Are Garden Designers Charging Enough?

by Hannah Smith, Principal, Oxford College of Garden Design

The Society of Garden and Landscape Designers has recently published its 2026 membership survey alongside new guidance on garden designer fees in the UK.

For anyone involved in professional garden design - and particularly garden design education - the findings make interesting, and in places uncomfortable, reading.

How much should a professional garden designer charge? There is no single answer. Garden design fees depend on the scope, complexity and level of professional involvement required. But the SGLD's latest figures suggest a more fundamental problem: many garden designers don't believe they are charging enough for the value they provide.

The survey paints a picture of a profession full of experienced and committed designers, but one in which many practitioners continue to struggle to translate their expertise into sustainable earnings.

The typical personal income from garden design reported by respondents was £25,000-£35,000, with the majority earning less than £40,000. When designers were asked whether they felt their fees accurately reflected the value they provide to clients, the average response was just 5.7 out of 10.

The SGLD's conclusion is clear: many professional garden designers believe they are undercharging for their work.

As someone who came through professional garden design education myself, established my own practice and now teaches the next generation of designers, I think that raises an important question.

Are we simply teaching people how to design gardens, or are we teaching them how to become professional garden designers?

Design education has to extend beyond design

A garden designer needs creativity. We need an understanding of space, proportion, planting, materials and the relationship between a house and its landscape.

But professional practice requires considerably more.

A designer may be responsible for developing a client's brief, surveying and analysing a site, preparing concepts, resolving levels, producing construction information, specifying materials and plants, obtaining quotations, coordinating contractors and overseeing work on site.

We also have to communicate with clients, manage expectations, understand contracts and professional responsibilities, carry appropriate insurance and run financially sustainable businesses.

This distinction matters particularly because the SGLD survey found that 71% of respondents operate as sole practitioners.

For most garden designers, therefore, becoming a designer also means becoming the owner of a small professional practice.

And nobody automatically knows how to do that simply because they can design a beautiful garden.

The problem with professional fees

One of the findings I found most interesting concerns the way designers establish their fees.

Experience and the size or complexity of a project were among the strongest influences on pricing. Business overheads ranked considerably lower.

That matters.

The amount a client pays me is not the amount I earn.

My fees have to support not only the hours I spend actively designing their garden, but the time and costs associated with running the practice: software, insurance, equipment, accounting, marketing, continued professional development, administration and the many hours of work that cannot be attributed neatly to a particular project.

And a viable business also needs to make a profit.

Without understanding that, it is perfectly possible to have a full diary, work extremely hard and still operate a business that isn't particularly successful.

This was something I was taught during my own Diploma at the Oxford College of Garden Design, and it is something we continue to teach our students today.

We don't teach a student that "a garden design costs £5,000".

We teach them how to work out what their professional service actually costs to provide.

That means understanding scope, estimating the professional time required, establishing an appropriate charge-out rate, accounting for overheads, understanding the complexity and responsibility involved and ensuring that the resulting fee allows the business to make an appropriate profit.

That distinction was enormously important to me when establishing my own practice.

In my first year after completing the Diploma, I worked on eight garden design projects, with professional design fees averaging around £6,000 per project. Two of those commissions were around £9,000.

The variation mattered. I wasn't applying a standard fee simply because I was a newly qualified designer. Each commission was priced according to its scope, the professional time required and the level of service I was being asked to provide.

I don't share those figures to suggest that every new designer should charge the same amount. Quite the opposite. What mattered was that I had been taught how to establish a fee based on the work involved, the time required to deliver it and the costs of running a professional practice.

That gave me the confidence not simply to ask, "What can I get away with charging?", but to ask a much more useful question:

"What does it actually cost me to provide this service properly?"

The point isn't that every graduate should charge the same amount. They shouldn't.

The point is that every graduate intending to establish a professional practice should understand why they are charging what they are charging.

Why professional education matters

Garden design education in Britain has a long and distinguished history.

Schools including the Oxford College of Garden Design, Inchbald School of Design and London College of Garden Design have produced generations of designers who have gone on to establish practices, win awards and contribute significantly to the development of the profession.

Their importance isn't simply a question of reputation.

