour of drive, which describes a different job entirely. Here are the example inputs and what the calculator returns.
A three-hour job with a haul should price well above a small front yard, and a national average blends tiny townhouse yards with big wooded lots. If your own numbers put a small yard far above the market average, though, look hard at your drive time and minimum before you assume the market is wrong.
Notice where the money goes. Labor is $120, but travel alone is $42, more than the dump fee and the overhead combined. On a leaf job the truck spends a surprising share of the day moving between the property, the next property, and the dump. The drive time guide covers whether to show that as a separate trip fee or fold it into the price. Either way, it has to be in the inputs.
Where disposal and bags belong
The calculator has one Material Cost field and no separate disposal line, so you have two reasonable choices. You can put the dump fee and bags into Material Cost, as the example does, or you can leave them out of the calculator and add disposal to the customer's quote as a pass-through line at cost. Both produce a correct price as long as you pick one and use it every time.
Putting disposal in Material Cost has one advantage that is easy to miss: overhead, the tax allowance, and your margin all get applied to it. Handling the load is real work. The truck carries the weight, you stand in line at the site, and you take the risk that the ticket comes in higher than you guessed. Running it through the calculator means the price covers that.
Showing disposal as its own line on the quote has a different advantage. When a customer compares your $322.55 to a competitor's lower number, a visible disposal line shows you are including something the other quote may leave out. Some shops do both: they run disposal through the calculator to set the total, then split the total into a labor line and a disposal line on the written quote. The customer sees the breakdown and you still get your full price.
Set Material Markup to 0% for dump fees unless you have a deliberate reason to mark them up. Overhead and margin already apply to that dollar. If you buy paper yard-waste bags, the same logic applies, and the bag count comes from your supply receipts divided by the bags used last season.
Curbside municipal pickup versus hauling it yourself
Where the town collects leaves at the curb, either loose in the gutter strip or in approved paper bags, your disposal cost can drop to zero or to the price of the bags. Your labor does not drop. Raking or blowing leaves to the curb, or filling and staging bags, often takes longer than tarping a pile into the truck. When you switch a property from hauling to curbside, cut Material Cost and Drive Time, then add time to Estimated Hours. Check the town's rules and collection dates before you promise curbside, because leaves put out on the wrong week can become the customer's problem and then yours.
Dump fees by weight or by load
A flat load fee is easy to price. You divide the fee by the number of jobs that fit in a load. If two small cleanups fill one truck, each carries half the fee. Weight-based fees are harder, because the same pile of leaves weighs noticeably more when it is wet. That difference comes back in the wet-leaf section below. For now, the rule is simple. Pull your scale tickets from last fall, group them by lot type, and use the average for that group in Material Cost.
Two people on the job means paying two people to ride
A second worker gets the same property clear faster, but they also sit in the truck on the way there and back. The calculator's Drive Time field bills drive hours once at the labor rate. That is correct for a solo operator. For a crew, you have to account for the second person's paid ride time yourself. The simplest way is to multiply the drive hours by the number of workers before you enter them.
For the example lot, assume two people finish in 1.75 hours instead of 3. Two people usually don't cut the time exactly in half, because one tarp still has to be dragged to one truck and some tasks don't split well. Your job log is the only real source for your crew's speed. Everything else stays the same except the doubled drive entry.
The crew price is $79.70 higher than the solo price for the same lot. Before tax and margin, the gap is $53.00: $30.00 for the second person's ride time, $20.00 because two people at 1.75 hours log 3.5 labor hours against the solo 3, and $3.00 of overhead on that extra labor. The tax allowance and margin carry that $53.00 up to $79.70. A crew earns its keep when the time saved lets the truck finish more properties in a day, or when the lot is big enough that one person would take all day. On a lot this size with a longish drive, the solo price is the stronger quote.
If you leave Drive Time at 0.75 hours for the crew, the calculator returns a lower number, and the gap between that number and $402.25 comes out of your pocket on every crew job. It is an easy error to make, because the field looks like it should already handle the crew.
