How to price landscape lighting by the fixture
A lighting contractor is not pricing a feeling. You are pricing a counted set of fixtures, installed and aimed, that still has to work a few years from now. The practical unit is the fixture. One number, times the count on the plan.
It does depend. A price per fixture lets the client multiply, instead of waiting on a total with nothing behind it.
A published unit price
Nite-Lite Landscape Lighting's public pricing page is a worked example. Those figures are for their brass, their crew, and the drive from East Setauket or Boston. The same pricing on that page applies to their Long Island and Boston projects. Yours will differ.
They publish a typical installed price of $500 to $600 per fixture, and a full range of $400 to $750. Multiply that unit by the fixture count on the plan and you are in the neighborhood.
They split the unit in two. The fixture is $200 to $600 retail: solid brass, a quality LED, the part the client keeps. The rest is the system: design time, direct burial wire and proper runs, transformers sized for the load, waterproof connections at every splice, trenching and site work, installation labor, and the nighttime aiming session. A fixture in a box is not a lighting system. The second half of the number is what makes it one.
Check the unit against a whole job
The same page lists what their work looks like at a few scales, so the unit and the project price can be checked against each other.
A focused front elevation (entry, architecture, specimen trees, and the walkways used at night) is 25 to 40 fixtures and $15,000 to $20,000, about $500 to $600 per fixture. Forty fixtures at $500 is $20,000. Twenty-five at $600 is $15,000.
A full property, front and back, is the row they mark as most common: about 50 fixtures and $25,000 to $30,000. Fifty times $500 is $25,000. Fifty times $600 is $30,000.
A larger property is 100 to 150 fixtures and $50,000 to $65,000, about $435 to $500 per fixture. Design time, transformers, and mobilization do not grow in a straight line with the count, so a 150-fixture job does not cost three times a 50-fixture one. Per-fixture cost drops as projects grow, up to a point. Estate work reverses that: 300 to 600 fixtures, $150,000 to $400,000, quoted individually, because harder sites and higher-specification fixtures push the unit back up.
One project on the page is a count rather than a range: 210 fixtures, 9 types, 2700K throughout. The sheets cover a drive and entry, then the main house, a pool terrace, and the surrounding grounds. Types named there include antique brass MR16 accents, tree-mounted downlights, path lights, well lights, and niche lights. Locate every fixture, give it a type, and count it before you say the price.
What moves your number
Fixture count is the largest factor, and it comes from the property and the design. Their page contrasts a half-acre with a straightforward front elevation against three acres with mature specimen trees, water features, and multiple outdoor living zones.
Material moves the unit. Solid brass costs more than cast aluminum, and considerably more than composite, and it lasts decades outdoors instead of years. Say which housing your unit assumes.
Site conditions add labor the fixture price does not contain: mature plantings, established hardscape, boring under a driveway, long wire runs from the transformer. Controls are their own line: a photocell and a timer, zoned control, or a full smart system. Name the one the price includes.
Design is a separate fee on that page, $250 to $1,500, paid before anything is installed. It covers travel back and forth, multiple appointments, and the hours to produce a plan: a drone aerial, every fixture on the drawing, wiring diagrams, and specification sheets. Where the fee lands depends on property size and design complexity. Keep it out of the installed unit, or say on the proposal that it is already inside. Do not collect it twice.
The low number is a different product
A bid around $225 per fixture installed is roughly half their typical unit, sometimes less. The fixture in that bid is often a $25 import, sometimes less. The LED is the cheapest available: poor color rendering, and heat the housing cannot shed, so it fails early, often in one or two years rather than in ten. The connections are usually indoor wire nuts, buried, and wire nuts corrode in the ground. That page uses heat-shrink waterproof connectors on every splice. None of this is visible on install day. Both systems look fine the first night. Compare your price with theirs plus the cost of doing the job again. If you cannot name fixture, wire, connections, transformer, trench, aim, and the drive inside your unit, you do not have a unit yet.
Keep the unit in one book
The same fixture has to cost the same thing on the next job. That is the price book.
In NiteLiteOS the price book is the lights you sell. Each row has your cost and your sell price, and the lamps and parts that go with that light. Add one from the catalog, or add your own. Labor is a separate list, because a well light does not take the same time to set as a path light on a stake. New drawings use your book only when you turn that on. Until then they still offer the built-in list, which may not be what you buy.
The drawing holds the count. Place the fixtures on an aerial of the property. The sheet keeps the legend, the beam spreads, and the wiring, and it checks voltage drop and transformer size while you draw. The job price is that sheet: lights, lamps, wire, hours, and the drive. You see your cost and the margin before a proposal goes out. Drop the back garden from the plan and both the count and the price change with the drawing.
Set the unit from real costs, the way the public page sets $500 to $600 as a fixture plus a system. Check it on finished jobs the way their table checks 25 fixtures and then 150.
Put two more numbers on the proposal
Their page says a maintained system lasts, and that the failures people blame on landscape lighting are mostly maintenance and components. A typical residential system starts around $300 a year. One visit: clean every fixture, check the connections, re-aim anything that has shifted, and replace what needs replacing. Large estates start around $5,000 a year, and the biggest properties they maintain run well into five figures. Most people sit much closer to the first number. Quote it as crew size times days on site, not as a percentage of the install.
A budget under $15,000 is, on that page, probably the wrong fit for a full design. A single tree or a short entry sequence can still be the right job. Price it on the same unit.
Price by the fixture. Show the count. Keep one book. The client can multiply on the plan you handed over. So can you, before you send it.