Long Beach has paid some of the most generous turf-removal rebates in Southern California, and it has a coastline that quietly destroys plants picked off a generic Southern California list. Those two facts define the local market: there’s real money available for converting a lawn, and real skill required to choose what replaces it. This page lists landscapers serving Long Beach.
What Long Beach landscapers handle
Maintenance runs twelve months in a climate with no dormant season. The seasonal variable is irrigation, not growth.
Lawn conversion is the dominant installation work, pushed along by rebate money and by the fact that turf is expensive to keep here.
Small-lot and bungalow gardens. Much of Long Beach is built on compact lots with California bungalows and Spanish revival homes. Front gardens are small, visible, and often bound by period-appropriate expectations.
Coastal-tolerant planting and hardscape — patios, decks, outdoor kitchens — with the salt-exposure caveats below.
The C-27 license and the $1,000 threshold
California licenses landscapers under C-27 Landscaping through the Contractors State License Board: four years of journeyman-level experience, the Law and Business plus C-27 trade exams, and a $25,000 contractor bond, renewed every two years.
Unlicensed work has been capped at $1,000 since January 1, 2025, raised from $500 by Assembly Bill 2622. The exemption fails if the job requires a building permit or if the unlicensed person hires anyone to help — either way a licence is required regardless of price.
Weekly gardening service doesn’t need a licence. Irrigation installation, retaining walls, drainage work and lawn conversions do. Verify at the CSLB lookup, and confirm workers’ compensation separately.
What’s specific to Long Beach
Salt air is the filter. Properties near the shoreline — Belmont Shore, Naples, Alamitos Bay, Peninsula — take persistent salt-laden air that scorches leaf margins on sensitive species and corrodes irrigation hardware and metal fixtures. Plants that thrive two miles inland can look ragged within a season near the water.
Practical implications a good local landscaper will raise unprompted:
- Species selection changes within a mile of the coast. Salt-tolerant Mediterranean, Australian and California-coastal plants perform; many popular ornamentals don’t.
- Irrigation hardware corrodes faster. Fittings, valves and controllers near the shore have a shorter service life.
- Metalwork in hardscape needs specifying for coastal exposure, or it rusts early.
Mild everything. Long Beach sits around USDA zone 10b with a strong marine influence — rarely hot, effectively never freezing. Subtropicals that fail inland survive here, while plants needing winter chill never get it. Summer heat spikes arrive with offshore Santa Ana conditions rather than as a steady season.
Compact, older lots. Long Beach’s housing stock skews older and denser than most of Southern California. That means small front gardens where design quality shows immediately, mature street trees with established root systems to work around, and frequent access constraints for backyard work — narrow side passages that determine what equipment can reach the site.
Alkaline, often compacted soil. Long stretches of the city sit on heavy or compacted urban soil with alkaline tendencies. Amendment and drainage planning matter, particularly where decades of lawn irrigation have compacted the profile.
Turf rebates
Long Beach Utilities pays $3.00 per square foot under its own Lawn-to-Garden programme for residents replacing lawn with drought-tolerant planting — a city utility incentive, separate from the regional programme, and among the higher residential rates in the region.
A point of confusion worth settling before you apply. Much of Southern California claims turf money through SoCal Water$mart, the Metropolitan Water District’s regional programme, whose rates are set by each member water agency. Long Beach Utilities is a city-owned utility running its own Lawn-to-Garden programme, and that is the one a Long Beach customer applies to — at the $3.00 per square foot rate set out below. Regional rates quoted for neighbouring cities are not what you will be paid here, so work from the city programme’s own terms.
Program conditions are consistent across these schemes and stricter than most homeowners expect:
- Pre-approval before removing anything. Demolition first can disqualify the claim.
- Minimum planting density — typically around three water-efficient plants per 100 square feet removed on the regional programme
- A water-efficient irrigation system, meaning drip rather than the old spray heads
- Synthetic turf is generally not eligible
Rebate rates and funding change frequently. Confirm current terms with Long Beach Water and your regional programme before building a budget around them.
Pricing expectations
Long Beach figures for 2026, from Long Beach Utilities’ Lawn-to-Garden programme:
- Long Beach Utilities pays $3.00 per square foot of lawn removed, up to a total of 5,000 square feet, under its Lawn-to-Garden programme. Note this is an incentive, not a rebate — the utility’s own terms treat it that way, so do not assume it is tax-free
- A design reimbursement of up to $1,500 is available on top, with a minimum $500 for eligible projects, calculated on the eligible conversion area
- But only if your designer is on the utility’s certified list. To get on it a designer must hold a C-27 licence, a horticulture certificate, APLD certification, ASLA membership or ReScape California certification, plus a business licence and a portfolio of three past projects
- $100 per tree planted inside the conversion area, to a maximum of five trees — $500 per application per year
- Six things the design must include: California native or California-friendly plants, 65% plant coverage, a storm water retention feature, habitat development, efficient irrigation, and mulch. Synthetic turf is not an approved conversion option and disqualifies the project
- Watering is three days a week — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday only — for 10 minutes per station or to the point of runoff, whichever comes first, and only before 9 a.m. or after 4 p.m. No watering during or within 48 hours of rainfall
The design reimbursement is the part worth planning around, and it has a gate most people miss. Up to $1,500 toward a professional landscape design is unusually generous — but it is paid only if the designer is on Long Beach Utilities’ certified list. You cannot hire whoever you like, get a design, and claim it afterwards. The credential bar to get on that list is real: a C-27 contractor licence, a horticulture qualification, APLD, ASLA or ReScape California. So the sequence is: check the list, then choose a designer, then design. Doing it the other way round forfeits up to $1,500. The utility is explicit that it will not arrange appointments between customers and designers.
The programme buys a specific kind of garden, not just an absence of lawn. Six elements are mandatory, and two of them catch people out: a storm water retention feature and habitat development are not optional extras, and 65% plant coverage is a higher bar than most western programmes set. Synthetic turf disqualifies the whole project — this is not a scheme for swapping grass for plastic.
Long Beach also runs a tighter watering rule than its neighbours: three fixed days, ten minutes per station, and a hard stop at runoff. That per-station time limit is the binding constraint on system design here — a spray zone that needs more than ten minutes to do its job is the wrong zone for this city, which is a real argument for drip and for high-efficiency nozzles.
One provenance note: Long Beach Utilities’ site returns 403 to automated fetching, so these figures were read from archived snapshots of the utility’s own pages rather than live. They are the utility’s text, but confirm the current rate before you apply — funding is first come, first served and the utility states it may change with participation.
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: that your designer is on Long Beach Utilities’ certified list BEFORE commissioning a design, or the reimbursement is lost, and that the design includes a storm water retention feature and 65% plant coverage, both of which are mandatory.
Neighborhoods served
Landscapers listed here work across Long Beach, including Belmont Shore, Belmont Heights, Naples, Alamitos Beach, Bluff Park, Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Altos, El Dorado Park, Wrigley, Signal Hill and the Peninsula.
Most also serve neighbouring cities — Lakewood, Seal Beach, Los Alamitos, Cerritos, Carson, Torrance, Huntington Beach and San Pedro.
How this directory helps
Every landscaper here is listed with business name, address and phone so you can check them yourself, with a C-27 licence number to verify against CSLB records where available.
The question that sorts Long Beach quickly: ask how their plant list changes between a Belmont Shore property and one in Bixby Knolls. Anyone who genuinely works both will describe a real difference in salt tolerance and species. Anyone who says the list is the same hasn’t been paying attention to what the ocean does.