Estimating hours when every lot is different
Hours drive everything else, and leaf jobs vary more from lot to lot than most landscape work. Four things move the number most.
Start with tree cover. A lot with one young maple and a lot under a stand of mature oaks can be the same size and produce very different volumes. When you walk a property for the quote, count the large trees on it and the ones overhanging it from next door. Last season's log will tell you how your hours tracked with tree count.
Open lawn clears fast with a blower or a mower with a bagger. Beds full of shrubs, groundcover, and mulch have to be cleared carefully so you don't blow the mulch out with the leaves, and hand work in beds can take as long as the whole lawn. Some shops quote beds as a separate line, which also gives the customer an easy way to trim the price if they want to do the beds themselves.
The equipment you bring changes the hours as well. A backpack blower is usually enough for small and mid-size residential lots. A walk-behind blower moves large open areas much faster. A truck-mounted leaf loader or vacuum can turn a long tarp-dragging job into a short one, but it costs money every day it exists. That cost belongs somewhere. If the machine runs on most jobs, fold its payment, maintenance, and depreciation into your Overhead & Burden percentage. If it only comes out on big jobs, divide its daily cost by the jobs it serves that day and add that share to Material Cost at 0% markup, the same way you would handle a rental.
Narrow gates, steep slopes, fenced yards where the tarp has to go through a side door, and long carries from the back lot to the curb all add time. None of these shows up on a satellite view, which is one more reason to walk a new property before you commit to a price.
Once you have a season of logs, you can build simple bands such as small, medium, and large, each with its own hours, and use them for quick quotes. Until then, use the actual hours from the jobs you have timed and round up.
Setting your leaf cleanup minimum charge
A minimum charge covers the fixed cost of showing up. The calculator has no minimum field, so derive it by running the smallest job you would realistically accept. For the example shop, that is a small front yard with 45 minutes of work, leaves blown to the curb for municipal pickup so there is no dump fee, and a half-hour round trip with no dump detour and $8 of fuel.
The calculator carries full precision and rounds only for display, so net profit shows $18.80 even though the rounded lines subtract to $18.79. Travel is almost as large as labor here, which is exactly why small jobs need a floor. For this example shop, a posted minimum of $95 covers the trip with a little room. That lands above the $80 minimum LawnStarter cites, and there is nothing wrong with that. Your minimum should come from your drive and your labor rate. If your number comes out far lower than that, check whether you left the drive time out.
Rerun the minimum whenever your service area changes. A minimum set for jobs ten minutes from the shop will not hold for a customer forty minutes out. Some shops publish one minimum for their core zone and a higher one beyond it.
The wet-leaf trap, and how to price for it
Dry leaves blow. Wet leaves mat down, stick to the lawn, clog the blower's path, and have to be raked or vacuumed. They also weigh more, which matters if your yard-waste site charges by weight. A cleanup you quoted in dry weather can take far longer, and cost far more to dump, if it slides into a rainy week or gets scheduled after the leaves have been sitting on the lawn for a while.
To see the effect, rerun the same solo lot with wet leaves. In this example the time goes from 3 hours to 4.25, and the dump fee goes from $30 to $55 because the site charges by weight. Both of those figures are examples. Your own wet-leaf ratio should come from comparing wet and dry jobs in your log and your scale tickets.
The wet version prices $129.70 higher, about 40% more than the dry quote. More important, the wet job's total cost of $361.80 is higher than the dry price of $322.55. If you quoted dry and did the work wet, you lost $39.25 on the job before paying yourself any profit at all.
Write the wet-leaf terms into the quote before the job is scheduled. One common approach is to quote the dry price and state a percentage surcharge for leaves that are wet or matted on the day of service, based on your own dry-to-wet ratio. Another is to quote a range with the wet price as the upper end. Either way, the customer agrees to it in writing before the rain does.
A surcharge is easier to defend when it is tied to something the customer can see. "Leaves wet or matted at time of service" is a condition both of you can check at the property. A vague "late-season fee" invites an argument.
