How Much Does Landscaping Cost in Minnesota? A 2026 Price Guide

In 2026 Twin Cities dollars: a 30-foot foundation bed runs about $650 to $960 planted and mulched, a 50-foot privacy hedge $1,040 to $2,690, a shade tree $191 to $639 delivered and planted, and mulch is $40 per cubic yard. Planting is a published per-plant fee — $10 to $220 by size — with no minimum job. Full landscape installation crew work carries a $1,500 minimum.

Every other price guide in this market says landscaping costs "$3,000 to $15,000 depending on your project." That is not information. We sell plants and plant them across the metro, our catalog prices are public, and our planting fee is a fixed published schedule — so we can show you the actual arithmetic on real projects instead of a range wide enough to be meaningless.

This guide is organized by project type, because that is how people actually think about their yard. For each one we build the number from the same two ingredients — plant prices and the per-plant planting fee — and then we are honest about the six site conditions that move any quote in either direction. Prices are current Three Timbers Minnesota catalog prices for the 2026 season.

What Minnesota landscape projects cost, at a glance

How the pricing actually works

Landscaping in Minnesota is priced two fundamentally different ways, and confusing them is why quotes seem so unpredictable.

Plant delivery and planting is per-plant work. You pick plants, you pick sizes, and the planting fee is a published number per plant. It is additive and completely predictable, and it has no minimum job at any order size. One #5 hydrangea planted in your front bed is a real order and we will do it.

Full landscape installation is different work: a crew on site for days, doing bed construction, grading, edging, plant removal, and design-build. That work carries a $1,500 minimum, because mobilizing a crew and equipment for half a day costs the same whether the job is small or not. Two important exceptions: mulching and rock installation have no minimum, and neither does plant delivery and planting. The $1,500 figure is not a blanket company policy and you should not read it as one.

What common Minnesota plants actually cost

Before you can estimate a project you need real plant prices. These are current catalog prices for the shrubs, grasses and perennials that go into most Twin Cities beds:

The pattern worth noticing: most flowering shrubs roughly double in price from #2 to #5, while a boxwood or a yew climbs much faster because it grows so much more slowly. Growth rate is the hidden variable in every plant price. A fast shrub is cheap at every size; a slow evergreen is not.

Build your own estimate in five minutes

You do not need a site visit to get within a couple hundred dollars of the real number. Do this:

1. Measure the bed. Length times depth in feet gives you square footage. Write it down; you will use it twice.
2. Count plants. For a hedge, run length divided by spacing, rounded up. For a bed, roughly one #5 shrub per 9 square feet or one #1 perennial per 4 square feet.
3. Price the plants. Multiply your count by the catalog price for the size you want. Check the price one size down too, so you can see what patience is worth.
4. Add planting. Multiply the same count by the per-size planting fee from the table above.
5. Add mulch. Square feet times 3, divided by 324, rounded up to the next whole yard, times $40.

That total is what a straightforward job on an accessible site should cost. If a quote you receive is dramatically higher, the difference is in the six factors below — ask which one, and a good contractor will tell you exactly.

Project 1: a front foundation bed

The most common project we do. Thirty feet of house front, roughly 5 feet deep, eighteen plants. Here it is twice — once in the sizes most people choose, once one size smaller.

Version A — #5 shrubs, #2 grasses:

• 3 × Green Velvet Boxwood #5 at $53.99 = $161.97
• 5 × Little Princess Spirea #5 at $32.99 = $164.95
• 3 × Annabelle Hydrangea #5 at $32.99 = $98.97
• 7 × Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass #2 at $20.99 = $146.93

Plants: $572.82. Planting: eleven #5 at $20 is $220, seven #2 at $12 is $84 — $304. Mulch: 150 square feet at 3 inches is 1.4 yards, so 2 yards at $40 — $80. Total: about $960, delivered, planted and mulched.

Version B — the same eighteen plants, one size down:

• 3 × Green Velvet Boxwood #2 at $36.99 = $110.97
• 5 × Little Princess Spirea #2 at $21.99 = $109.95
• 3 × Annabelle Hydrangea #2 at $21.99 = $65.97
• 7 × Karl Foerster #1 at $10.99 = $76.93

Plants: $363.82. Planting: eleven #2 at $12 is $132, seven #1 at $10 is $70 — $202. Mulch: $80. Total: about $650.

