If you’ve ever priced a landscaping job off the top of your head and watched the profit disappear halfway through, you’re not alone. Most disputes and losses on garden projects come down to the same thing — the job was never properly measured and itemised before a price was given.
A bill of quantities (BOQ) fixes that. It’s the standard tool used across civil engineering and construction, and it works just as well for a garden patio as it does for a motorway. Here’s how to put one together for a landscaping job, step by step.
What is a bill of quantities?
A BOQ is simply an itemised list of every element of work on a job, with a measured quantity and a rate against each item. Instead of “patio and fence — £4,800”, your quote breaks down into:
- Excavate and reduce level, 32 m² × 250mm deep — 8 m³
- MOT Type 1 sub-base, 150mm compacted — 5.8 tonnes
- Sharp sand and cement bed, 40mm — 32 m²
- Indian sandstone paving, laid and pointed — 32 m²
- Close board fencing, 1.8m high — 14 linear metres
Each line gets a rate, the rates add up, and you have a price you can stand behind — and defend if the client questions it.
Why bother for a garden job?
Three reasons:
You stop underpricing. The items that kill margins on landscaping jobs are the ones nobody measures — muck away, sub-base tonnage, waste allowances on paving cuts. A BOQ forces you to quantify them before you commit to a price.
Variations become easy. When the client adds three metres of wall halfway through, you already have a rate per metre. No awkward renegotiation — the extra is priced in seconds using the same rates as the original quote.
You look professional. A client comparing two quotes — one a single figure on a text message, one a properly itemised BOQ — knows which contractor has actually thought the job through. Itemised quotes win work, and they win it at better prices.
Step 1: Measure everything on site
Take dimensions for every element — don’t estimate off a photo or a plan the client sketched. For a typical garden job you’ll need:
- Areas (m²) — paving, turfing, decking, planting beds, artificial grass
- Linear runs (m) — fencing, edging, walls, drainage runs
- Depths — dig depth for patios and drives, foundation depths for walls
- Volumes (m³) — excavation, topsoil import, concrete
Write everything down on site. The measurement you don’t take is always the one that costs you.
Step 2: Break the job into work items
Work through the job in construction order. A patio isn’t one item — it’s excavation, disposal, sub-base, bedding, paving, pointing. Splitting it out matters because each element has a different cost driver: excavation is plant and muck-away cost, paving is materials and labour.
A sensible breakdown for most garden jobs:
- Site clearance and demolition
- Excavation and disposal
- Sub-bases and foundations
- Drainage
- Hard landscaping (paving, walls, edging, decking)
- Fencing
- Soft landscaping (topsoil, turf, planting)
- Making good
Step 3: Convert measurements into quantities
This is where jobs go wrong. Getting from “32 m² of patio at 250mm dig” to tonnes of muck away and tonnes of Type 1 involves bulking factors, compaction, and density conversions:
- Excavated soil bulks up by around 25–30% — 8 m³ in the ground is roughly 10 m³ in the wagon
- MOT Type 1 needs around 2.3 tonnes per m³ compacted
- Sharp sand for a 40mm bed runs at roughly 0.07 tonnes per m²
- Add a waste allowance of 5–10% on paving for cuts
Miss the bulking factor on a big dig and you’ve under-ordered your muck away by a grab lorry or two — that’s £250+ straight off your margin.
Step 4: Apply your rates
Against each item, price:
- Materials — current supplier prices, not what you paid last year
- Labour — realistic outputs (a two-man gang lays roughly 15–20 m² of flags a day, not 40)
- Plant — digger and dumper hire, skips or grab wagons, compaction plant
- Overheads and margin — added to every rate, not bolted on at the end where it’s the first thing to get negotiated away
Step 5: Present it properly
Lay the BOQ out with item descriptions, quantities, units, rates and totals, plus a clear list of exclusions (unforeseen ground conditions, tree roots, contaminated soil, service diversions). The exclusions list is your protection when the digger finds a concrete slab nobody knew about.
The faster way to do all this
Doing the above with a notepad and calculator works, but it’s slow and it’s easy to drop a conversion. LandscapeBOQ was built to do the heavy lifting — 17 calculators covering patios, fencing, turfing, decking, drainage, walls, excavation and more, each one handling the depth conversions, bulking factors and tonnage calculations automatically, then pulling everything into a single bill of quantities you can price and send.
Built by a UK civil engineer with 30 years of site experience, it’s designed around how landscaping jobs are actually measured and priced in the UK — metric units, UK material specs, UK terminology.
Measure the job once, enter the dimensions, and the quantities are done. Try it at landscapeboq.com.