Landscaping quote - is £200 a day the going rate?

[PearlHeart3]

Hi all, I just received a quote for some work to be done on my front and back garden. It's a very detailed quote and I've used them before, so I'm happy with their standard of work. However I've calculated the cost of labour vs materials, and just over half of the quote is for labour.

To give you an idea, the total quote is approx. £6300 and the labour costs come to approx. £3600 - so that's over 50% just on labour. It works out to be about £200 per day (over 6 days) per contractor (there will be 3 of them).

I'm in Cambridgeshire region if it helps.

The question is, is that a reasonable day rate?

Thats all heavy manual labour, and you already know they'll do a full days work. Would you do it for less?

@Dozycuntlaters

I honestly can't believe some people are so against finding out about how much a person's day rate is

Why? When you go to the hairdressers for say a colour, do you ask how much the materials are costing and how much is for her time? No of course you don't, you accept the price or not. Same goes for this. He's given you the quote for the whole job which you either accept or not. If you want someone on a daily rate then that's different, get the materials and everything else yourself and then just pay the labour.

Yes except you wouldn't spend thousands of pounds on your haircut, so it's not really comparable.

Perfectly reasonable - it isn't day rate as such, it's a price for the overall service you are receiving. He's taken the time to quote, work out which materials will be needed and when, plus overall management of the job and if anything happens (ie it rains/there is unexpected hard ground which is harder to excavate) and it takes longer than anticipated he'll have to take the hit on profit. If he wanted to earn £150 day rate he could go and be employed by a company, turn up and be told what to do by someone else and have none of those stresses.

OP it sounds good to me. We had landscaping done a couple of years ago, it was a much bigger job than yours so was even more expensive. What neither we nor the landscapers knew was that there were foundations for old greenhouses across our garden, so they needed an extra day and additional wagons for the debris removal. I felt really bad for them as it was that heatwave in 2018 and it was stinking hot, not the sort of day you would want to discover a whole load of extra work you hadn't accounted for! I wanted wooden structures putting in and a lot of paving and they will have had to go to builders merchants to buy those - they took photos of the kind of paving available there and sent them to us so we could choose the preferred style and stone.

It was a lot of money but it's made a massive difference to our garden and I consider it worth every penny. I hope you get the same feeling of happy satisfaction when yours is done and that your dog responds well to the chemo, poor sausage.