Ask three facility managers what they pay for grounds maintenance and you'll usually get three different answers, and it's not because anyone's being cagey about it. A single-lot office courtyard and a six-building retirement village portfolio have almost nothing in common once you get past "there's grass involved," so pricing them the same way doesn't work. What follows is the range we actually see across the properties we quote — not a single number, because there isn't one.

If you'd rather skip the reading and just get a number for your property, our commercial landscaping and grounds maintenance pages both have a quote form. Otherwise, here's how the pricing generally breaks down.

If you're starting from scratch — a new garden bed at an office entrance, a full common-area overhaul for a strata block, or landscaping a new build — that's quoted as a project, not an hourly rate, because the scope is so different site to site. A small entrance planting refresh might land somewhere around $2,000–$6,000. A strata common area with more garden beds, some lawn, and maybe a retaining wall or irrigation upgrade tends to run from $5,000 into the $20,000s. Beyond that — hospital courtyards, school grounds, larger corporate campuses — you're generally looking at bespoke pricing that only really makes sense after someone's walked the site, because the variables (access, existing drainage, how many separate zones need work) swing the number too much to guess from a phone call.

Most of our commercial clients aren't after a one-off project at all — they want someone who turns up on a schedule and keeps the property looking the way it did the day it was finished. That's priced per visit, and the driver is really visit frequency and site size more than anything else. A small office or a modest strata block on a weekly or fortnightly mow-and-tidy usually sits in the $150–$400 per visit range. Step up to a larger strata complex, a school, or an aged care site with more lawn, more hedges and more garden bed work, and you're typically in the $400–$1,200 range per visit. Multi-site portfolios and hospitals tend to be quoted as a single contract rather than per-visit, because at that scale it's more about the whole arrangement — scheduling, invoicing, access windows — than any one mow.

Worth saying plainly: these are ranges we've seen, not a price list. The only way to know what your property actually costs is a site visit, because two properties that sound identical over the phone can be a completely different job once you're standing in the courtyard.

Size matters less than people assume — a large but simple lawn is often cheaper to maintain than a small courtyard packed with garden beds, hedging and edges, because it's the fiddly detail work that eats time, not the square metreage. Access hours matter more than most people expect too. Hospitals, schools and childcare centres often need work done in specific windows to avoid disrupting patients, students or staff, and squeezing a job into a narrower window usually costs a bit more than having the run of the site all day. Frequency is the other big lever: weekly visits cost more in total than fortnightly ones, but they're often non-negotiable for aged care or healthcare sites where overgrowth becomes a genuine safety issue rather than just an eyesore. Finally, if you're managing more than one property, bundling them under a single contract almost always brings the combined rate down compared to running separate arrangements per site.

If your grounds are already in decent shape, a maintenance contract is nearly always cheaper over a year than paying for repeated one-off callouts — you're not paying a premium for ad-hoc booking every time, and the crew already knows the site. If the property needs real work first — new turf, a redesign, drainage fixed — that's a project first, with a maintenance contract picked up once it's finished. Trying to maintain your way out of a genuinely neglected site usually costs more in the long run than just fixing it properly once.

There's no single number for commercial landscaping or grounds maintenance in Melbourne, and anyone who quotes you one without seeing the property is guessing. What we can say with some confidence is that a small strata property on a fortnightly visit will generally cost a few hundred dollars a visit, and a hospital or multi-site portfolio will be priced as its own contract entirely. A free site assessment is really the only way to close that gap.

Get in touch for a tailored quote on commercial landscaping or an ongoing grounds maintenance contract for your property.