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Landscapers get shopped on a published $0.55 a square foot installed Facebook special. That number cannot see the grass or the dirt. Two thousand square feet of tall fescue on ready soil you pick up at the farm is a different job from eight thousand square feet of zoysia on clay that needs the existing lawn stripped, hauled off, tilled, graded, and watered three times.
Open the free sod bid calculatorFarms sell sod by the pallet. A pallet is commonly 400, 450, or 500 square feet depending on the farm and the cut. You do not buy 4.6 pallets. You buy five. Waste on curves and edges is applied to the lawn first; the leftover coverage on the last pallet is paid for even if it is not laid. That leftover is how a “2,000 foot” special quietly becomes 2,250 feet of farm invoice.
Ready soil is a site walk. Till-and-grade is a crew morning. Strip-and-haul is dump tickets plus roughly twice the dirt hours of a till. Matching a ready-soil fescue special on a strip-and-haul zoysia lawn is how a sold yard becomes a two-day loss after the first dump ticket.
Fescue is lighter and lays faster. Bermuda sits in the middle. Zoysia costs more at the farm and lays slower because the pads are thicker. The calculator prices the same lawn three ways so you can see which grass still keeps the margin when the homeowner asks you to “just match the other guy.”
Farm pickup is your trailer. Farm delivery is a truckload — leftover pallets still need the truck. Slope slows prep and install, not the drive. Extra watering visits are their own trips; they are not hiding inside the per-foot special.
Load the wage with payroll burden. Add overhead as a share of direct cost. Then take margin as a share of the customer’s price, not a markup on cost. The walk-away number is total cost. A proposed price under that number loses money before you take anything out of it.
This page is a walkthrough of the arithmetic in the sod installation bid calculator. It is not a landscape specification, a soil test, or a price you should copy onto a contract.
Charge from whole pallets after waste, plus soil prep, delivery, slope, and watering — not a published per-square-foot special. A 2,000 sq ft fescue pickup on ready soil is a different job from 8,000 sq ft of zoysia that needs the existing lawn stripped and hauled off.
Pallets are sold whole. Multiply lawn square feet by one plus the waste percent, then divide by the farm's pallet coverage (often 400 to 500 sq ft) and round up. Leftover coverage is paid for even if it is not laid.
Zoysia costs more per square foot at the farm and lays slower because the pads are thicker and heavier. The same lawn in zoysia also often wants more watering visits after install.
Yes. Ready soil is a site walk. Till-and-grade is a crew morning. Strip-and-haul adds dump tickets and roughly twice the dirt hours of a till. Those hours do not live in a per-foot special.