Do Lawn Care Services Know What They're Doing?
Last updated May 2025
To produce a high-quality lawn with a minimum of labor and material—and minimal use of pesticides and other chemicals—lawn care services have to employ knowledgeable workers who can assess soil needs, recognize insects and diseases, select seed varieties, and time treatments. Unfortunately, many companies don’t seem to know much.
Checkbook’s undercover shoppers have over the years collected proposals from lawn care services for more than 100 properties. Usually these proposals include a “lawn analysis” or similar notes from representatives who inspected the space and recommended work and a treatment plan. If all the lawn care services’ estimators knew what they were doing, every analysis would contain similar findings and recommendations.
Not even close. The proposals we get rarely agree on identification of weed species, presence of disease, amount of fertilizer needed, or recommendations on core aeration. Sometimes companies can’t even agree on the square footage of a lawn with clear boundaries.
Worse, when our undercover shoppers recently collected proposals for sample lawns, some companies gave them treatment plans based only on over-the-phone descriptions or satellite imagery to estimate yard sizes—without ever inspecting the lawns’ quality. These same companies often claimed to offer “custom plans.” How is that possible without seeing the lawn in advance?
Because most companies don’t employ representatives who can make informed judgments, many simply follow fixed routines—providing roughly the same treatment for every lawn and applying controls in a preventive broad-scale manner.
Want a more tailored program? You’ll need a company that employs knowledgeable staff that will come to inspect your lawn. Also, carefully read the company’s written materials to determine whether it coherently describes and justifies its lawn care practices.
After each treatment, ask the company to leave you a brief written explanation about what was done and why. Also, be home during some service visits and ask the technician questions—what you learn will help you decide whether to continue using the company.
