Garden designer cost in the Netherlands, or DIY?

The cost of a garden designer in the Netherlands is about 60 to 90 euros an hour. A complete design costs 300 to 900 euros on average. Drawing a plan of your own plot in tuinontwerp.app costs nothing. Which of the two you need depends on what you want to have in your hands at the end.

How much does a garden designer cost in 2026?

The hourly rate for the design work itself depends on which price overview you read. Three Dutch sites give three bands:

Most studios do not bill hours. They charge a fixed price per garden. A complete design costs 300 to 900 euros on average, and the amount rises with the size of the garden. Homedeal's price overview breaks it down by size:

A planting plan is usually not included. It adds 40 to 60 percent of the design cost, or a fixed amount of 150 to 400 euros.

Part of the price spread comes from the word itself. In the Netherlands, the title tuin- en landschapsarchitect (garden and landscape architect) is protected. Only someone listed in the Dutch Architects Register may use it, since the Architects' Title Act (Wet op de architectentitel) came into force on 1 October 1988. Price comparison sites also list landscapers with a design service under the heading tuinarchitect. Those charge around 45 to 60 euros an hour. At the top end, specialists charge up to 120 euros an hour.

What do you get for the money?

A drawing a landscaper can work from, plus a price. The final design shows every element of the garden in detail: paving, lighting, planting and materials. A quote for building the garden comes with it.

Werkspot prices those parts separately. A layout plan, the drawing seen from above, costs 300 to 750 euros there. A 3D visualisation costs 500 to 1,000 euros and a planting plan 200 to 500 euros. If a layout plan is all you need, you do not pay for the rest.

Those pieces take time: allow 2 to 6 weeks between commissioning the design and receiving the final version. For a garden built in spring, that process starts in winter.

So you are buying two things at once: a decision about the layout, and a document you can compare quotes against. Both steps come up again in the garden design section of the blog.

Cost, lead time and the finished document, side by side

Each row below gives what both options cost and says when to choose the designer over your own plan.

A design fee of a few hundred euros is small next to the cost of building the garden. A landscaper charges 35 to 60 euros an hour, and over a whole garden that adds up fast. If you have the garden built, the design is the cheapest item in the project.

The lead-time row decides when to start. A spring build starts in winter. When the landscaper has a waiting list of months anyway, that time costs you nothing.

The row on the finished document is not about money. A designer delivers a drawing made to be handed to a contractor. Three quotes on one drawing compare better than three quotes on three readings of your own description.

That leaves the row on what each option misses. A calculation does not know the ground underneath. Beyond your property line it sees only the buildings, not your neighbours' trees. Someone standing in your garden sees those.

Can you design your own garden?

Yes, for the layout and the light. Tuinontwerp.app starts from your address. Your plot comes to scale from the cadastral map of the Kadaster, the Dutch land registry, through PDOK, the government's geodata platform. The buildings around it get their heights from 3DBAG, the open dataset of measured building heights for the Netherlands. On that plan you place your terrace, your borders and your plants, each at a grown plant's width. Each plant shows the most hours of direct sun its spot gets on 15 May. Why that day was chosen is explained in garden sun hours, calculated per spot.

The difference from a sketch on paper lies in what you cannot see for yourself. In a worked example with terraced houses, a spot one metre behind the back door is left with 0.0 hours of direct sun. The reason is that the app counts the property line as a wall of 1.8 metres. A sketch does not show that. How that works is set out in north-facing garden plants.

Figures like these are an upper bound. Anything beyond your own plot that you have not drawn is left out, so in practice the spot gets less. To set it beside what you see yourself, the method is in measure sunlight in your garden.

When is a garden designer worth the money?

As soon as the ground itself is involved. Differences in height, drainage, an existing tree that stays, a fence that has to be agreed with the neighbours: those are decisions someone makes on site. The app's calculation assumes one flat ground surface and ignores the soil.

The same goes for putting the work out to quote. A designer's document is made to be handed to a landscaper, with materials and a quote for building the garden. That prevents misunderstandings between you and the contractor.

So choose the designer as soon as you start moving soil, or as soon as you ask contractors to quote. If the garden is flat and your question is mostly about layout and light, your own plan gets you far enough.

From the address field to your own plan

Start at the address field at the bottom of this page. Tuinontwerp.app lays out your plot to scale, with the buildings around it, and you draw your terrace, borders and plants on it. Designing on your own plot is free.

Because the measurements come from cadastral and building-height data, they are right to within decimetres. That is enough to plan a border or a terrace, but too coarse for setting out a foundation.

What you then have is the first half of what a designer delivers: the dimensions of your plot, your layout and the light that falls on it. With that plan, ask a landscaper for a quote. The conversation about your garden then starts with your own layout on the table.