The lawn
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with your farm ticket and a crew you have timed. Changing grass, prep, or delivery fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and farm rates
These start from the grass, prep, and delivery you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a farm catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a per-foot special that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Lawn area
- Ordered after waste
- Pallets to buy
- Paid coverage
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Sod (whole pallets)
- Prep, watering, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per sq ft
- Price per pallet
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
A bid link carries your own rates — wage, burden, overhead, and target margin — so the page reopens exactly as you left it. Send it to yourself or your crew. The numbers ride after the #, which is never sent to a server, so copying a link uploads nothing. The customer should get the price, not the link.
Same lawn, three grasses
| Grass | Hours | Price |
|---|
Where the hours go
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. The starting hours and farm rates are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a guarantee — time your own crews and replace them.
Hand the customer a proposal
The price above is for you. This is the page you print or save as a PDF and give to the customer — your details, their details, the scope, the deposit split, and a line for them to sign. Your business details are saved on this device so you only type them once; the customer’s details are never saved.
Everything on the printed page is text you typed or a number this calculator worked out. It contains no warranty, lien, or cancellation wording — those depend on your jurisdiction and your contract, and this tool is not the place to invent them.
Common questions
Why am I paying for 2,250 square feet when the yard is 2,000?
Because sod is bought by the pallet and pallets do not split. The default 50 × 40 ft lawn is 2,000 sq ft; the 5% waste allowance for cuts and edges brings the requirement to 2,100; and at 450 sq ft per pallet that is 5 pallets, which is 2,250 sq ft paid for and 150 sq ft of leftover. The estimate rounds up because the supplier does. Pricing off the bare 2,000 loses you most of a pallet on every job.
Why doesn’t the waste allowance just add 5% to the price?
Because it changes the requirement before rounding, and rounding is what actually costs money. Going from 5% to 10% waste on the defaults takes the requirement from 2,100 to 2,200 sq ft — still 5 pallets, so the price does not move at all. Somewhere past 2,250 it becomes a sixth pallet and the price jumps in one step. Sod cost is a staircase, not a slope.
Why is labor only $174 on an $1,860 job?
Because laying sod is fast and the sod is expensive: 6.17 hours at a $28.16 loaded rate against $1,012.50 of sod. It also means the defaults assume the ground is ready. Grading, tilling, killing off existing turf, and hauling away the old lawn are separate prep options, all set to none by default — and on a real re-sod they are usually the larger half of the day.
Does the price include watering the new lawn in?
Not by default. Watering visits are an option and start at zero. It is worth pricing deliberately rather than absorbing: new sod needs consistent water for its first two to three weeks, and if you are the one warranting establishment, those visits are your cost. If the homeowner is responsible, say so in writing — sod that dries out in week one is the most common warranty argument in this trade.