Three hundred dollars saved on an identical design, and by year three you cannot tell the two beds apart. Shrubs and grasses close a size gap far faster than trees do, which is why we push people toward smaller stock on beds and let them spend up on specimen trees instead.

Project 2: a perennial or pollinator bed

Two hundred square feet, roughly forty #1 perennials and grasses at about 2 feet on center:

• 15 × Cheyenne Spirit Coneflower #1 at $10.99 = $164.85
• 15 × Little Bluestem #1 at $9.99 = $149.85
• 10 × Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass #1 at $10.99 = $109.90

Plants: $424.60. Planting: forty #1 at $10 — $400. Mulch: 200 square feet at 3 inches is 1.9 yards, so 2 yards — $80. Total: about $905.

Look at that install number. On a #1 perennial bed the planting labor is nearly equal to the plant cost, because forty holes is forty holes regardless of how small the pots are. This is the one category where doing the planting yourself genuinely saves real money — a #1 perennial is a trowel and two minutes. A 6-foot balled-and-burlapped spruce is not.

Project 3: a privacy hedge

Fifty feet of American Pillar Arborvitae at 3 feet on center is 17 plants. Delivered and planted:

The whole hedge decision is money against years, and we work it out run length by run length in our dedicated Twin Cities privacy hedge cost guide, including juniper and spruce alternatives and cost per linear foot.

Project 4: planting a tree

A single tree is the cheapest large-scale improvement you can make to a Minnesota yard, and the price range is enormous because the size range is enormous.

The full ladder, from #3 all the way to a 10-foot B&B specimen, with an explanation of what drives each jump, is in our size-by-size Minnesota tree price guide.

Project 5: mulch, and the math nobody does for you

Mulch is $40.00 per cubic yard and has no minimum job. What people cannot do in their head is figure out how many yards they need, so here is the formula and the table.

Square feet × depth in inches ÷ 324 = cubic yards. One cubic yard covers about 108 square feet at 3 inches deep, or 162 square feet at 2 inches. Three inches is the right depth for a Minnesota bed — deep enough to hold moisture and suppress weeds, shallow enough not to smother roots or invite voles against the stems.

Measure your beds once, write the square footage down, and you never have to guess again. And skip the landscape fabric underneath. It degrades, weeds root happily in the mulch layer on top of it, and in five years it is a shredded mess that makes replanting miserable — a point University of Minnesota Extension has made about woven fabric in planted beds for years.

Project 6: full landscape installation

This is crew-and-equipment work — bed construction and shaping, sod removal, grading, edging, hauling out what is there now, and a designed planting installed as one job. It carries a $1,500 minimum. Below that threshold, mobilizing a crew and a trailer costs more than the work bills out at, so we would rather sell you the plants and plant them per-plant instead, which is genuinely cheaper for you.

To be explicit about where the minimum does and does not apply:

The six things that move any Minnesota landscape quote

Everything above assumes a normal residential job. Here is what changes it, in roughly the order it bites:

• Access. A 36-inch gate means every plant, every yard of mulch, and every shovel of backfill goes through by wheelbarrow. That can add hours to a job that would take one machine pass in an open front yard. If you have a back-yard project, measure your gate before you call anyone.
• Slope. A bed or hedge across a grade needs each hole leveled into the hill and usually a shallow berm on the downhill side so water soaks in instead of running off. Steeper than roughly 3:1 and you are into terracing, which is a different project entirely.
• Existing removal. Taking out a dead arborvitae row, an old juniper foundation planting, 400 square feet of landscape rock and fabric, or a strip of sod is real labor and gets quoted separately. Rock removal in particular surprises people — it is heavy, slow, and there is always more of it than you think.
• Soil. Heavy clay and clay-loam is the metro norm and we plant in it constantly; it is not a problem, it is just Minnesota. The genuine problem is buried construction debris — concrete chunks, brick, compacted fill — in subdivisions built in the last twenty years. Woodbury, Lakeville, Blaine and the newer Maple Grove builds turn it up often enough that we raise it before we quote.
• Distance from the truck. Carrying a 400-pound root ball 150 feet around a house is a different job from setting it off the tailgate ten feet from the hole.
• Utility locates and season. Locates are free and required — call Gopher State One Call at 811 at least two business days before digging. Private lines like irrigation, invisible fence, and low-voltage lighting are not covered by the public locate; you mark those. And season matters: evergreens must be planted by mid-to-late September, hardy deciduous stock plants through the end of October, and container material is the most forgiving of all.

