Garden design cost: 2026 prices and your 2027 budget

The cost of a garden design runs from 200 to 1,500 euros if you have it made, with 500 euros as the average. For a garden of 300 m² or more you pay 1,000 to 1,800 euros and up. You draw a plan of your own garden yourself in tuinontwerp.app, and designing on your own plot costs nothing.

The prices you find online differ by more than a factor of seven. That is because a garden design is not one fixed product. It can be a sketch on squared paper or a worked-out drawing with dimensions and a planting plan.

How much does a garden design cost in 2027?

Budget 200 to 1,500 euros if you have it made. Within that range, the 2026 price lists give an average band of 410 to 590 euros.

No rates for 2027 have been published yet. The amounts below come from the 2026 price lists, and those are the figures to set your budget with now.

Homedeal is a Dutch price comparison site for home improvement work, and Trustoo a Dutch platform for finding tradespeople.

The garden designer row is not like the others. Price comparison sites also list landscapers with a design service under that heading. Starters there charge around 45 to 60 euros, and specialists up to 120 euros an hour. So the hourly rate covers a wider group than the protected Dutch title tuin- en landschapsarchitect (garden and landscape architect). What that title means is explained in garden designer cost in the Netherlands, or DIY.

Within that band, the size of the garden mostly decides where you land. Homedeal names four price factors, in this order on its page: the size of your garden, with or without a planting plan, designing it yourself or hiring it out, and extra options and additions.

Priced per square metre, the picture changes. Hovenier.website is a Dutch site on landscaping and design prices. It gives 3.50 euros per square metre for a garden up to 100 m², 2.75 euros for 100 to 200 m², 1.50 euros for 200 to 400 m² and 1.06 euros for 400 to 800 m². A large garden costs more than a small one, but less per metre. The drawing work does not grow with the area.

What do you get in each price class?

A drawing, and a different one per class. At the bottom it is a layout: where the terrace goes, where the path runs, where the borders lie. Further up, the dimensions are added, along with the materials that go into the garden.

The design price is made up of four items: design and layout, working out and detailing, consultation, advice and corrections, and preparing the build. The lowest class mainly buys the design and the layout. The highest class buys all four, plus choices you would otherwise have had to make yourself.

The planting plan is priced on its own. Allow about 50 percent of the design cost on top of the price, or 40 to 60 percent in a wider estimate. So a 500-euro design with a planting plan comes to about 750 euros.

What the most expensive class adds is presentation and detail: a 3D design, a lighting plan, extra technical work. Those are options, not fixed parts. Each one can be left out without making the design unusable.

The design and layout item is one you can settle yourself before you ask for a quote. In tuinontwerp.app you draw that layout on a plan of your own plot, with your terrace, your borders and your plants to scale.

What makes a design dearer in 2027 than in 2026

Labour costs, and an index the trade itself puts on them. Since 2024, CBS (Statistics Netherlands) has published a quarterly price and labour cost index for the green sector. It draws the index up with Koninklijke VHG, the Dutch trade association for landscapers. The index is meant to give landscapers a reference point when they adjust their rates each year.

At the end of the second quarter of 2025, that index stood at 4.7 percent. The collective labour agreement for the landscaping trade provided for a wage rise of 2.5 percent from 1 January 2026. Vakblad De Hovenier, the Dutch trade magazine for landscapers, expected an average rate rise of 4 to 5 percent to be needed in 2026 to keep margins up.

For 2027 that figure does not exist yet. What does exist is the mechanism: CBS publishes the index every quarter, and wages under the collective agreement rise on 1 January. So a design you budget at 500 euros today needs a little more for next spring.

The VHG itself notes that indexing is a matter for each business. A sector figure is an indication, not a rate. Always ask for a current quote rather than working from a price list in an article, this one included.

Which costs are not in the design price?

Three. A site visit for advice costs 120 to 250 euros. Sketch and administration costs come to about 100 euros. Extra advice outside the design is charged at about 70 euros an hour.

The biggest item stays out of sight as long as you only compare design prices. Having the garden built costs 50 to 300 euros per square metre, and a landscaper charges 35 to 65 euros an hour. Next to those amounts, the design is the smallest line on the bill.

Starting on your own plot

You can settle the design and layout item yourself, and that costs nothing: designing on your own plot is free. Enter your address at the bottom of this page. Tuinontwerp.app takes your plot from the cadastral map of the Kadaster, the Dutch land registry, via PDOK, the government's geodata platform, and lays it out to scale. Around it stand the buildings, with their heights from 3DBAG, the open dataset of measured building heights for the Netherlands. You draw your terrace and borders on it and place your plants, each as wide as a grown plant.

Next to each plant, the plan gives the most hours of direct sun that spot gets on 15 May. How that sum works is explained in garden sun hours, calculated per spot. It is an upper bound: soil, differences in height and your neighbours' trees are not in the calculation, and the measurements are right to within decimetres. For a border and a terrace that is enough; for setting out a foundation it is not.

More on the order of design, quote and build is in the garden design section of the blog. When you then ask for a quote, your own layout is already on the table.