You paid more for a sandwich this year, more at Home Depot, and your truck insurance renewal was higher in January...
You didn't call anyone about it; you didn't complain; you just paid the bill and went back to work.
So here's the question I want to open with...
How long have you been sitting on a price increase you know you need, because you don't want to have a twenty-second conversation with a customer who's going to read your letter, say, "okay", and go right back to what they were doing?
I recorded a whole episode of The Landscaping Podcast on this, and I want to lay out the numbers here too, because I think a lot of owners in this industry are bleeding money on something that takes about a week to fix.
Your costs moved, and here's how much.
Let's start with what's happened, because this is not a feeling.
As of early July 2026, on-highway diesel averaged $4.57 per gallon nationally. That's 84 cents higher than the same week last year.
Regular gas was $3.78, up about 65 cents from a year ago. That's straight from the EIA weekly fuel update, and you can pull it yourself any Monday.
Run that across a fleet.
If you're burning 400 gallons of diesel a week across your trucks and equipment, an 84-cent increase is $336 a week. Over a 40-week season, that's better than thirteen thousand dollars you did not budget for and did not bill for.
And fuel is the easy one to see; labor is worse, and it's bigger.
Labor runs somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of revenue for most landscape companies, and the number that gets people is labor burden. Payroll taxes alone are 7.65%, and once you stack workers' comp, unemployment insurance, benefits, paid time off, and training time, the burden typically adds 20%-35% on top of the wage.
A guy you're paying $20 an hour is costing you $24 to $27 before he touches a mower.
If you're estimating off the wage instead of the burdened rate, you are losing money on every hour you sell, and you will never figure out why.
The math that should bother you
Here's the part I slow down on when I talk about this.
- Take a $1,000 job.
- Say your labor and burden on it is $450.
- Materials, fuel, and equipment run $250.
- Overhead is $200.
- That leaves you with $100 in net profit, which is 10%, and 10% is respectable in this industry.
- Now let costs climb 15% in that materials, fuel, and equipment bucket.
- Given where diesel is, that is not an aggressive assumption; your $250 becomes $287.50.
- Your $100 of profit just became $62.50.
You didn't lose a customer, you didn't bid anything wrong, your crews performed the same as last year, and yet you just lost 37% of your profit.
Now the other direction: To get back to that $100, you need to raise your price by about 3.5%.
Three and a half percent, that's the conversation you've been avoiding, and not having it is costing 37% of what you make.
Now scale it.
Two million in revenue at 10% net is $200,000 in profit.
Lose thirty-seven percent of that, and you're out $75,000.
That's a truck, a crew leader's salary and benefits, the mower fleet you keep telling yourself you'll replace next year...
LANDSCAPING CAN BE A PROFITABLE CAREER
The data says your customers aren't going anywhere
This is where most owners will push back, so let's use real industry numbers instead of my opinion.
Lawn & Landscape ran its annual benchmarking survey in early 2026, surveying 320 companies across the US and Canada. Two findings sit side by side and tell the whole story.
First, average customer retention across the industry went up, from 88% in 2024 to 89% in 2025. That's during a stretch when raising prices annually became standard practice across the green industry.
Second, the average net profit margin over that same period declined from 19% to 17%.
Read those together; customers stayed, margins fell anyway.
That means the churn everybody is terrified of did not show up in the data, and the cost of not pricing correctly did. Owners protected relationships that were never at risk and paid for it out of their own profit.
You are not unusual for raising prices...
You're unusual for not doing it; NFIB's June 2026 small business survey found that 38% of owners plan to raise their selling prices, the highest reading since January 2023, with another 32% planning to raise prices in the next three months. The long-run historical average for that measure is around 13%.
Why it feels personal when it isn't
The math is easy; it's this part that isn't.
Pretending people don't matter goes against everything we preach when we say, "Landscaping is a people business." It's a message that dates back to Episode #2 of the Landscaping Podcast.
When a national company raises prices, it's a decision made in a conference room by somebody who has never met the customer, so nobody feels weird about it.
When you raise prices, you're doing it to a person whose dog knows your truck, whose kid's graduation party you cleaned the yard up for, who comes out with a bottle of water in July and asks about your family.
That closeness is the best thing about running a small business; it's also the reason owners absorb cost increases for years that a corporation wouldn't absorb for a single quarter.
But think about who's on the other end of that...
Those neighbors bought groceries this week, their own employer raised prices this year, their homeowners insurance renewed at a higher rate, their internet went up, and their kid's daycare went up. They are not shocked; some of them will be surprised that it took you this long.
The awkwardness lives entirely on your side of that conversation.
Your customer will read the letter you write to inform them, think about it for ten seconds, and move on. You're the only one still thinking about it a week later.
Holding your price is not generosity
There's an idea floating around that keeping your rate flat is taking care of your customer. I don't think it holds up.