Where Minnesota homeowners waste money

• Buying big stock for a hedge. The single most expensive avoidable decision. A #10 hedge costs about two and a half times a #3 hedge to gain roughly three years.
• Landscape fabric. It costs money, it does not work in a planted bed, and it costs money again to remove.
• Planting arborvitae on a browsed site. Deer and rabbits hammer it — rabbits strip the lower two to three feet bare from the packed snow line and the bald skirt never fills back in. On exposed property lines, sites backing onto woods or parks, or anywhere you see rabbit runs, juniper is the better hedge and the replacement you skip pays for the difference several times over.
• Amending the planting hole in clay. Backfill with the native soil you dug out. A pocket of rich amended soil in a clay hole behaves like a bathtub and the roots stay in it instead of moving out.
• Under-watering year two. New plants need 5 gallons per plant, once a week, for two full summers, not one. Rainfall counts toward it. A great many replacement claims are year-two plants that got watered like established ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does landscaping cost in Minnesota? A 30-foot foundation bed runs about $650 to $960 planted and mulched, a 50-foot privacy hedge $1,040 to $2,690, a tree $48 to $1,041 delivered and planted, and mulch is $40 per cubic yard. Full landscape installation crew work starts at a $1,500 minimum. Plant delivery and planting have no minimum at all.

Is there a minimum job for landscaping? It depends on the type of work. Plant delivery and planting have no minimum job at any order size, and neither do mulching or rock installation. Only full landscape installation crew work — bed construction, grading, sod removal, design-build — carries the $1,500 minimum.

How much does it cost to plant a shrub? The planting fee is $12 for a #2, $15 for a #3, $20 for a #5, $30 for a #7, and $35 for a #10, on top of the plant. A #5 Annabelle Hydrangea at $32.99 plus $20 planting is $52.99 delivered and planted, with free delivery on orders over $200.

How much does mulch cost in the Twin Cities? Forty dollars per cubic yard, with no minimum job. One yard covers about 108 square feet at 3 inches deep. A 1,000-square-foot bed area needs about 10 yards, or roughly $400. The formula is square feet times depth in inches divided by 324.

How much does a 30-foot foundation planting cost? About $960 with #5 shrubs and #2 grasses, or about $650 for the same eighteen-plant design one size down, both delivered, planted, and mulched. By year three the two beds look essentially the same, which is why we usually steer people to the smaller sizes on beds.

Why do landscaping quotes vary so much? Six things drive nearly all of it: access to the work area, slope, whether something has to be removed first, soil conditions including buried construction debris, how far material has to be carried from the truck, and the season. The plant and planting prices themselves are fixed and published.

Is it cheaper to plant things myself? On #1 perennials, meaningfully yes — the planting fee is roughly half the total on a perennial bed because forty small holes is still forty holes. On #10 trees and balled-and-burlapped stock, no; the plant weighs hundreds of pounds, needs equipment, and a badly planted tree is a total loss.

Does the price include delivery? Delivery is free on orders over $200 anywhere in our Twin Cities service area, and orders typically arrive in 2 to 4 business days. Smaller orders carry a delivery fee that is calculated at checkout.

What is the cheapest way to improve a Minnesota yard? Mulch and a few well-placed trees. Ten yards of mulch across all your beds is about $400 and transforms how the whole property reads, and a #10 shade tree at $190.99 delivered and planted is the highest-return single purchase in landscaping.

When should I schedule landscape work in Minnesota? Late August into September is the best stretch of the year — fall is the strongest planting season for hardy deciduous material, and crews have more availability than in the May rush. Just remember evergreens have to be in the ground by mid-to-late September, and the metro ground typically freezes between November 10 and 25.

Ready to price your project?

Every number on this page comes from live catalog prices and a published planting schedule, so you can build your own estimate before you talk to anyone. Browse shrubs, trees, and perennials, add planting to any plant at checkout at the per-size rate, and remember there is no minimum job on delivery or planting. For deeper arithmetic on the two biggest line items, see our privacy hedge cost guide and our guide to mulching a Minnesota landscape. Three Timbers Minnesota grows and ships from Waconia and delivers across the Twin Cities metro in 2 to 4 business days, free over $200, and our crew can plant the whole thing for you. Call or text 612-214-1955.