How to put your prices up without losing customers

Most gardeners and cleaners undercharge, and most know it. The work gets harder, costs rise, and the price stays where it was three years ago because raising it feels like asking for a favour.

It is not a favour. It is administration. Here is how to do it calmly, including the exact words.

When to raise prices

Once a year, at the same time each year, is the healthiest pattern. Customers accept an annual review as normal. What unsettles people is surprise, not the increase itself.

Good moments are the start of the calendar year or the start of your busy season. Avoid raising immediately after a poor patch of service, and avoid springing it mid conversation at the door. Put it in writing, with notice.

If you have not raised prices for several years, do not try to catch up in one jump. A large single increase reads as a shock. A clear increase now, and a note that prices are reviewed annually, resets the pattern.

How much

Your costs are the floor: fuel, insurance, equipment, wages if you employ anyone, and your own time getting more valuable as you get better at the work. Work out what the last year of cost increases has actually done to your margin before choosing a number.

Round numbers communicate confidence. Moving a visit from twenty two pounds to twenty four reads as considered. Moving it to twenty three pounds seventeen reads as apologetic arithmetic.

It is also fine, and often right, for different customers to move by different amounts. The garden that has doubled in scope since you quoted it needs a bigger correction than the tidy one that has stayed the same.

What to say

Short, warm, factual. No apology, no essay about fuel prices. Customers respect a straight sentence far more than a page of justification.

Here is a template you can copy and adapt.

Put one of your prices in and see the new one, with the email already written.

Enter a price to see the new one.

Subject: Price update from [your business name]

Hello [name],

Thank you for having us look after [the garden / your home] this year.

From [date], the price for your [weekly / fortnightly] visit will change from [old price] to [new price]. This is our annual review and reflects rising costs over the year.

Everything else stays the same: same visits, same standard, same team.

If you would like to talk anything through, just reply to this message or give me a call.

Best wishes, [Your name]

Send it with at least one full billing cycle of notice. A month is courteous. Same day is not.

Handling the responses

Most customers will not reply at all. Some will say thanks for letting me know. A small number will question it.

For those, hold two lines. First, the increase is real and considered, not an opening bid. Discounting the moment someone pushes back teaches every customer you have to push back. Second, be genuinely relaxed about the rare customer who leaves. A business priced so that nobody ever leaves is a business priced too low. Losing one customer in fifty after a fair increase, while the other forty nine pay the new rate, leaves you better off and less stretched.

If a longstanding customer on a fixed income asks for help, you can choose to hold their price as a deliberate kindness. The difference is that it is your decision, made once, not a precedent set by whoever complains.

Keep a record

Write down who was told what, when, and from what date the new price applies. Scattered WhatsApp threads are where price agreements go to die, and six months later nobody is sure what was agreed.