While pursuing the career of your dreams can be a pleasant thought, it can often produce disappointing results, with industries providing far less pay than you would expect. When getting into a career, it’s always best to research the average pay beforehand so that you can know what to expect and negotiate fair pay for yourself. Landscape designing is no exception to this, and future landscape designers would do well to know how much they could be making!
On average, a landscape designer will make around $57,000 per year. Somebody who just got started as a landscape designer may make $48,000 per year, while professionals at top landscape companies such as Four Seasons Lawn Care may make upwards of $93,000 per year. As with most positions, the pay of a landscape designer can vary depending on several factors such as skills, experience, education, employer, and more, so it would be unrealistic to jump straight into an almost six-figure salary at Four Seasons Lawn Care early into your career.
The job market can be a volatile thing, with different employers offering wildly varying salaries for similar jobs. If you want to own your own business, you can thankfully set your salary; the only limit is how much money you can bring into your business! If you would like more information on what factors can dictate your future salary, read forward. There are a good few factors, but they are all relatively simple!
Experience
Except for the most simple starter jobs, like the ones you and your friends may have taken on in high school, most jobs will primarily search for experienced employees. If you have prior experience in the landscape design industry, you will be able to get a higher salary than a newcomer.
One fun aspect of the experience is that you don’t have to have experience in the same position as whatever job you are applying for! As long as you have experience in a remotely-related aspect of the landscaping field, you will be a strong competitor for a landscape designer position and therefore be able to negotiate a higher salary.
While being an accountant at a landscaping company may not make you a shoo-in for a landscape design position, or at the very least may net you a lower starting salary than your peers, a manual labor position such as a landscaper can net you a very high salary in a landscape design position. That is, of course, as long as you have enough experience!
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Education
As time goes on, a college degree seems to become less and less important to the job hunt. While it certainly is important and definitely will allow you to get a higher starting salary, an increasing amount of people are entering the workforce without a college degree!
This can work to your advantage, however. Getting a college degree, especially in a landscaping-related field such as botany, can help set you apart from your competitors in a major way! If you stand head-and-shoulders above your competitors, you will be offered a higher starting salary by any company that values quality. For this reason, a college degree is a great way to stand out among your peers!
Employer
As with many other things, your pay will always be dictated by your employer. If you own your own landscaping company or are a freelancing landscape designer, you may be in luck! Your salary can be as high as you want it to be, with the only limiting factors being necessary business costs and how much business your company can bring in. If you run a particularly successful landscaping business, you could easily be bringing in a six-figure salary every year. However, this would likely be from more administrative work than landscape designing!
If you work for a landscape company that you don’t own, your salary is dictated by your employers. You, of course, have a say in this; if you have all of the other factors down pat, you can easily negotiate with the most reasonable employers. However, some companies can be run by unsavory people; you would do your best to search for a company that treats its employees well. A kinder boss often means a higher salary!
Skills
Skills are quite possibly the most important aspect of any job, even more so than anything else on this list. If you don’t have the necessary skills, you either will not get hired in the first place or your landscaping company will not get much business!
Skills often go hand-in-hand with experience, as the more you work in a certain field, the more you adapt to it. However, you can gain skills in landscape design outside of direct fieldwork- working in similar fields can easily translate over
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Location
People in the real estate business like to spout the phrase “Location, location, location!” This phrase means that two houses of the same build, with the same materials, will cost wildly different prices depending on where they are located. When thinking about the job market, this phrase is remarkably applicable- especially in terms of landscape design.
Certain locations will have a greater need for landscape designers than others. For example, places in sandy deserts or frozen tundras will not often have residents clamoring for well-designed landscapes- not much can grow in these places anyway! However, locations in lush, well-populated areas will have a higher demand for landscape designers. While a higher demand may lead to more people being landscape designers, which may drive prices down due to competition, a well-established and highly-skilled landscape designer can raise their prices. Of course, this is assuming their work can speak for itself- and it should, especially when you’re dealing with other people’s homes or places of work!
On average, the American states and locations where landscape designers can make the most money are California, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York, which all average in the $80,000 range annually. However, one location cracks a six-figure salary; in the District of Columbia, landscape designers can make over 100,000 dollars per year!
In most states, a career in landscape design will keep you well above the poverty line. There are very few areas recorded where a landscape designing career averages under $40,000, though there are quite a few states where landscape designers may earn almost half of what their colleagues make in a different state.
Of all the states that are financially inopportune for landscape designers, Louisiana takes the cake, with some reports putting the lower end of Louisiana’s average landscape designer salary at $27,000 per year. This low amount is a massive difference from other states and almost one-quarter of what a landscape designer can make in the District of Columbia.
Other states that are not financially optimal for landscape designers include Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nebraska. You may notice that all of these places have one thing in common- they are all very flat, plains-filled regions that are barren in most interesting forms of plants. Because of the inherent features of these regions, the demand for landscape designers is low- frankly, there isn’t much a landscape designer could do here! With a low demand, it makes sense that a landscape designer could make so much less money in these areas.
In Conclusion
Ultimately, there are a lot of different aspects factoring into how much you could make as a landscape designer. Thankfully, landscape salaries across the board are not bad- however, in some circumstances, you could make less than thirty thousand dollars per year!
To recap everything quickly and easily, the major factors in how high your salary can be as a landscape designer are your experience in the field, your level of education, the profit margins and employee-friendliness of your employer, and your skills. At least, these are the ones you can help- unless you want to move for your career, location is a factor you can’t do much about!
However, landscape designers are often well-paid, regardless of location. As long as you are a presentable and determined employee, you can make a healthy amount of money in the landscape design field in no time!
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Frequently Asked Questions
If an education is important for a higher salary, does it matter where I went to college for a degree in landscape design?
In most cases, no, it does not matter! While certain colleges are better for landscape designs, most employers will look to see if you went to college at all. While having a related degree is your best shot, some employers will hire you even with a degree in marine biology!
How much does negotiation factor into my salary as a landscape designer?
Your ability to negotiate is a huge factor in how much you will get paid in any job, regardless of the field. If you are particularly charismatic, you can talk yourself up to a higher starting pay, though this is made significantly easier if you have the skills and experience to back it up.
To learn more on how you can start your own landscaping business, check out my startup documents here.
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Meet Shawn Chun: Entrepreneur and Landscape Business Fan.
I’m a happy individual who happens to be an entrepreneur. I have owned several types of businesses in my life from a coffee shop to an import and export business to an online review business plus a few more and now I create online resources for those interested in starting new ventures. It’s demanding work but I love it. I do it for those passionate about their business and their goals. That’s why when I meet a landscape business owner at a job site, driving down the road or anywhere else I see myself. I know how hard the struggle is to retain clients, find good employees and keep the business growing all while trying to stay competitive.
That’s why I created Landscaping Business Boss: I want to help landscape business owners like you build a thriving business that brings you endless joy and supports your ideal lifestyle.