Late-season overtime and the owner in the field
The last few weeks of leaf season tend to stack up. Customers often want the final cleanup at the same time, daylight is shorter, and crews end up working past 40 hours. Overtime raises your labor cost per hour, and the job's price needs to reflect that when the hours will actually be paid at time and a half.
Premium pay does not raise every part of your burden by the same amount, so the overtime rate you enter is usually less than 1.5 times your full loaded rate. The after-hours pricing guide walks through the split. The example below uses $55 an hour as an example overtime loaded rate for the same solo dry job. Because drive time is billed at the labor rate, the higher rate raises travel too.
You can decide which late-season customers pay the overtime price, as long as you know which jobs will land on overtime hours. Price those jobs at the overtime rate, or spread the expected overtime across the whole late-season list. If you expect roughly a quarter of your final-cleanup hours to be overtime, a blended rate that weights $40 and $55 that way is a fair input for all of them.
If you are the owner and you do the cleanups yourself, still enter a real labor rate. The calculator can't tell the difference between a wage you pay and a wage you skip, and a price built on $0 labor only looks profitable. When you eventually hire someone to take over the rakes, that price will not cover their paycheck.
One big cleanup or a scheduled fall program
A one-time cleanup waits until most of the leaves are down and clears them in a single visit. A fall program schedules two to four visits across the season, each one lighter. The program is harder to explain on a first call, but it changes the shop math in ways that often favor you.
Scheduled visits can be grouped by street or neighborhood, so the drive per visit drops. Each visit picks up less, so loads are lighter and the leaves are more often dry because they haven't been sitting. The calendar fills in advance, which makes it easier to plan crew hours and avoid a pile of overtime at the end of the season.
Here is a three-visit program for the same example lot. Each visit takes 1.5 hours solo. The dump fee is $15 per visit because the loads are lighter. Because visits are routed with neighboring properties, drive time is 0.25 hours and fuel is $5 per visit. The route share comes from dividing a day's drive and fuel by the stops on that day's route.
Now compare the season as a whole against the one-time alternative. A single late cleanup on this lot usually happens after the leaves have been down for weeks, so the more realistic comparison is the wet one-time price.
| Example option | Visits | Shop hours (on site plus drive) | Customer pays | Net profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-time, dry (if the weather cooperates) | 1 | 3.75 | $322.55 | $64.51 |
| One-time, wet (the likely late-season case) | 1 | 5.00 | $452.25 | $90.45 |
| Three-visit fall program | 3 | 5.25 | $456.76 | $91.35 |
For about the same money as one wet cleanup, the customer gets a clear yard all fall instead of a lawn buried for six weeks. For the shop, profit is about the same, but three things improve. The work is booked in advance. The wet-leaf risk mostly disappears, because each visit collects a light, fresher layer. And the visits sit on a dense route instead of requiring a dedicated trip. The program total is three times the per-visit price. On paper that is $456.75, and the calculator's unrounded cents make it $456.76.
The program is not automatically better. For a lot with little tree cover, one visit may be enough, and three visits would be overselling. For a far-flung customer who can't be routed with anyone else, the drive savings vanish and the per-visit price climbs. Run both options for the property in front of you before recommending one.
A program visit is also a natural place to sell other fall work while the truck is already there. If you winterize irrigation systems, you can quote the blowout on the same visit and save a separate mobilization. Price each service as its own calculator job so each one carries its own costs, then enter drive time only once across the two.
When a customer skips a scheduled visit
Put the skip policy in the program agreement before the first visit. If a customer cancels a visit with little notice, or you arrive and the gate is locked, you have spent the drive and some setup time. For the example shop, a routed trip with 15 minutes on site and no dump fee (0.25 hours, $0 material, 0.25 hours drive, $5 fuel) prices at a $39.85 trip fee in the calculator. Round it to a clean number and state it in writing.
The next visit also gets heavier, because it now has two visits' worth of leaves. Price it by what the lot actually needs. For the example lot, a catch-up visit at 2.75 hours with a $30 load fee, on the same route inputs, comes to $264.66 against the regular $152.25. A simple way to write this is that a skipped visit rolls into a catch-up visit billed at the catch-up rate. The customer then knows the skip does not save them the full visit price.
