How Much Money do Landscape Designers Make?

If you’re interested in a career within the landscape design industry, it’s important for you to have a general idea of the salary you should be shooting to earn once you’ve established yourself. That way, you won’t undersell your services to clients when you’re first getting started and similarly, won’t overcharge people for your work.

In general, landscape designers make about $66,500 per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That translates to about $32 an hour.

At the bottom of that curve, the least paid designers surveyed were making an annual salary of $37,620 (or $18.08 an hour), and the highest paid designers were making $99,560 (or $47.87 an hour). You should keep this in mind as a way to gauge how much you can expect to make when you’re first getting started, versus where you can aim to end up once you’ve been in the industry for some time and established a great portfolio and a client base.

The amount of money you can expect to make will also depend on your work dynamic; do you want to work for a larger firm? Or do you hope to launch and manage your own business independently?

When the aforementioned survey was completed, over 60 percent of the total 15,760 landscape designers questioned worked for themselves or in larger firms, where they averaged an annual of $67,430 ($32.42 hourly).

16 percent worked as service employees hired by specific buildings or dwellings, and these designers made an average of $57,280 a year ($27.54 an hour).

The highest paid designers surveyed did not work for private firms or for themselves independently- they worked for the government. Landscape specialists hired to work on government projects reported making $92,720 ($44.58 per hour).

Want to learn more? The New York Institute of Art and Design offers an online landscape design course that can teach you how to become a landscape designer. Request your free course catalog today!