Austin has two local rules that separate competent landscapers from everyone else. Watering is restricted to one day a week under current drought stages. And pruning a live oak at the wrong time of year can spread a fungal disease that kills trees across a whole neighbourhood. Neither is obscure — both are widely published locally — which makes ignorance of them a useful filter. This page lists landscapers serving Austin.
What Austin landscapers handle
Maintenance across a long season, with summer work focused on survival under water restriction rather than on growth.
Native and adapted planting design. Austin has a strong native-plant culture, supported by the region’s horticultural institutions, and the local plant palette is genuinely distinct from the rest of Texas.
Irrigation design and repair — the licensed portion of the trade, and critical given how little watering time is permitted.
Limestone hardscape — terraces, retaining walls, dry creek beds, patios — using the material the Hill Country provides in abundance.
Tree care, which in Austin carries the oak wilt considerations below and a strict city tree ordinance.
Licensing: what Texas actually requires
Texas has no general landscaping contractor licence. Anyone can mow, plant and maintain without a state credential.
Irrigation is licensed. Under Texas Occupations Code Chapter 1903, anyone who sells, designs, installs, maintains, alters, repairs, services or inspects an irrigation system must hold a TCEQ licence — earned through a 40-hour course and a six-hour exam requiring 70% in each section, valid for three years. Irrigation Technicians work under the direct supervision of a licensed irrigator.
Unlicensed irrigation work is a Class C misdemeanour under §1903.251, with civil penalties up to $5,000 per day.
Pesticide application is licensed separately through the Texas Department of Agriculture. Because state licensing is otherwise thin, verify general liability and workers’ compensation directly.
What’s specific to Austin
One watering day per week. Austin has been operating under Stage 2 restrictions since July 2025, limiting landscape watering to one day per week on an odd/even address schedule. Stages change with conditions, so confirm the current stage and your assigned day with Austin Water.
Designing for a single weekly watering event is a real constraint, and it rewards the things good designers already do: deep infrequent cycles, cycle-and-soak scheduling for thin soils, heavy mulch, tight hydrozoning, and genuinely drought-adapted plants rather than merely fashionable ones. A landscaper proposing a conventional thirsty lawn under these rules is proposing something that will brown out by August.
Oak wilt is the defining local tree issue. Central Texas has an established oak wilt problem — a fungal disease that spreads between trees through interconnected root systems and via beetles carrying spores to fresh wounds. Live oaks are especially vulnerable because they graft roots with neighbours, so infection moves tree to tree across property lines.
The practical rules any competent Austin landscaper follows:
- Avoid pruning oaks during the highest-risk months, which local guidance places in the spring period when beetles are most active
- Seal every fresh cut on an oak immediately, regardless of season — this is the opposite of general arboricultural advice about wound paint, and it exists specifically because of oak wilt
- Sanitise pruning tools between trees
- Never leave fresh oak wood or brush on site during risk periods
A landscaper who prunes your live oaks in spring and leaves the cuts open is endangering more than your tree. Ask this question directly — it’s the fastest competence test available in this city.
Thin soil over limestone. West and central Austin sit on Hill Country limestone with only inches of soil above bedrock, often alkaline and quick to shed water. East Austin has deeper blackland clay soils that behave completely differently — heavier, more fertile, slower draining. The dividing line runs roughly along the Balcones Escarpment, and a plant list that thrives in Hyde Park may struggle in Westlake and vice versa. Ask which side of town a contractor mostly works.
Flash flooding. The Hill Country’s thin soil over rock sheds water fast, and Central Texas is genuinely prone to sudden intense flooding. Drainage design and erosion control matter on sloped properties, and dry creek beds here are functional infrastructure rather than a decorative motif.
Heat with real winter freezes. Austin sits around USDA zone 8b. Summers are long and severe; winters are mild on average but punctuated by hard freezes that periodically kill marginal plants people install during warm years.