If you're underpriced, you can't replace equipment on schedule, so machines get older and jobs take longer. You can't pay competitively, so you lose your best people to the company down the road that can. Quality drops, response time slips, your customer starts to notice that the property doesn't look the way it used to...
And then you lose them anyway, except now you're broke too.
FOLLOW LANDSCAPING UNLIMITED ON INSTAGRAM
You're not doing anybody a favor by charging less than it costs to do the job right; you're just building a slower version of the same failure.
What to track before you touch a single price
You cannot walk into this on a feeling; confidence in the price increase conversation comes from knowing your number. Review them quarterly, not annually, because an annual review means you eat eleven months of a cost increase before you find it.
- Fully burdened cost per man-hour. Wage plus payroll tax, workers' comp, healthcare, PTO, and the hours you pay for that aren't billable. Drive time, shop time, loading the trailer, the morning meeting.
- Fuel by crew, by week. It never shows up as one big bill you'd notice. It shows up as small transactions that all look normal.
- Equipment cost per hour. Purchase price over the life of the machine, plus blades, belts, filters, tires, and downtime. A mower waiting on a part costs you twice, once for the machine and once for the crew that can't produce.
- Materials. Pull last year's invoices and this year's and set them side by side. Not what you think it costs. What you actually paid.
- Insurance renewals. General liability, commercial auto, and workers' comp, and watch your experience mod, because that moves your labor cost across the whole company overnight.
- Overhead per billable hour. Shop, office, software, phones, admin payroll, truck notes. All of it, divided by the hours you can actually bill.
And your P&L alone isn't enough, because it only tells you the company made money. Job costing tells you which accounts made it and which ones took it away. You need the second one, because you should not be raising every account the same amount.
How to send it
The mechanics matter more than the wording.
Put it in writing, not a text, and not something you mention at the truck while you're loading up. Give thirty to sixty days' notice before the season starts; never do this in the middle of it. Send it to everybody at the same time, because nothing sinks a price increase faster than a customer finding out their neighbor got a different number.
Keep it to four sentences:
Starting March 1, your monthly maintenance rate will be $X. Costs across fuel, equipment, and labor have risen over the past year, and this adjustment lets us keep the service and crew quality you expect. Everything about your service stays the same. We appreciate your business and look forward to another season, and if you have questions, call me directly.
Now here's what to leave out, because this is where most people blow it...
Don't apologize.
The second you say you're sorry, you've told them there's something to be sorry about, and you've opened a negotiation you didn't intend to open. Don't say you hope they understand, because that's asking permission and you're not asking; you're informing. And don't attach your problems. One sentence of context is plenty, your customer doesn't want to see your P&L; they want the number and the date.
Three responses you'll get:
"The guy down the road is cheaper." He is. He may also be uninsured and unlicensed, and there's a fair chance he's gone by August. Say that professionally. If you carry real credentials, name them. We hold both an NC General Contractor license and an NC Landscape Contractor license, and that's a real difference in what we can legally build and what happens if something goes wrong on a property.
"Can you hold my price one more year?" No. If you grandfather one, you'll grandfather twelve, and you'll be back here next year with a bigger correction and less nerve.
Nothing at all. This is the most common by far. Silence is not anger; silence is acceptance. Don't go chasing people to make sure they're okay with it.
Small and regular beats big and rare
The last thing, and it's the one that changes how people think about this.
Skip your increase three years running, and you don't need three and a half percent anymore; you need twelve, maybe fifteen. And a 15% increase is the one that actually loses accounts because it triggers three competing quotes.
The business owners who lose customers over price increases are almost never the ones who adjust every year. They're the ones who waited four years and then had to correct all at once. Three percent a year is invisible; nobody (very few) cancels over three percent, most won't even mention it.
Companies don't die from raising their prices; they die because they were too afraid to.
Key takeaways
- Diesel is running about 84 cents a gallon above last year. If your pricing hasn't moved, you absorbed that.
- A 15% jump in materials, fuel, and equipment costs can erase 37% of your net profit on a job you bid perfectly. The correction is under 4%.
- Industry retention rose to 89% while average net margins fell from 19 to 17%. Customers stayed, the profit didn't.
- Track six numbers quarterly, and use job costing, not your P&L, to decide which accounts get what.
- Give 30 to 60 days' written notice before the season to everyone at once. Four sentences, no apology.
- Annual increases of 3% are invisible. The 15% correction after five years of waiting is what causes customers to leave.
Want the full breakdown? I walk through all of this in detail on The Landscaping Podcast
Listen to the episode here or find The Landscaping Podcast wherever you get your shows.
Zac Small is COO and Media Director of Landscaping Unlimited, Inc. in Washington, North Carolina, and co-hosts The Landscaping Podcast with owner Shay Brickhouse. Landscaping Unlimited holds both a NC General Contractor license and a NC Landscape Contractor license.