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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

That £26.50/hour for weeding is insanity?

494 replies

LaBellySausage · 21/02/2021 19:54

I'm looking for someone to come around for 3 hours/week to help with weeding the garden.

I was given a couple of names of local people who do gardening. I expected to pay somewhere between £10-12/hour, perhaps £15/hour if the person was an experienced gardener. I believe minimum wage is £8something but I don't think people can live on that.

The first person wouldn't give a quote til they came to view the garden and then was hesitant to give an hourly rate, preferring to give a rate for 'the job'. It's not a job that can be finished- it's like when I shave my legs the bastards on the other one have started growing back when I start the second. I just want a few weeds less per week. He eventually said £18/hour. I thanked him for his time but said it was a bit more than I had budgeted. The second guy said £26.50/hour!

This is simple weeding. Trowel and hoe provided. £26.50/hour is about £55,000 annually.

I worked jobs like this while in uni at minimum wage. For reference, we live in a very inexpensive part of the country- he would not be weeding Chelsea Flower Show. Both candidates were local so didn't have more than a 5/10 minute drive.

Am I being unreasonable, or is this a crazy rate?

OP posts:
chomalungma · 22/02/2021 21:51

@GreenlandTheMovie

chomalungma Waits...........

Does sound like you have a lot of time on your hands Grin

So no idea then.

You've merely confirmed you don't understand about chargeable hours.

LemonSwan · 22/02/2021 22:00

choma
I assume she gets the calculation. She is outraged that a gardener at £26.50 an hour likely pays themselves under 20k a year (after having personally outlaid for depreciating assets likely in the region of c. 20k (equipment, vehicle, workwear etc.) So works a year for free every 4 or 5 years. Has no pension contributions.

And I am being generous here; If you are legit - paying corp tax; responsible - not paying yourself all your earnings in order to have retained earnings for emergencies (ie. COVID or another dramatic event), and moral - ie. paying salary - NIC2 contributions as opposed to getting gov to pay your Company NIC and living off lower taxed dividends; then its going to be a lot less than 20k someone can pay themselves before personal taxes.

Userg1234 · 22/02/2021 22:10

Wow I am clearly really under charging! I am a gardener in a town outside of Bristol. Lots of retired well of people. I charge £11 an hour, provide all my tools, buy a new van every 3 years. I am fully insured and pay my taxes. I've been in business for about 15years.
I know I could charge more but never more than £15 an hour. I would rather be constantly busy and warning than chasing work. I am a workaholic so do about 40hours a week during the winter and 60 to 75 in the summer.
So I don't think the op is being unrealistic in her expectations

chomalungma · 22/02/2021 22:14

I am a workaholic so do about 40hours a week during the winter and 60 to 75 in the summer

That's a lot of chargeable hours Grin

SantiagoSky · 22/02/2021 22:18

Here in Switzerland a gardener for an hour is at least £45.

Userg1234 · 22/02/2021 22:23

Chomalungma....I did say I'm a workaholic...2019 I worked 351 days! 😁

Palavah · 22/02/2021 22:26

[quote LaBellySausage]@Junobug I view it in the same way as a cleaning job which people have to travel to. My cleaner charges £13/hour. The skill level is no different and the labour is of a similar intensity.[/quote]
The difference is cleaners tend to be women and gardeners tend to be men?
Or cleaners can work ywar round whereas gardening is more seasonal?

chomalungma · 22/02/2021 22:28

@Userg1234

Chomalungma....I did say I'm a workaholic...2019 I worked 351 days! 😁
Ever thought about working fewer hours but increasing your hourly rate?

According to this blog,

www.edwardsgardenservices.co.uk/garden-services/gardening-rates/

The ‘other’ trade network for professional gardeners is the Professional Gardeners Guild. The PGG is coming to recognise the role the self-employed play in the horticultural industry, reflected in their 2020 salaries & rates guidelines, recommending the rates for self-employed gardeners to be:

London rates – £22 to £38 per hour
SE, including East Anglia – £21.50 to £31 per hour.
Scotland, Wales and UK Regions – £19.50 to £31 per hour.

So you could work fewer hours but take home the same amount......or price yourself out of the market.

Personally - setting an appropriate hourly / daily rate is one of the hardest things in business - but you can always go down, but it's difficult to increase prices.

typicalvalues · 22/02/2021 22:31

But the op doesn't need a gardener - she needs someone to pluck weeds!

LemonSwan · 22/02/2021 22:38

Userg1234 You are massively undercharging! If your good you wont need to chase work. I turn down work regularly for well over these prices in the midlands. I will do a 7.5 hr day rate of £175 for a full day only. Any thing less that its £30 an hour for general maintenance - no waste disposal. Hedges and machinery cutting work is quote per job basis not hourly. I am midlands!

Skysblue · 22/02/2021 23:18

I’m South east commuter belt. Gardener is £20/hr here.

Suspect he didn’t want the job, weeding sucks.

I don’t think it’s crazy money for the work they do though. Hairdressers charge crazy money for something very simple, gardeners work harder...

