A Landscaper's Guide to Adding Artificial Turf to Your Services

It starts with a question you weren't expecting.

You're finishing a paver patio, or a planting bed, or a full backyard redesign — and the homeowner asks: "Can you do artificial turf too?"

You've never installed turf. You know it exists. You've seen it in other people's yards. But you don't know the products, you don't know the margins, and you definitely don't know how to seam two pieces together without it looking like a zipper running through the middle of the lawn.

So you say "let me get back to you" — and then you either never follow up, or you refer them to a turf company and watch $8,000-$15,000 walk out the door.

This is happening to landscapers, hardscape contractors, and general contractors all over the country. The demand for artificial turf is growing, and the people being asked about it most often are the contractors already working on the property. If that's you, here's how to think about it.

Option 1: Sub it out

The lowest-risk approach. You find a turf installer in your market, bring them in as a subcontractor for the turf portion of the project, and mark up their price by 10-20%.

Pros: No learning curve, no risk of a bad install, no need to buy new equipment or find a supplier. You stay in your lane and collect a referral fee or markup for bringing the work.

Cons: You're giving away the highest-margin portion of the project. Turf installation at $10-$16/sf installed has better margins than most landscaping work. You also lose control of the schedule — you're dependent on the sub's availability, which can delay your overall project timeline.

When this makes sense: You get asked about turf once or twice a year and it's not worth investing time or money into learning a new trade. Or the project is complex (putting green, large commercial install) and you don't want your first turf job to be a $25,000 high-stakes situation.

How to do it well: Find two or three turf installers in your area. Get their pricing. Build a relationship before you need them. When a project comes up, you quote the turf portion at their price plus your markup, they do the install, and you manage the client relationship. Make sure your agreement is clear about who handles warranty issues on the turf portion.

Option 2: Learn it and do it yourself

The higher-risk, higher-reward approach. You invest time into learning turf installation, buy the basic equipment, find a supplier, and start handling turf jobs in-house.

Pros: You capture the full margin on turf work (which is typically 20-30% net). You control the schedule. You can offer turf as part of a complete backyard package — pavers, planting, irrigation, turf — which makes you a one-stop shop that wins bigger projects at higher total revenue.

Cons: There's a learning curve. Your first 2-3 installs will take longer than they should and won't be as clean as a dedicated turf company's work. You need to invest in equipment (plate compactor, seaming tools, infill spreader) and find a reliable turf supplier. And if you mess up a seam or a base, the callback costs you money and reputation.

When this makes sense: You're getting asked about turf monthly or more. The projects in your pipeline regularly include turf as a component. You already have a crew that does grading and base work (the hardest part of turf installation is the part you already know how to do).

How to ramp up:

Start with one small, low-pressure job. A friend's side yard. A family member's backyard. Something where the stakes are low and you can take your time. Don't quote your first turf job to a paying client who found you on Google.

The skills you already have as a landscaper transfer directly to at least half of turf installation. You know how to grade. You know how to compact base material. You know how to work with edging. The turf-specific skills you need to learn are: seaming (trimming edges along stitch lines, applying adhesive to seam tape, butting pieces cleanly), infill selection and application, nap direction management, and material takeoff (calculating how many rolls you need and how to orient them for minimum waste).

Those skills take maybe 3-5 installs to get comfortable with. By your fifth job, you'll be producing clean work. By your tenth, you'll wonder why you waited so long.

Equipment you need that you probably don't already have: A caulk gun and seam adhesive, seam tape rolls, a stiff-bristle broom or power broom for infill, a drop spreader for infill application, carpet knives with hook blades, and a straight edge for trimming. Total investment: $200-$500. You probably already own the plate compactor, wheelbarrow, rakes, and measuring tools.

Option 3: The hybrid approach

This is what most smart landscapers end up doing. Sub out the first 2-3 projects to a turf installer — but shadow them on the job. Watch how they seam. Watch how they handle nap direction. Ask questions about their material choices and application rates.

After you've watched 2-3 installs, try doing the next small one yourself with your own crew. Use what you learned from watching the sub. If you get stuck, you've got the sub's number.

This approach lets you learn the trade without risking client work during the steep part of the learning curve. By the time you're doing it in-house, you've already seen how it's done properly and you know what "good" looks like.

What to charge when you're new at it

This is where landscapers get into trouble. They know their margins on pavers, grading, and planting. They don't know their margins on turf. So they either underprice it (to win the work) or overprice it (because they're nervous about the unknown costs).

Here's a rough framework for pricing turf as a landscaper adding it to your services:

Materials cost: Turf product ($1.50-$5.00/sf wholesale), base material ($0.35-$0.75/sf), infill ($0.15-$0.75/sf depending on type), seam tape, adhesive, edging, weed barrier, staples. Your all-in material cost will typically be $3.00-$7.00/sf depending on product quality.

Labor cost: For your first few jobs, your crew will be slower than a dedicated turf crew. Budget 30-50% more labor time than you'd estimate for a similar square footage of grading work. As you get faster, labor cost per square foot drops.

Your selling price: For residential landscape turf, the market range is $10-$16/sf installed. As a landscaper adding turf to a larger project, you can price at the lower-middle of that range ($10-$12/sf) and still make 20%+ margins once you have a few jobs under your belt.

Don't discount just because you're new. Price at market rate. The homeowner doesn't know (or care) how many turf jobs you've done — they care about whether the yard looks good. If you do the work properly, the result is the same whether it's your third install or your thirtieth.

The material takeoff problem

This is the part that trips up landscapers the most. With pavers, you calculate square footage, add 10% for cuts, and order. Turf doesn't work that way.

Turf comes in 15-foot-wide rolls (sometimes 12' or 7.5'). You can't order arbitrary dimensions. You need to figure out how to cover a specific yard shape using rectangular strips from a 15-foot-wide roll, with all strips oriented in the same nap direction, minimizing waste while keeping seams out of high-visibility areas.

On a simple rectangular yard, this is easy math. On an L-shaped yard with a pool cutout and a curved garden bed, this becomes a genuine optimization problem. Getting it wrong means overordering (wasting money) or underordering (delaying the job while you wait for more material).

This is where estimating software earns its keep. Instead of hand-sketching the yard and eyeballing strip placement, you draw the actual shape and let the tool calculate the optimal strip layout, total material needed, waste percentage, and a full material list. For a landscaper who does 3-5 turf jobs per year, the time savings alone pay for the tool — and the accuracy prevents the costly mistake of showing up on install day with one strip short.

The real opportunity

Here's why this matters: the landscaper who can say "yes, we do turf too" wins the full project. The one who says "you'll have to call someone else for the turf" loses control of the timeline, loses the turf margin, and risks losing the entire project to a turf company that also does hardscape.

The market is moving toward full-service outdoor renovation. Homeowners don't want to hire four different contractors for pavers, turf, planting, and lighting. They want one company that handles the whole backyard. If you can be that company — even if turf is only 20% of your revenue — you win projects that specialists can't.

Adding turf to your services isn't about becoming a turf company. It's about becoming the contractor who never has to say "that's not something we do." TurfBrain makes the material takeoff problem easy — draw the yard shape, get an optimized cut list and full material order in minutes, even on your first turf job.