Cleaning and lawn mowing price calculator for NZ: cost the visit, set the margin, price the annual contract.
Hours, people, pay and on-costs, travel time and kilometres, products, equipment and overhead in; the cost of the visit, the price at your margin (excl and incl GST), the profit and the effective hourly charge out. Then pick a visit frequency and a contract discount to price the year, with the margin that is left after the discount. Runs on the page; the Excel download has the same formulas. Free, no email required.
How do you price a cleaning or lawn mowing job in NZ?
Cost the visit before you price it. Labour is the hours on site times the people, at pay plus on-costs (holiday pay 8%, KiwiSaver 3.5%, ACC levies and sick leave add roughly 15% to a wage, and the adult minimum wage is $23.95 from 1 April 2026). Travel is paid time too, so cost the minutes between jobs the same way, and add the kilometres at a real per-km vehicle cost. Add products, equipment wear and a share of overhead per labour hour. Then set the price from the margin you want on the price, not a markup on cost: a 30% margin is a 42.9% markup. For a regular contract, multiply the per-visit price by visits a year, decide what discount a year’s commitment is worth, and check the margin that is left. Across 12,570 publicly posted reviews of NZ cleaning, garden and pest control businesses, repeat-use language appears in 36.8 to 43.5% of positive reviews, so these are long relationships, and quote accuracy is praised in only 3.0 to 10.6%. A price that has to hold for a year has to be built from cost.
One visit, costed properly. Then the whole year.
Your numbers
The job
Annual contract
What it works out to
Runs in your browser; nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. The Excel download carries the same formulas, so the two always agree.
The job this document is doing.
- —The lawn was priced at $45 because that is what the customer used to pay, and the round trip is 40 minutes
- —Two cleaners for three hours were costed at wages only; the holiday pay and KiwiSaver came out of the owner’s margin
- —A 10% discount was offered for a fortnightly contract on a job that only had a 12% margin to begin with
- —The vehicle was treated as free because it was already owned, until the tyres and the service bill arrived in the same month
Open it and use it today.
- 01Job price: hours, people, hourly pay and on-costs, travel minutes, kilometres and per-km cost, products, equipment and overhead per labour hour, and the margin you want
- 02The cost of the visit by component, the price excl and incl GST, profit per job and the effective charge per labour hour
- 03Annual contract: visits a year (weekly to quarterly), contract discount, per-visit price after discount, annual value, monthly instalment and the margin left, with a warning when it runs thin
- 04Excel workbook with the same two sheets and formulas, shaded inputs, and a how-to sheet
- 05Nothing you type is sent anywhere; the calculator runs in your browser
Free to use and adapt for your own business. Pay figures are examples: the adult minimum wage is $23.95 an hour from 1 April 2026 (employment.govt.nz, checked 9 October 2026), and on-costs vary by business.
Why this document, and not another one.
| Category | Repeat-use language (positive reviews) | Quote accuracy praised | Transparent pricing praised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning services | 41.8% | 4.2% | 17.2% |
| Garden and outdoor | 43.5% | 10.6% | 25.3% |
| Pest control | 36.8% | 3.0% | 13.2% |
Share of positive reviews (80 or more out of 100) mentioning each trait, from 12,570 publicly posted reviews of 186 NZ cleaning, garden and outdoor, and pest control businesses, collected August 2026. Value is the lowest-scoring of the four rated dimensions for cleaning services at 96.7 out of 100. Negative reviews score under 50 on any dimension; the cleaning negative sample is small (55 reviews), so its figures are rounded and reported as rank order. Full corpus, method and thresholds: the property maintenance methodology page. Full findings: the property maintenance research study.
Use it alongside
Property maintenance service agreement template and checklist
Twelve plain-English clauses covering services, price, access, scope changes, cancellations, re-dos, insurance, ending and disputes, plus a before-you-sign checklist.
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