Pricing a Yard

The market anchors

Anchor your rates to what the market already pays, then adjust for your route density, never for your nerves. The published anchors:

• Weekly single-dog yard: $18-25 (Central Texas operator, published rates)
• Bi-weekly single-dog yard: $25-35 per visit (same operator; more per visit because two weeks of accumulation takes longer to clear)
• Survey reports of $15-20 a weekly visit (r/sidehustle); twenty works as a planning midpoint
• One-time cleanups at $40-75, set by yard size and dog count; spring total-yard cleanups after a snowy winter run $60-100, both reported in that same survey thread
• Historical floor for calibration: a business book from the genre's earlier era cited a Colorado service at $9.90 per dog per week, and rates have roughly doubled since, which tells you the market drifts up, not down, over time

Build from those with the two adjustments clients accept without blinking: a per-dog surcharge, typically $5-10 a month per additional dog, and a frequency discount, weekly priced below bi-weekly per visit because a maintained yard is a fast yard.

| Service | Base rate | Notes | |---|---|---| | Weekly, 1 dog, standard yard | $18-25/wk | The subscription you actually want | | Weekly, each additional dog | +$5-10/mo | Charge it; two dogs is not twice the waste but it is more | | Bi-weekly, 1 dog | $25-35/visit | Accumulation premium | | One-time cleanup | $40-75 | Spring cleanups run $60-100; first-clean engine, see below | | First cleanup for new subscription | Same as the one-time rate, or free-with-annual | Recovers the backlog before weekly pace |

The first-clean premium

A yard that has been uncollected for months is not a weekly yard. It is a restoration job holding months of material, and pricing it at the weekly rate is how new operators donate their backs. The standard structure: quote the one-time cleanup at its own price, complete it, then convert the now-maintained yard to the weekly subscription at the normal rate. For the quote itself, an operator three months into the trade bills one-time cleanups at $40-75 depending on yard size and dog count, and where winter buries the yard from December to thaw, total-yard spring pickups bill $60-100. The one-time clean is the funnel head; the conversion step is where the business actually starts.

The per-hour test

Whatever you quote, run it against time. Price per labor hour is the honest floor for a route business: pick the weekly rate, estimate the minutes on that yard, and divide. A $20 yard you can do in 12 minutes is a $100-an-hour yard on paper. Add drive time and the true number lands lower, which is why route density matters so much: a dense route turns the same $20 into a much better hourly rate than a scattered one. If a quote works out below $40-50 per hour of yard time on a well-built route, the yard is underpriced or too far away. Either fix the price or decline the job.

Commercial work prices on this same test at higher targets, $60-100 per labor hour, and gets its own treatment later in the course.

Raising prices later

You will underprice something in your first month. Everyone does. The repair is a standard annual increase, five to eight percent, announced by text or email two weeks before it hits the invoice, framed on the service rather than your costs: same yard, same day, new rate as of the 1st. Grandfather your first ten clients for an extra few months if you want the goodwill; the relationship is worth more than the delta. What you cannot do is silently eat a fuel increase for a year and resent your own route.

Pricing is set. The thing that determines whether those prices are good hourly rates or bad ones is not on the price sheet at all, it is the order of the stops.