Landscaping contract template — seasonal terms and plant warranty

Landscaping contracts cover two different businesses: a season of maintenance and a one-off install. Here is what each has to settle, including the plant warranty.

Read this before you use it

This is a checklist of what a landscaping contract has to settle — not a ready-to-sign legal document, and not legal advice. Most states regulate home improvement contracts: required disclosures, cancellation windows, deposit limits and licence display all vary, and some trades carry extra rules. Adapt this, then have a lawyer in your state review it before you put it in front of a customer.

landscaping contract checklist

Download as a spreadsheet to work through, or print it to sit alongside your own agreement.

Checklist (Excel / Sheets) Printable PDF

What a landscaping contract has to settle

Landscaping contracts have to survive the weather and the seasons. A maintenance agreement needs its term, its visit frequency, what happens to a visit cancelled for rain, and how either side gets out of it. Install work is closer to small construction and carries a plant warranty — which needs its start date, its term, and above all its conditions, because a plant that died of neglect and a plant that died of bad installation look identical and the watering obligation is the whole argument.

Clauses it needs

Parties, licence number, property address, and maintenance or install scope
For maintenance: term, visit frequency, and the seasonal window covered
Weather-cancelled visits: rescheduled, credited, or neither — stated
Cancellation and renewal terms, with notice periods both ways
For installs: plant material by species, size and count
Plant warranty: term, start date, and the customer's watering obligation
Irrigation responsibility and whether the system is included in the warranty
Seasonal extras — mulch, aeration, leaf clearance — authorised separately
Payment: per visit, monthly, or deposit-and-balance for installs
Property damage, underground utilities, and irrigation lines struck during digging

What landscaping contracts actually get argued over

A plant warranty claimed with no record of the watering the contract required
Weather-cancelled visits billed inside a monthly cycle with no clause allowing it
Seasonal extras added to a maintenance invoice without separate authorisation
Irrigation lines cut during planting, with no clause on locating them first

The estimate this contract is built on

A contract can only be as clear as the scope it references. BidWand drafts the itemised estimate — labour, materials, exclusions and assumptions — that the scope and exclusions clauses point at.

Free landscaping estimate template →

Draft the landscaping estimate this contract references

This generates the estimate, not the contract — describe the job and you get the itemised scope to attach. No email needed to see the first one.

What you get — see the format first

A complete estimate you can send to the customer, built from the rate you enter:

Description	Qty	Unit	Unit price	Total
Labor — itemized by task	hrs	hour	your rate	—
Materials — with your markup applied	qty	ea / sq ft	cost + markup	—
Permits, disposal, access	—	—	—	—

Plus a plain-English scope summary, assumptions (what had to be guessed), exclusions (what you are not doing — the section that prevents most change-order arguments), and a validity period. Printable, or send the link.

Every figure comes from the rate and markup you supply. We never fill in a market price for you.

Related guides