LemonSwan · 22/02/2021 23:35

typicalvalues
She needs to pluck weeds because she cant be bothered to hire someone skilled. If she did this problem would not have occurred in the first place in freshly cut beds, and it is possible to prevent new weeds from germinating and existing perennial weeds from spreading.

I am very generous with advice usually but I am going to make a point of not sharing that information. If its so easy and unskilled she can work it out and she can also go and find someone with a trade account to go and purchase her the not for sale to general public secret magic :)

BettysButtons · 23/02/2021 05:03

But the op doesn't need a gardener - she needs someone to pluck weeds!

Many people can’t tell the difference between new young shoots and weeds.
One ‘gardener’ I had happily dug over a bed of seedlings I had planted out. He massacred them! 😂

BettysButtons · 23/02/2021 05:16

Hairdressers charge crazy money for something very simple, gardeners work harder

Having bought and used hair clippers on my DH’s hair, I can confirm that cutting hair is a very simple concept. Technically, anyone can cut hair but actually Creating a hairstyle is a completely different matter.
(I wonder if Boris will hold out? He was looking very fluffy yesterday)

Back to gardens... Most people can dig or pull stuff out of the ground. Knowing what to pull out and where to dig is a different matter.

79andnotout · 23/02/2021 07:52

I've studied for rhs qualifications for the last couple of years in an evening class and it was all women except for one guy. About 20% of the class were hobby gardeners like myself but the rest were in the trade.

So I'm surprised if most gardeners are male as I thought it would be the opposite, based on my friends and family too all the expert gardeners are female. Maybe there are lots of unskilled men claiming to be gardeners?

BTW, horticulture is a deep subject. I have a biochemistry PhD so had a head start on the cellular stuff but you have to know and understand a huge volume of material to pass RHS exams.

Proudboomer · 23/02/2021 08:40

Where I am most trained gardeners are women. There are men who garden but they do more Labour type work. Grass cutting, hedge trimming type stuff. No formal qualifications and very little plant knowledge.

bossyrossy · 23/02/2021 09:22

A gardener would know the difference between a weed and a treasured plant. I’m not sure a student would. I’m in the SE and I pay my experienced gardener £15 per hour and she comes once a month for 4 hours.

WaltzForDebbie · 23/02/2021 09:30

I don't agree that it not a skilled job. I'm a keen gardener and would be very reluctant to get a non-gardener to do my weeding as they would be very likely to dig up the wrong thing. Especially in the spring when plants are just emerging.

79andnotout · 23/02/2021 09:50

Also, I don't think it's reasonable to complain about your current wage as a trainee doctor being less than that of a professional gardener. You have the scope to earn six figures and know you will have year on year wage growth. I was earning 7k/year whilst working long hours in the lab getting my PhD, but now I earn six figures. There's no scope for that kind of growth as a gardener.

MadMadaMim · 23/02/2021 14:47

You're paying for gardnener, not a weeder. There is no such job as a weeder. You should expect to pay the going rate for a gardener. £10 p/h is very low.

The fact that you only want a gardener to weed is not the gardener's issue.

MadMadaMim · 23/02/2021 14:50

And forgot to say - I wouldn't pay £26 p/h but I would expect to pay around £15-20 depending on experience and how many regular hours they do. If it was 2 hrs every other week, I'd expect to pay more p/h than I would for 2 hrs every week

FrangipaniBlue · 23/02/2021 16:17

asking a gardener to come and simply do your weeding without any landscaping or planting etc is like asking a joiner to come round and remove some old doors, but without fitting new ones.

You are asking a skilled tradesman to do an unskilled task.

If you simply want an unskilled task done, you need to seek out unskilled workmen (eg a labourer or general handyman or local teenager who wants some pocket money)

Harmonypuss · 03/03/2021 01:57

There are also quite a lot of people who are gardeners working for the local council or other large organisations who do a full time job then do "foreigners" in their spare time without paying tax&NI (yes, totally illegal I know). I know of at least 2 in the South Birmingham area who've been doing it for 30+yrs (and getting away with it despite having been reported on numerous occasions)! At the last time I spoke to one of them (about 6yrs ago) he was charging £15/hr, but as I said, not paying any taxes etc and he was working 3-4hrs every m-f evening and all day Saturday, so 23-30hrs/wk (weather permitting) about 7months of the year, picking up somewhere in the region of £10k/yr, over and above his "legal" salary!

HeathIns · 03/03/2021 06:55

There are so many garden maintenance companies out there. They maintain lawns (cut them) borders (weed them) hedges (trim them). They charge around £20 -25 an hour here.
The OP doesn’t want a horticultural specialist or landscaper she wants someone to maintain her garden - a ‘gardener’.
One who doesn’t think that weeding is beneath them.

CoalTit · 03/03/2021 07:48

The OP doesn’t want a horticultural specialist or landscaper she wants someone to maintain her garden - a ‘gardener’. One who doesn’t think that weeding is beneath them.
She found two: one charges a pound an hour more than the top of your range, and the other charges two pounds less than the bottom. She didn't want to pay that much. No big deal, really. But she took to aibu to ask if it was "insanity".
Loads of people tried to explain the difference between an hourly wage and what a business charges, but she didn't seem able to understand, which was striking, because, as she told us several times, she's a doctor, which requires you to be pretty clever.