What the established professional schools have traditionally recognised is that design cannot be taught in isolation from the realities of delivering it.

A rigorous professional course should bring together design, horticulture, construction, communication, technical drawing and professional practice.

That breadth matters.

There has never been more information available to someone wanting to learn garden design. Individual skills can be learnt through short courses, books, online tutorials and experience.

But acquiring a collection of individual skills is not quite the same thing as learning to practise a profession.

A professional designer ultimately has to take responsibility for an entire project and understand how its many disciplines relate to one another.

Education therefore has to prepare students not only to produce a beautiful drawing, but to understand whether what they have drawn can be constructed, what it is likely to cost, how it should be communicated to a contractor, what risks and responsibilities they are assuming and what their own professional involvement should cost the client.

Should new garden designers charge less?

Creative professions have historically had an uncomfortable relationship with commerciality.

Garden design is no exception.

There can be a reluctance to discuss fees openly, and new designers sometimes assume that charging very little is a necessary part of establishing themselves.

At OCGD, we actively discourage that approach.

Our graduates have completed a rigorous professional Diploma. They have been trained across design, planting, construction, technical drawing, specification, professional practice and the process of taking a garden from initial brief through to implementation. When they enter practice, we encourage them to charge for the professional value of the service they are providing from the outset.

That doesn't mean pretending experience doesn't matter. Nobody would expect a newly qualified designer beginning their first commission to have the same depth of experience as somebody who has been practising for twenty years.

But newly qualified and unqualified are not the same thing.

A graduate may be at the beginning of their career, but they are entering it as a trained professional. If they are providing a professional service, with the knowledge, time and responsibility that entails, their fee should reflect the value and cost of providing that service.

If we teach graduates to deliberately undervalue their work simply because they are new to the profession, we risk teaching undercharging as a habit from the very beginning of their careers.

Undercharging also has consequences beyond the individual designer.

If we routinely underestimate our time, clients develop unrealistic expectations about what professional garden design should cost. Those expectations affect other practices and make it harder for the profession collectively to charge appropriately.

There is also a danger that we normalise an industry in which being busy is mistaken for running a successful business.

Ultimately, talented designers may decide that they simply cannot afford to remain in the profession.

The SGLD figures suggest that this is a conversation worth having.

A professional education should prepare you for a profession

This is why I think we need to be careful when talking about garden design education purely in terms of creative outcomes.

Of course design quality matters. It is fundamental.

But if somebody is investing significant time and money in professional education because they intend to change career, the responsibility of the school extends beyond teaching them how to make attractive gardens.

They need to leave understanding how a professional project works.

They need enough construction knowledge to communicate intelligently with contractors. They need to understand specifications and tendering. They need to know how to deal with clients and define the scope of their services. They need to understand their professional responsibilities.

And they need to understand money.

That doesn't guarantee that every graduate will build a successful practice. No course can promise that.

But it gives them the tools with which to build one.

What does a sustainable garden design practice look like?

There is one further finding in the SGLD research that deserves attention.

Practices reporting average project fees above £10,000 were more likely to anticipate growth, while those operating at lower fee levels were more likely to expect turnover to remain static. The SGLD notes that the relationship was not statistically significant, so it shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that simply charging higher fees creates successful businesses.

But it does raise an important question.

What does a financially sustainable garden design practice actually look like?

Success doesn't mean charging clients as much as possible.

It means charging enough to give projects the professional attention they require. It means being able to invest in software, training and continued development. It means having the capacity to collaborate with other professionals and employ people where appropriate.

And it means being able to make a reasonable living from the expertise we have spent years developing.

If the typical personal income from garden design is £25,000-£35,000 despite the expertise and responsibility involved in delivering substantial landscape projects, we should at least be prepared to ask why.

The answer isn't simply "charge more".

It starts much earlier.

We need to teach emerging designers how professional practices actually work. We need to give them the technical competence to justify professional fees, the commercial understanding to calculate those fees properly and the confidence to communicate their value to clients.

Because ultimately, we shouldn't simply be teaching people how to design gardens.

We should be teaching them how to become professional garden designers.

This article refers to findings published in the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers' Membership Survey Findings and Fee Guidance 2026.

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