Weather delays
Rain, early snow, and wind storms will push visits around. Give each program visit a week-long window, and say in the agreement what happens when weather closes that window: the visit moves to the next open day on the route and is billed at the regular program rate. A delay can change four fields. Leaves that sit longer add Estimated Hours and, at a weight-based site, raise Material Cost. A visit that can't be moved to another route day loses its routed share of Drive Time and Fuel / Travel Cost, so rerun it with the full trip before you confirm the price. If a delay turns dry leaves into wet ones, the wet-leaf terms from your quote apply. If early snow ends the season before the final visit, decide in advance whether that visit is refunded, credited to spring cleanup, or delivered once the snow melts.
Sanity checks before the quote goes out
Run through these before you send a leaf quote, especially early in the season when you are still setting your bands.
- Divide the suggested charge by the total shop hours, on site plus drive. For the solo dry example, $322.55 over 3.75 hours is about $86 an hour. If that number is below your burdened labor rate, an input is missing.
- Check that Drive Time was multiplied by the number of workers on any crew job.
- Confirm the dump fee reflects wet weight if the site charges by weight and the job is late in the season.
- Compare the quote to your own minimum charge. Nothing should go out below it.
- Make sure the Material Markup field is at 0% if you put the dump fee there. A leftover 20% from the Landscaper preset quietly marks up the disposal.
Mistakes that quietly lower your price, and the fix for each
Mixing wet and dry jobs in the same log
If your job log averages every cleanup together, the dry jobs make your wet estimates too low and the wet jobs make your dry quotes too high. The error shows up in two fields: Estimated Hours, and Material Cost wherever the dump charges by weight. Tag each entry as wet or dry when you write it down, along with tree count and whether the leaves were hauled or left at the curb. Pull Estimated Hours and Material Cost only from matching entries.
Logging only the time spent blowing
Unloading equipment, laying tarps, loading the truck, tying down the load, and a final pass on the driveway all belong in Estimated Hours. A log that starts when the blower starts will undercount every job by the same amount, and the error repeats across the whole season. Record arrival to departure.
Discounting the program to close the sale
A season discount feels harmless, but it comes straight out of the margin. On the example program, a $30 discount on $456.76 takes net profit from $91.35 to $61.35, which drops the margin from 20% to about 14.4%. If you want to offer a discount, rerun the program with a lower Desired Profit Margin first and decide whether you can live with the result.
Carrying last season's rates into this one
Yard-waste sites change their fees, fuel moves, and wages go up. Before the first quote of the season, check the current dump rate and a recent fuel receipt, update your burdened labor rate from payroll, and rerun your minimum and your standard lot sizes. Do it again when the heavy drop begins if any of those have moved.
Frequently asked questions
How do I price leaf removal by the hour instead of by the job?
Run a typical job in the calculator, then divide its Suggested Charge to Customer by the job's on-site hours. That hourly figure carries drive, overhead, and margin with it, so it only holds for jobs with a similar drive. Bill disposal as a separate line at cost when you charge hourly, because the dump fee doesn't grow with the hours. Hourly billing protects you on slow, wet days, but it leaves the customer guessing at the leaf removal cost, and some customers would rather see a fixed number. A fixed price with a stated hour cap, billed hourly past the cap, splits that risk.
How should fall cleanup pricing differ from a single leaf job?
A full fall cleanup often adds bed cutbacks, gutter clearing, or a final mow, and each added task needs its own hours in the calculator. Gutter work usually means a ladder, so check that your insurance covers it before you add it to the menu, and consider raising Overhead & Burden for jobs that include it if your premium does go up.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice. All shop dollar figures and examples are example numbers for illustration; they do not represent typical prices, rates, or costs in any market. Check local yard-waste and curbside collection rules before quoting disposal. Consult qualified professionals for advice specific to your business and jurisdiction.
