For most lawn care operators, the last leaf cleanup leaves a gap of about ten weeks. Mowing revenue drops to nothing, but the truck payment, insurance, and phone bill keep coming. Some guys plow snow. Some take a seasonal job. A growing number put up Christmas lights, and the ones who do it right often clear $8,000 to $25,000 between November 1st and mid-January using the truck, trailer, and client list they already have.

This isn't a get-rich-quick pitch. Holiday lighting is real work: ladders, roofs, cold hands, and a short window where everyone wants their install done the same week. But it fits a lawn care business better than almost any other add-on, because your best leads are clients you already mow for every week. Here's how to set it up so it makes money and doesn't wear you out.

Why Lighting Fits a Lawn Care Business

Your clients have already decided they'd rather pay someone than do the work themselves. That's the whole sale. Someone who pays you $45 a week so they don't have to mow is also not going to want to climb a 24-foot ladder in December to clip C9 bulbs onto their gutters.

  • Zero acquisition cost — if you have 60 recurring mowing clients and 15–20% say yes, that's 9 to 12 installs before you spend a dollar on marketing.
  • Same equipment base — your truck, trailer, and route software all carry over. You'll add ladders and lights, not a whole new fleet.
  • Route density still applies — the neighborhoods where you mow are where you'll install. Three installs on one street means one setup and almost no drive time.
  • Keeps crew employed — if you have even one employee, giving them winter hours means they're still around in April instead of working somewhere else.
The best holiday lighting lead isn't a stranger who saw your yard sign. It's the client who already pays you on autopay and waves at you from the kitchen window.

Pricing: Per Foot, With a Real Minimum

Most established lighting companies price rooflines by the linear foot, and that's the easiest model to quote quickly. Typical ranges in 2026:

  • Roofline (first story) — $3.50 to $6.00 per linear foot, including lights, install, takedown, and storage
  • Roofline (second story or steep pitch) — $5.50 to $9.00 per linear foot
  • Wrapped trees — $8 to $15 per foot of trunk height for trunk wraps, or $150 to $600+ per tree for full canopy wraps depending on size
  • Shrubs and hedges — $40 to $100 per shrub, or a per-foot rate for long hedge lines
  • Wreaths and garland — sold as add-ons at 2–3x your wholesale cost

Set a minimum and stick to it. A $450 to $600 minimum is normal. Even a small ranch house has a real cost to show up: ladder setup, power layout, timer, cleanup, and a separate takedown trip in January. If you charge $280 for a 70-foot roofline, you'll lose money once you count both trips.

Measure before you quote. Satellite measuring tools work fine for rooflines. Measure the gutter run you'll actually light, not the whole house perimeter, and add 10% for peaks and gables. If you already measure lawns from satellite imagery, it's the same skill.

The Lease Model vs. Selling the Lights

This is the decision that matters most for whether lighting becomes a real business or just a one-time gig.

Selling the lights means the client owns them. You install, they keep the strands in their garage, and next year they might call you or might do it themselves. Margins are fine the first year and unpredictable after that.

Leasing the lights means you own the inventory. The client pays one price for install, takedown, and storage. You label every strand by address, pull them off the house in January, and store them in totes. Next year you show up with lights already cut to fit their roofline.

The lease model wins for three reasons:

  1. Year two is mostly profit — your lights are paid off, cut to length, and labeled. A 150-foot roofline that took 3 hours the first year takes about 1.5 hours the second.
  2. Renewals are sticky — good lighting companies renew 70–85% of clients. You can offer returning clients a small discount (5–10%) and still make more per hour than you did the first year.
  3. You control the quality — commercial-grade LEDs with replaceable bulbs look better and last longer than big-box strands, and every house becomes an ad for you.
Price year one to cover your inventory. Price year two to make your profit. Clients who renew are where lighting gets lucrative.

Equipment and Startup Costs

You don't need a big buildout. A realistic startup for a solo operator or a two-person crew targeting 15 to 25 installs looks like this:

  • Ladders — one 24–28 ft fiberglass extension ladder, one 6–8 ft step ladder, and a ladder stabilizer (standoff) so you aren't leaning on the gutters. Budget $600–$900.
  • Fall protection — a harness and roof anchor kit for anything above one story or steeper than a 6/12 pitch. About $150–$300.
  • Wire and sockets — SPT-1 or SPT-2 wire on spools with slide-on sockets lets you cut every run to the exact length. Roughly $0.40–$0.70 per foot wholesale.
  • Bulbs — commercial LED C9s run $0.30–$0.60 each at wholesale. At 12-inch spacing, figure about one bulb per foot.
  • Clips — all-in-one gutter/shingle clips, around $0.10 each. One clip per bulb.
  • Timers, extension cords, and GFCI protection — $15–$30 per house.
  • Storage — labeled totes, one per client address.