Pricing expectations
Austin figures for 2026, from Austin Water and local landscaping companies:
- Austin Water runs the widest rebate menu of any city on this site: WaterWise Landscape turf-to-native-bed conversion up to $3,000; rainwater harvesting up to $5,000; an irrigation upgrade up to $1,000; laundry-to-landscape greywater up to $600; a pool filter swap up to $250; landscape survival tools — mulch, compost, core aeration — up to $120; a hose-end timer up to $40
- WaterWise Rainscape pays $0.50 per square foot for features that capture and retain rainwater
- Sod installed: $1.38–$2.96 per square foot overall — Bermuda $1.38–$2.00, Buffalo $1.40–$2.00, St. Augustine $1.50–$2.20, Zoysia $1.80–$2.96. Material alone runs $0.30–$0.75 a square foot depending on grass
- Irrigation installation: $4,250–$6,500 on an average suburban yard, with $500–$900 added per zone; another local irrigator prices by lot — $6,000–$12,000 up to a quarter acre, $11,000–$16,000 to half an acre, $16,000 and up beyond
- Tree removal across Austin and Central Texas: small trees such as yaupon holly or Ashe juniper under 25 ft $250 upward; 25–50 ft $800–$2,200; over 50 ft from $2,500 to beyond $7,000. Most jobs land $450–$4,800
- Oak wilt containment adds $200–$500 to a removal — a Central Texas line item that barely exists elsewhere
Austin waters once a week, and that is the permanent baseline rather than a drought emergency. Austin Water has been in its Conservation Stage since 2 September 2025: automatic in-ground irrigation is limited to one assigned day per week — odd addresses Wednesday, even addresses Thursday — and only between midnight and 10 a.m. or 7 p.m. and midnight. Penalties reach $1,000 per violation. Any design that assumes two waterings a week is designing something that will not survive an Austin August, and any irrigation quote should be built around that single window.
The rebate menu is the compensation, and it is unusually broad — eight separate programmes, covering everything from a $40 hose timer to a $5,000 cistern. Two things to know before you count on the big one. Pre-approval is mandatory: work started before Austin Water approves it will not qualify, full stop. And there is an eligibility gate that catches people out — at least 75% of the conversion area must have healthy turf grass to begin with. You cannot claim a turf-conversion rebate on ground that is already dead or bare, so if conversion is the plan, keep the lawn alive until approval lands. The finished bed must reach over 50% plant cover at mature size.
Underground, Austin has the same enemy as San Antonio and Phoenix. Caliche rock and dense clay slow trenching, which is why irrigation here is priced per zone as much as per yard — every zone is another run through difficult ground. Ask what the per-zone figure covers and what happens if rock is hit.
On trees, know the two thresholds before anyone quotes: a protected tree is 19 inches or more in diameter measured 4.5 feet up, and a heritage tree is 24 inches or more. Those are diameters, not circumferences, and they decide whether your removal is a job or a permit application. The City Arborist publishes no dollar mitigation rate, so treat any per-inch figure a contractor quotes you as their estimate rather than the City’s.
These are ranges local landscaping companies publish for this metro rather than survey data, so treat them as a bracket to check a quote against, not a price list.
Two contract items: written Austin Water pre-approval before any turf is removed, and that the area still meets the 75% healthy-turf gate, and the diameter of any tree being removed, measured 4.5 feet up, against the 19-inch and 24-inch thresholds.
Neighborhoods served
Landscapers listed here work across Austin, including Hyde Park, Travis Heights, Zilker, Barton Hills, Tarrytown, Clarksville, Crestview, Allandale, Mueller, Bouldin Creek, Circle C and East Austin.
Most also serve surrounding communities — Round Rock, Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Georgetown, Leander, Kyle, Buda, Lakeway, Bee Cave and West Lake Hills.
How this directory helps
Every landscaper here is listed with business name, address and phone so you can verify them yourself.
The three questions worth asking in Austin: request the TCEQ irrigator licence number for any sprinkler work; ask how they’d keep a landscape alive on one watering day per week; and ask when they prune oaks and whether they seal the cuts. That last question has a right answer that every competent Austin landscaper knows immediately.