Garden Landscaping Cost Calculator

How Garden Landscaping Cost Calculator Works

Select the elements of your project—patio, lawn, decking, fencing, and so on—enter the sizes, and the calculator combines current supply and fit rates into a comprehensive project estimate with a realistic range.

Professionally landscaped gardens in the UK currently cost roughly £80 to £250 per square metre depending on the mix of hard and soft landscaping, with a typical 50 m² garden makeover landing between £6,000 and £12,000. London and the South East run 20% to 30% above the national average, while the North and rural areas often come in 10% to 20% below. If you are laying gravel borders or pathways, you can calculate the aggregate requirements using our Gravel Calculator.

What Each Element Costs in 2026

Current supply and fit rates for common garden landscaping components:

• Patio, concrete slabs: £90 to £140 per m²
• Patio, natural sandstone: £120 to £180 per m²
• Patio, porcelain: £140 to £220 per m² (the premium is driven by wet bed installation)
• Real turf including ground preparation: £15 to £30 per m²
• Artificial grass: £35 to £130 per m² with sub-base
• Timber decking: £60 to £96 per m²
• Composite decking: £120 to £180 per m²
• Closeboard fencing: £60 to £96 per linear metre
• Garden levelling: £20 to £120 per m² depending on soil movement

Labour underneath it all runs £350 to £500 a day for a two-person landscaping team. Skips, at £250 to £380 for an 8-yard container, disappear surprisingly fast once excavation starts because dug soil bulks up by around 30 percent.

The Costs Hiding Below Ground

Groundworks absorb 30% to 50% of a typical landscaping budget, which is why quotes that skip detail end up growing. A proper patio sits on 100mm of compacted MOT Type 1 over a geotextile membrane, which means 150 to 250mm of excavation and disposal before a single slab is laid.

Lawns fail from below too: turf laid straight onto compacted clay thins and dies within a couple of years, so the £2 to £5 per m² for rotovating, levelling, and topsoil is the cheapest insurance in the whole project. Access is another silent multiplier: a garden with no side or rear access means every tonne of spoil and materials travels through the house by wheelbarrow, adding 15% to 25% to labour costs.

Getting More Garden for the Budget

Several honest levers cut costs without cutting quality. Phasing spreads spend: do the hard landscaping and drainage in year one, and the planting and finishing in year two, since the groundwork is the part that cannot be done in stages later.

Booking between October and March finds landscapers quieter and often cheaper, and autumn is genuinely good weather for hard landscaping. Doing the soft landscaping yourself (planting, turfing, and mulching) trims 15% to 25% off a mid-range project. Material substitutions also work: good concrete slabs, sealed well, achieve most of the sandstone look for 30% to 40% less.

Rules and a Worked Example

Most garden landscaping is permitted development, with three exceptions worth knowing: impermeable front garden paving over 5 m² needs drainage within the boundary, walls and fences are capped at 2 metres (1 metre by a highway), and conservation areas carry their own rules. You can calculate matching fencing costs with our Fence Panel Calculator.

A typical 80 m² rear garden refresh:

• Clearance and skip: £450
• 25 m² sandstone patio: £3,000
• 45 m² of turf with preparation: £900
• 20 metres of closeboard fencing: £1,500
• Planting and borders: £800
• Labour & Waste: Two-person team across six days.
• Total: Sitting in the £8,000 to £10,000 band, exactly where national benchmarks say a mid-range project of this size should.