All-in, expect roughly $1.20 to $2.00 per linear foot of roofline in materials. At $4.50 per foot billed, a 150-foot house brings in $675 against about $250 in lights you'll reuse for three to five seasons. Total startup for 20 houses usually lands between $4,000 and $7,000, and most operators make that back in the first season.

Ready to put this into practice? Download on the App Store — it’s free and works offline.

Safety and Electrical: The Part You Can't Skip

Ladder falls are the biggest risk in this work, and it's not something to learn the hard way. A few rules worth following from day one:

  • Check your insurance before your first install. Many general liability policies for lawn care exclude work above a certain height or roof work entirely. Call your agent and get it in writing. If you need a rider, it's usually a few hundred dollars for the season.
  • Use two people for anything over one story. One person on the ladder, one person footing it and handing up material. It's faster too.
  • No roof work when it's wet, icy, or windy. Build weather days into your schedule. You already know how to run a rain day plan; this is the same idea.
  • Respect circuit limits. A standard 15-amp household circuit can safely handle about 1,440 watts continuous (80% of 1,800). LED C9s draw well under a watt each, so you won't overload circuits the way old incandescent displays did. But always plug into GFCI-protected outlets and never daisy-chain indoor cords outside.
  • Don't touch the electrical panel. If a client wants a new outlet, refer them to an electrician. You're a lighting installer, not a licensed electrician.
A dropped strand costs you twenty minutes. A fall costs you the business. Two people, stabilizers, and a dry roof every time.

Scheduling the Season

The holiday lighting calendar is short and the timing is predictable:

  1. Mid-September to mid-October: sell. Mention it on fall invoices, text your mowing clients, and put a line in your leaf cleanup quotes. Offer a 10% early-booking discount if they sign by October 15th.
  2. November 1st to December 10th: install. Most clients want lights up before Thanksgiving. Book installs in neighborhood clusters, just like a mowing route, and schedule the biggest houses first so you're not doing a 400-foot job on December 12th.
  3. Turn-on window: around Thanksgiving weekend. Set timers ahead of time so clients don't have to call you. Dusk to 11 PM is the standard.
  4. January 2nd to January 20th: takedown. This trip is already paid for. Pull the lights, coil them, label the tote with the address and run lengths, and store them.

Plan for 4 to 6 installs per day with a two-person crew on average single-story homes. A 150-foot roofline should take 2 to 3 hours in year one. Write down actual times per job so you can tighten your per-foot pricing next year, the same way you'd job-cost a mowing account.

LawnBook works well here. Add lighting as its own service type on existing client records, log install and takedown as separate jobs, and add notes like outlet locations, run lengths, and timer settings. Because it works offline, you can pull up those notes on a ladder in a subdivision with bad signal, and next November everything you need for that house is already saved.

Partnering, Tracking, and Keeping the Books Clean

Some of the best lighting leads come from other home service businesses. If you know someone who runs a residential cleaning company, offer a referral swap. Their clients are also people who pay for household help, and cleaning businesses are busy in the holiday season too. Many of them run their operations on ShineBook, so it's easy to send referrals back and forth. A $50 referral credit in each direction costs almost nothing compared to what a renewing lighting client is worth.

On the money side, keep lighting revenue separate from mowing revenue. They have different margins, different seasonality, and a big inventory purchase up front. If you're solo and tracking hours across several kinds of work (lighting, snow, a winter side gig), a tool like Stintly makes it easier to see your real hourly rate and set money aside for quarterly taxes. Your bulbs and wire are business inventory or equipment, so keep the receipts. Your Schedule C will thank you in April.

Inside LawnBook, invoicing lighting as a separate line item from your fall cleanup keeps the reporting clean. At the end of the season you can see exactly how many lighting clients you had, what they paid, and which ones to call first next September.

What a Realistic First Season Looks Like

Here's a conservative example for a solo operator with one seasonal helper:

  • Clients — 14 installs, mostly from the existing mowing list
  • Average ticket — $720 (about 140 ft of roofline plus a couple of shrubs)
  • Gross revenue — about $10,080
  • Materials (reusable) — about $3,400
  • Helper labor — about 70 hours at $20 = $1,400
  • Insurance rider, fuel, timers, misc. — about $900
  • Year-one net — about $4,380, plus $3,400 of inventory you own

Now year two: 12 of those 14 renew at a 5% discount, and you add 8 new clients. Install time on the renewals drops by roughly 40% because the lights are already cut and labeled. Net profit for the season often doubles, and you didn't need a single new piece of equipment.

Holiday lighting won't replace your mowing income, and it shouldn't. What it does is fill the worst ten weeks of your year with work that uses the trust you've already built with clients. Start small with 10 to 15 houses, lease instead of sell, price for two trips, and take safety seriously. Do that for one season and you'll have the start of a winter business that grows every year your clients renew.