Gardening franchise earnings are the first thing almost everyone asks us about, and rightly so. If you’re thinking about leaving a salary behind to run your own business, you want to know what’s realistic — not a sales pitch. So here’s a straight answer.
The short version
As an Ed’s franchisee working on your own, you could earn between £40,000 and £55,000 a year. Build a multi-van operation with teams and a larger territory, and that can rise beyond £100,000. The gap between those two numbers isn’t luck — it’s a choice about how big you want to grow.
What actually drives your earnings
Three things make the difference, and you control all of them:
How much you work
You set your own hours. Some of our franchisees deliberately keep things at one van and a comfortable week because the lifestyle is the point. Others go hard from day one. Both are valid — but they earn very differently, and that’s down to you.
Your hourly rate and your territory
Self-employed gardeners across the UK typically charge somewhere between £30 and £40 an hour, more for specialist work. Because we give you a substantial protected territory, you’re not scrapping over the same few streets as ten other gardeners. You concentrate on building regular, repeat customers — the kind that fill your diary weeks ahead.
Whether you employ a team
This is the real lever. One person can only mow so many lawns in a day. The moment you put a second van on the road with someone working for you, your earning ceiling lifts. The franchisees earning six figures aren’t working twice as hard — they’ve built a business that works without them holding every tool.
What does a full round look like?
Let’s put the numbers in concrete terms. Say you’re mowing lawns at £25 a visit, with 100 regular customers each booked in 25 times a year. That’s 2,500 jobs and £62,500 in revenue — from repeat customers alone, without quoting for a single new job. Regular work like that fills your diary and underpins your income; non-regular jobs (one-off tidy-ups, hedge cutting, larger clearances) sit on top of it.
Building and managing a round that size is where our edsjobs software earns its keep. It helps you organise your schedule, spot which customers are genuinely driving your bottom line, and make decisions based on your actual numbers rather than gut feel.
Be honest about the costs
Anyone who quotes you an earnings figure without mentioning costs isn’t being straight with you. What you charge isn’t what you keep. You’ll have fuel, insurance, equipment, the van, and your franchise fee to account for. We’re upfront about all of it before you commit — there are no surprises buried in the small print, because a franchisee who’s blindsided by costs doesn’t last, and that helps nobody.
Why a franchise rather than going it alone?
You could start a gardening business tomorrow with a mower and a leaflet. Plenty do. But most spend their first two years making expensive mistakes — underpricing, chasing one-off jobs, drowning in admin, no idea how to find steady work. Our model has been proven since 2003. You get the demand, the systems, the business management tools that handle your admin and accounting, and someone to call when you’re stuck. You skip the costly trial-and-error and start earning properly, sooner.
The honest bottom line on gardening franchise earnings
A gardening franchise won’t make you rich overnight, and we’d never pretend otherwise. What it can do is give you a genuine, growing income from work you control, outdoors, with more demand than we can currently supply. How far you take it is up to you.
If you’re weighing up whether the investment makes sense at all, our honest assessment of whether a gardening franchise is worth it works through it properly.
Want the full picture, including costs and territory availability? Download our prospectus or get in touch — we’ll give you straight answers.
Thinking about running your own gardening business?
Find out what it takes to become an Ed’s franchisee.