Lease a Robotic Mower or Hire Another Crew Member?

Which option costs less over three years?

The answer depends on which hours you are short. A new crew member covers every task on the list, but the cost starts before anyone shows up, through recruiting, and it keeps moving with overtime. A robotic mower on a three-year lease covers mowing only, and it does so on one fixed quote. It does nothing for edging, trimming or detail work.

So the useful question is narrower than cost per hour. Where are your hours running out, and when? If the gap sits mainly in peak-season mowing, a mower addresses it directly. If the gap sits in trimming, edging and client detail, a person may still be the right add, or a mower may free the person you already employ. The sections below walk through each cost line and where to measure it.

What does a new crew member cost in wages?

According to O*NET, which draws on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, landscaping and groundskeeping workers had a May 2025 national median wage of $18.82 per hour, about $39,150 per year. The 25th percentile was $17.40 per hour and the 75th was $22.52. Those figures give you a realistic band rather than a single guess.

Wages are the starting line, not the total. Payroll taxes, insurance, equipment and the supervision time a new hire needs all sit on top. This piece does not put a number on those items, because the sources we checked did not give a verified figure. Ask your payroll provider for a loaded rate, then compare it with the lease quote for the same months.

How long does it take to fill the seat?

Recruiting time is easy to undercount because it lands on someone else's calendar. A 2016 SHRM benchmark, reported by Business Management Daily, put the average cost per hire at $4,129 and the average time to fill at 42 days. It is an older, general benchmark rather than one written for grounds crews, so treat it as a scale check, not a forecast.

The bigger cost for a short crew is the gap itself. Each open day, your remaining people absorb the mowing, and a crew lead spends hours on interviews, reference checks and onboarding. A leased mower skips that cycle, but it has its own lead time: a site assessment, a charging location and a start date all need planning.

Where does overtime exposure show up?

Overtime tends to arrive in the weeks you can least afford it: spring flush, a storm cleanup, a client who wants the property finished before a weekend event. Every hour a crew member works past the threshold adds pay on top of the base wage, and the exposure grows with each extra hour in a peak week. The exact premium depends on your state rules and payroll setup, so confirm it with your payroll provider rather than applying a general multiplier.

A mower on a fixed lease carries no overtime line. Its run time is set by the schedule you program and the charging cycle you allow, and it does not ask for extra pay when the grass grows fast. It does not remove the need for someone on the property, though. A person still checks routes, clears debris and answers alerts, and that role belongs in the comparison.

How many hours come back, and where do they go?

The hours returned to trimming and detail are the real prize, and the evidence on them is thin. A fleet director quoted by Landscape Management said robotic mowers save two to four man-hours per job. That is a trade press account, not a controlled test, and it has not been checked against your site data. OXmaint, a maintenance software vendor, reports that labor hours fell 48 percent at a resort it describes. It names no independent study, so treat that as a case to test, not a benchmark.

Build your own number. Pull six weeks of mowing hours by property, separate the time spent on edging, trimming and blowing, then estimate how much of each a mower takes over. Redirect the freed hours to work that earns repeat business, such as bed edges, detail passes and irrigation checks. Hours that go nowhere are not savings.

How does a three-year lease compare with adding a person?

A three-year lease turns an open-ended labor question into a fixed commitment you can put in a budget. Service Robot Co. leases robots on a three-year term, with one fixed payment quoted after a free site assessment. That quote is written for your property, so the comparison runs against a number rather than a range of estimates.

We are OEM-neutral. Our job is to match the machine to your turf, slopes and edges, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service it through our nationwide US engineer network. Once the term is set, the payment does not follow the wage market, which is why a fixed quote suits a budget that a hiring market can swing.

Do property mix and climate decide the answer?

Largely, yes. A mower works best on open, reasonably level turf with clear edges and defined no-go zones. Steep banks, dense tree lines, many small beds or frequent wet spells can shrink the area a mower really covers, which pushes the answer back toward a crew member. Climate changes run time and scheduling too, since hot afternoons, heavy rain and frost delays all alter when a machine can run.

Published figures for mower run time on wet or heat-stressed turf are thin, so ask for site-specific numbers during the assessment rather than borrowing them from a brochure. A useful assessment maps the zones, the charging position and the hours a mower can realistically work, and it turns those findings into the quote.

What should you measure before you decide?

Gather these five figures before you request a quote and hand them to the site assessment team. They turn the debate into arithmetic, and the fixed quote then reflects your properties rather than a generic mowing estimate.

• Mowing hours per week for the last two seasons, split by property.
• Overtime hours logged in peak weeks, with the rate that applied to them.
• Days a position stayed open, and the crew hours that covered those days.
• Share of each property that is open, level turf versus slopes, beds and tight edges.
• Trimming, edging and detail hours that a mower would not remove.