Duranta
featured image

Jul 21, 2025

What are production rates and how you should use them

Production rates are the key to running a profitable business

Share This Article

For a landscaper or lawn care professional, whether you are selling a maintenance contract, spraying lawns or pricing a patio, the pricing of your services comes down to the cost of time and materials. Pricing materials is fairly straight forward: you look at how much it costs to buy something, you figure out how much of the material you need then you add a margin. Pricing your time comes down to two factors:

  1. How much money you want to make per hour (or per day)
  2. How long it takes to perform your service

Pricing your landscaping service boils down to the cost of time and materials

Production rates convert work into time

We trust you can figure out how much money you want to make per hour. Figuring out how long it takes to you perform a task is a little trickier, and that is where production rates come in. To get your production rate, divide the work you want to do, by how long it takes to do it. For example, if it takes you 1.5 hours to 20,000 sq feet using a 21” mower, then your production rate is 13,333 sq ft/hr. If you can lay 1 ton per hour of base for a driveway, then your production rate is 1 ton per hour.

Production rate = work / time to do the work

How to use production rates to price a complex job

If your job has materials, you need to include both your production rate (that is the cost of your time) and the cost of your materials in your final price. The trick is figuring out exactly how much material you need for your job. Duranta helps with that - we automatically convert the area that you are working on, into both the time you need to service it, AND the materials you need to do the job.

Price = time * production rate + cost of materials

blog content image

How AI can help with pricing jobs

AI helps you create estimates by automatically calculating your service area, applying your production rates and calculating the amount of materials needed. Let us take the example of pricing out lawn fertilization and pest control estimate:

  1. AIdan creates a map of the property with area and perimeter measurements of the lawn, building and more.
  2. You choose what areas you want to service: for example lawns and building perimeter.
  3. Duranta calculates how much material you need, and uses your production rate to estimate the hours the job will take.
  4. You get a beautiful proposal that you can send to a customer!
blog content image

So if you haven’t already, start thinking in production rates. It’s one of the simplest ways to turn landscaping from chaos into a smooth, predictable business. You can learn how to add production rates to your account here: