How to Start a Landscape Lighting Installation Business

How do you start a landscape lighting installation business step by step?

Confirm your state's low voltage rule, register the business, bind liability insurance, buy a transformer, wire and pro-grade fixtures, install free demo systems, photograph them at night, then close paid work with nighttime demos.

Zero to first paid job is two to four weeks in this trade, and the gate is not money. The mechanics are quick to learn. The wiring is 12 volt, the fixtures land on stakes, and the layouts repeat house to house. What takes years is aiming, controlling glare, and burying a splice that survives five winters. Your buried connections are what decide whether you still have a business in year three.

So do the free systems first. Your own house, your parents, the neighbor with the good magnolia. Set the fixtures, run the wire, measure voltage at the transformer and at the last fixture on the run, then go back after the first hard rain and again at six months and open every connection you made. What you find in those splice boxes is your real training.

• Confirm the license line before you spend a dollar. Of the 50 states, 24 plus Washington D.C. require some form of licensing for low voltage installation and 11 have a dedicated low voltage specialty license. Call your state board and ask about landscape lighting by name.
• Set up the legal side. LLC or sole proprietorship, EIN, business bank account, and a written contract that says who owns the fixtures until the invoice clears.
• Bind general liability before the first shovel goes in the ground. Budget $600 to $1,200 a year for a solo landscape lighting operator, which sits near the $610 a year average landscaping businesses pay.
• Buy the starter kit: one 300 watt multi-tap transformer, a 250 foot spool of 12/2 direct burial wire, a canister of King Innovation DryConn connectors, a trenching shovel, a cordless hammer drill, wire strippers, and a multimeter.
• Open a wholesale account. SiteOne Landscape Supply runs over 800 locations and is an authorized FX Luminaire distributor. Ewing and Wolf Creek serve the same channel.
• Learn the two numbers that make you a pro: load a transformer to no more than 80 percent of its rating, and keep voltage drop between the transformer and the last fixture under about 2 volts.
• Call 811 before you trench on any property, including the free ones. The locate is free, it takes a couple of business days, and cutting an unmarked gas or communications service with no ticket on file is the fastest way to end a new business.
• Install two or three free systems, photograph them at night, then book the first paid job with a nighttime demo. Set six fixtures on a prospect's lawn after dark, turn them on, and quote while they are standing in it.

How much does it cost to start a landscape lighting business?

Tools and setup run $3,100 to $7,700 before you buy fixtures for any paying job. Add stock, insurance, marketing and a reserve and a realistic solo open is closer to $5,600.

Two figures get quoted in this trade and they measure different things. A supplier that sells to landscape lighting installers puts total initial investment at $3,100 to $7,700, and says plainly that the number excludes fixtures for a paying job. The same source calls $15,000 to $40,000 the ideal funded launch. The table below is the version that includes fixture stock, insurance, marketing and a reserve, so its totals land above the $3,100 headline. Both are honest. They just count different things.

Say you take a 12 fixture job the week you open. One Kichler 15PR300SS Pro Series 300 watt stainless transformer is $424.99. Twelve brass path and spot fixtures at roughly $55 each is $660. One 250 foot spool of 12/2 direct burial wire is $151. That is $1,235.99 of material sitting in your truck on a job nobody has paid you for yet. Take a material deposit at signing or that number comes out of your own pocket on every single job, which is exactly why the operating reserve line is not padding.

The gap between the two columns is stock and reserve, not tools. A crew needs spare transformers on the shelf, both wire gauges, and three months of operating expenses behind it, which trade sources put at $5,000 to $10,000 for a small crew.

Do you need an electrical license to install low voltage landscape lighting?

There is no national license. Of 50 states, 24 plus Washington D.C. regulate low voltage work and 11 have a dedicated low voltage license. Texas exempts landscapers except the power source. Florida exempts only plug-in systems.

The whole licensing question hangs on one number: 30 volts. NEC Article 411 governs lighting systems operating at 30 volts or less, and the statutory carve-outs across states follow the same shape. They exempt installation and service of listed landscape lighting systems except for any permanent wired connection exceeding 30 volts. Texas says it most plainly, exempting landscapers who install and maintain low voltage exterior lighting and holiday lighting, excluding any required power source.

So here is the business model that keeps a non-electrician legal. Everything downstream of the transformer's secondary is yours. The 120 volt supply feeding the transformer is not. Plug a transformer into an existing exterior GFCI receptacle and you stay inside the exemption in most states. Hardwire that same transformer and you have done electrical work. Florida spells it out: the exemption survives only for a factory-installed cord with plug that does not require installation, wiring, or other modification to the structure's wiring.

The practical answer is a phone number. Find a licensed electrician who will install an exterior GFCI receptacle with an in-use cover for you, because the customer with nowhere to plug in the transformer is a common job, not a rare one. 2023 NEC 210.8(F) requires GFCI protection on outdoor outlets on circuits of 150 volts or less to ground and 50 amps or less, which covers essentially every residential lighting transformer. And know the gotcha before an inspector says it to you: GFCI protection on the primary side of an isolation transformer does not provide GFCI protection on the secondary side.

Know your burial depths before someone else quotes them at you. Cover requirements live in NEC Article 300 and Table 300.5. For circuits of 30 volts or less in Type UF or other identified cable the minimum cover is 6 inches, and 18 inches under residential driveways and outdoor parking areas. Line voltage is a different world: 120 volt outdoor cable has to go 18 inches deep, in conduit, with sealed junction boxes at every connection. That trench-and-conduit requirement is most of why 120 volt landscape lighting costs what it does, and it is another reason the 12 volt side is where a new business belongs.

Then call 811 before every trench, on paid jobs and free ones. The locate is free and it takes a couple of business days. Irrigation lines are not marked by 811 either, so walk the yard with the homeowner and find the heads and the valve box before you cut a single line. A severed gas or fiber service with no locate ticket on file is a liability problem your general liability carrier will ask hard questions about.

Certification is separate from licensing and it is voluntary. The Association of Outdoor Lighting Professionals runs two programs. CLVLT, Certified Low Voltage Lighting Technician, is a standardized exam written specifically for 12 volt systems, 8 sections, written and hands-on, with a $50 fee to retake a failed section. COLD, Certified Outdoor Lighting Designer, is the advanced design credential, revised from a four year program down to just over one year, with continuing education and a $50 renewal fee every two years. Neither is required anywhere. Both put letters after your name that a $10,000 client notices.

Where a license does apply, budget for it. California is the clearest published example: the CSLB charges $450 to apply for an original contractor's license and $200 for the initial license as a sole owner, $350 otherwise, the C-27 trade exam is 100 questions in 210 minutes with a 72 percent pass mark, failed parts are retakeable every 21 days for a $100 reschedule fee, and a contractor bond runs about $250 a year. California also raised the no-license threshold from $500 to $1,000 effective January 1, 2025, for jobs needing no permit where the worker employs nobody.

On insurance: $600 to $1,200 a year is the realistic band for a solo landscape lighting operator. Landscaping businesses average $51 a month, or $610 a year, for general liability, and 79 percent of them pay under $100 a month. Workers compensation is driven by payroll, so a true one-person shop usually has little exposure until the first hire, though state rules on including or excluding the owner differ. Landscapers fall under NCCI class code 0042, and at the 2025 national average of $4.39 per $100 of payroll, one $50,000 a year installer costs roughly $2,195 in comp.

What should you charge for landscape lighting installation?

Most of the trade quotes per fixture installed. Budget-tier work lands $100 to $200 per point, and specialist design-build work lands $300 to $500. Whole systems average $2,000 to $6,000.

Sources genuinely disagree on the per-fixture number, and you should know why before you set your price list. Consumer cost aggregators cluster at $100 to $250 per installed fixture. A national franchise in this trade publishes about $325 per fixture as its rule of thumb covering product plus installation. Both are true. They describe different businesses. The $100 tier hangs roughly $30 retail fixtures. The $325 tier hangs roughly $80 professional fixtures that, as that same franchise source admits, may look identical in the box.

Take Dana, quoting a 14 fixture front-yard system in a Nashville suburb. She prices 14 points at $325 each installed, which is $4,550. Her cost side: 14 pro-grade brass fixtures at about $55 each is $770, one 300 watt transformer at $425, 250 feet of 12/2 wire at $195, and connectors, stakes and sleeving at $80, so $1,470 of material. Labor is one install day with a helper, about 17 crew hours at trade productivity of roughly 20 minutes a fixture plus wire burial, then a 3 hour evening trip to aim, which every real lighting job needs. Twenty crew hours at $40 an hour loaded is $800. Job cost is $2,270, gross profit is $2,280, and that is 50 percent, the middle of the 40 to 60 percent gross margin band a healthy lighting company should run.

Do not quote by the hour if you can avoid it. Customers who ask for an hourly rate are shopping a $50 to $100 an hour market and comparing you to a handyman. Quote the finished result. Charge the design separately at $200 to $500 if you are producing a real plan, and tell the customer up front whether that fee is credited against the install.

How do you get your first landscape lighting customers?

Nighttime demos sell this trade better than anything else. Set fixtures on a prospect's lawn after dark and let them see it. Then work neighbors, landscapers, pool builders, and finished jobs.

The highest-leverage habit in this trade is working the street you just finished. Your installs run every night from dusk in front of every neighbor who drives past, for free, for years. Nothing else in your marketing does that, so build the follow-up around it instead of chasing the whole metro.

Marcus finishes a 16 fixture system on a corner lot in October. He spends $300 on 2,500 door hangers and walks 600 of them over three evenings, only on the streets with a sight line to that house, timed so homeowners find the hanger and then look up the block at a lit front yard. Six people call over the next six weeks. He runs four nighttime demos and closes two jobs, one at 12 fixtures and one at 16. At $325 per point that is 28 points and $9,100 of signed work against $72 of print, with 1,900 hangers left over for the next install. Those conversion numbers are a model, not a published statistic, so track your own from job one.

Trade startup guidance puts initial marketing, meaning a simple website, cards and a few local ads, at $500 to $1,500 in total. Spend it in that order. Paid search gets expensive in fall when the franchises bid hard, so put the free channels to work first: a Google Business Profile stacked with night photos, the referral relationships below, and demos. Add paid search only once you know what a booked job is worth to you, because one closed $4,000 system funds a lot of clicks and a stack of unbooked clicks funds nothing.

• Nighttime demo kit. Six fixtures, one transformer, a 100 foot cord for when there is an outdoor outlet and a battery pack for when there is not. Thirty minutes of setup closes jobs a brochure never will.
• Door hangers on the streets that can see your finished installs. The lit house is the proof, the hanger is just the phone number.
• Landscape designers, landscape maintenance companies, and irrigation contractors. They are already in the yard, lighting is not their scope, and they want someone to hand it to.
• Pool builders and hardscape contractors. A new patio or pool deck is the single most common trigger for a lighting call.
• Home builders and remodelers doing exterior work. Get in before the sod goes down and your wire runs cost half the labor.
• Realtors listing higher-end homes. A lit front elevation photographs at dusk and sells the listing.
• Your own night photo library. Same angle, before and after, posted every single week. This is a visual trade and buyers decide with their eyes.
• Service calls on other people's failed systems. A $150 repair visit on a dead zone is the cheapest way to meet a customer who will eventually buy a whole new system.

What tools and equipment do you need for landscape lighting installation?

A trenching shovel, cordless hammer drill, wire strippers, a multimeter, and DryConn connectors do the work. Budget $2,000 to $5,000 for the full kit, plus field service software for quotes.

Two technical rules decide whether your systems last, and both are free to follow. First, the American Lighting Association recommends loading a transformer to no more than 80 percent of its rated capacity. Add your total fixture wattage and divide by 0.80. So 200 watts of fixtures needs at least a 250 watt transformer. Run a transformer at its limit and the core vibrates and throws waste heat that can melt internal wire insulation. Where the manufacturer publishes a VA rating, size on VA rather than watts. With modern LED fixtures the two are nearly identical, but VA is the accurate number.

That is also why the 300 watt multi-tap is the trade's default, and it is not because a typical LED system draws anywhere near 300 watts. LED fixtures pull a fraction of what halogen did. You buy the 300 for the taps, the terminal blocks, and the headroom for the second zone the customer asks for in two years. Sizing down to save $150 on the transformer is how you end up pulling one out on a return visit.

Second, watch voltage drop. Most systems perform best with cable runs under 100 to 150 feet unless you are actively balancing the load. If the drop between the transformer and the last fixture on a run exceeds about 2 volts, the cable layout has to change, not the lamp. This is the entire reason pro transformers are multi-tap. VOLT and FX units offer 12V, 13V, 14V and 15V taps, and the VOLT Pro-Grade goes to 22 volts. Those taps exist to compensate for line loss.

Buy through the wholesale channel once you have volume. SiteOne Landscape Supply is the largest US wholesale distributor of irrigation and outdoor lighting to green-industry pros, with over 800 locations and an FX Luminaire distributorship. Ewing is its main competitor. Wolf Creek Company is a regional distributor that also runs installer training. Home Depot and Lowe's are fine for Southwire cable and an emergency Kichler transformer, not for spec fixtures.

What should the first 90 days of a landscape lighting business look like?

Weeks one and two are setup, tools, and a free demo system. Weeks three to six chase paid residential jobs and night photos. Weeks seven to twelve add maintenance contracts and holiday pre-sell.

Time your launch if you can. Starting in July or August puts your first 90 days directly into the fall peak, and gives you the summer runway to pre-sell holiday lighting before the good product runs out.

What mistakes kill new landscape lighting businesses?

The killers are bad buried splices, overloading transformers past 80 percent, ignoring voltage drop, hardwiring a transformer without a license, trenching without an 811 locate, and selling installs with no maintenance contract.

• Bad buried splices. Corroded or disconnected wire splices at the fixture are the most frequent cause of zone failures, and poorly executed underground splices are the number one cause of flickering lights and dead runs. Use UL 486D listed direct-bury connectors, not tape.
• The delayed failure that ruins your reputation. A nicked cable jacket lets water reach copper and the lights keep working for days or weeks while the copper oxidizes green and brittle. The callback lands long after you drove away, and the customer believes you sold them junk.
• Loading a transformer to 100 percent of its rating. Ignoring the 80 percent rule is described as the number one sizing mistake in this trade. It makes the core vibrate and generate heat that melts internal insulation.
• Guessing at voltage drop instead of measuring it. Measure at the transformer, mid-run, and the final fixture. Most electrical faults in a low voltage system become obvious the moment you take three readings.
• Hardwiring the transformer because the customer has no exterior receptacle. That single decision can take you outside your state's low voltage exemption. Sub it to a licensed electrician and mark it up.
• Trenching without a locate. Call 811 on every property, every time, and walk the irrigation zones with the homeowner because 811 does not mark private irrigation. Cutting a lateral is an expensive afternoon. Cutting a gas or fiber service with no ticket on file is a claim you pay for.
• Treating holiday lighting as the same job. Rooflines mean ladders and heights, which is a different injury profile and a different insurance conversation than staking path lights. Tell your carrier before your first roofline, not after a fall.
• Buying the $30 retail fixture instead of the $80 professional one because they look identical in the box. They stop looking identical after two winters, and you eat the warranty.
• Pricing by the hour. At $50 to $100 an hour you are competing with handymen for a job whose value is the finished night scene, not your time.
• Never selling maintenance. A system with no service plan means dead fixtures, an unhappy customer, and no revenue between installs. Contracts run $100 to $400 a year, or $55 to $200 per visit.
• Skipping the nighttime demo and quoting from a photo. Nobody buys landscape lighting in daylight.
• Taking fall work you cannot install before the ground freezes. September through November is the crush, and an overbooked calendar in October turns into refunds in December.

Is a landscape lighting business worth it?

Yes, if you hold 40 to 60 percent gross margin and stack maintenance contracts. The solo ceiling is install days, not demand. Nobody publishes a credible first-year solo figure, so model yours from points per day.

No credible source publishes a first-year revenue figure for a solo landscape lighting operator, so build one from the inputs instead of trusting a number you read somewhere. A standard residential install of 15 to 25 fixtures is one full day for an experienced crew, roughly 20 minutes per fixture, and about 20 fixtures a day for a three-man crew. A one-person operation is materially slower than that, and nobody publishes how much slower, so do not divide the crew number by three and call it a fact.

So model it conservatively. Say you average 5 installed points a day working alone and get 90 real install days in year one, allowing for weather, estimates, night aiming trips, and the January to March trough. That is 450 points. At $325 per point installed that is $146,250 of signed work. Hold the 50 percent gross margin from the pricing example above and you keep $73,125 before insurance, vehicle, marketing and your own overhead. Cut the assumption to 4 points a day and 70 days and it drops to 280 points and $91,000 of revenue. Both are models, not promises. Run yours before you quit anything.

The recurring layer is what makes this a business instead of a series of projects. Annual maintenance plans run $100 to $400 a year. Per-visit pricing runs about $55 for small garden systems and $150 to $200 for larger ones, and one working contractor posts a structure of $120 minimum for the first hour of a scheduled visit, then $80 an hour in 15 minute increments plus parts, twice a year. Forty contracts at $250 a year is $10,000 of revenue that shows up whether or not you sold a new system that month, and it is also how you get first call on every referral those forty houses generate.

The ceiling is real and it is high. A healthy landscape lighting company runs 40 to 60 percent gross margin on projects. Franchise data in this category shows gross margins over 58 percent, with 54.6 percent as the average for the middle third of franchisees, and system average gross sales per location of $718,095. That last figure is a multi-employee franchise location with a full crew and a national brand behind it, and it comes from franchisor marketing, so treat it as the shape of the ceiling rather than a forecast. For context on demand, the global landscape lighting market was $13.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $22.0 billion by 2030, a compound growth rate of 8.9 percent.

When is the busy season, and should you add holiday lighting?

September through November is the hard peak, when the landscape lighting rush collides with holiday install season. January through March is service and repair. Summer is design work and holiday pre-sell.

Fall is the peak install season for a stack of reasons that all point the same way. Cooler weather lets crews move faster. Shorter days make lighting visibly more valuable to a homeowner who is now arriving home in the dark. And customers want projects finished before winter. That same window is when holiday lighting installs start, which is either your biggest opportunity or your biggest scheduling problem depending on how early you plan.

Holiday lighting is the natural crossover because it uses the same customer and the same off-season, but understand that it is not the same work. Landscape lighting is ground-level. Holiday lighting is roofline and ladder work, and it belongs in a conversation with your insurance agent before you sell the first one. Labor-only pricing baselines at $2 to $5 per linear foot, or $6 to $7 where access is hard or wages are high. Supply the lights and materials yourself and it goes to $5 to $10 per linear foot. All-inclusive packages covering lights, install, maintenance and takedown run $6 to $9 per foot, and across all US markets the full range is $8 to $35 per foot, with the San Francisco Bay Area at $25 to $35, the highest in the nation. Permanent holiday lighting is a different product at $20 to $40 per linear foot, with total installs averaging $2,000 to $8,000.

Be careful with average job size, because the sources flatly disagree. One consumer cost guide puts the average US holiday light install at about $442, with most homeowners paying $220 to $685. An industry pricing analysis puts the average job at $1,200 to $1,300 and claims trained first-year installers reach $50,000 to $100,000 and up inside a 60 to 70 working day season. Both numbers are published. They probably describe different markets and different service tiers. A well-managed holiday operation is more commonly described as $10,000 to $50,000 and up in a single season, and successful contractors target 20 to 35 percent net margin on that work.

The one thing everyone agrees on: start selling holiday in summer. Installs might not begin until October, but pro-grade product and custom decor carry long lead times, inventory tightens as the season progresses, and some contractors run Christmas in July campaigns for exactly this reason.

Should you sell design-build or install-only?

Install-only means you hang what somebody else already picked. Design-build means you own the plan, the fixture selection, and the transformer sizing, and you can charge $200 to $500 for the design.

Install-only is the faster start. A landscape designer or a homeowner hands you a fixture count, you dig, wire, set, and aim. You are paid for labor, you compete on labor, and your ceiling is $100 to $200 per point. It is a real living and it teaches you houses fast.

Design-build is where the margin lives. A full-service design-build contractor owns site assessment, fixture selection, transformer sizing, and the low voltage wiring as one scope, and that scope is what supports $300 to $500 per point. You also get to charge separately for the plan, $200 to $500 for a design and detailed illustration the customer can keep. Many design-build shops offer photometric renderings or nighttime walk-throughs so the customer previews the result before a single fixture goes in the ground. Note honestly that nobody publishes close-rate data comparing the two approaches, so any claim that a demo doubles your close rate is unsourced. Demos are standard practice because installers keep doing them, not because a study says so.

The pragmatic path is to start install-only, keep every fixture count and every material list you touch, and switch to design-build the month you can size a transformer and lay out a run without looking anything up.

• Install-only: faster to start, lower per-point price, you compete on labor, and you inherit somebody else's design mistakes.
• Design-build: you set the scope, the fixture grade, and the price. You also own the failure if the layout is wrong.
• Charge for the design either way. A $200 to $500 design fee filters tire-kickers and pays for the site visit.
• Sell the plan, not the fixtures. Customers who shop your fixture list against Amazon are shopping the wrong thing, and a design fee reframes the conversation.
• Either model needs the same technical floor: the 80 percent transformer rule, voltage drop under about 2 volts, and direct-bury rated connectors.