It depends on one thing: whether your design is mature and low-maintenance, or fussy and high-upkeep. Get that right and professional landscaping returns 100% or more at resale — better than a kitchen remodel, better than a bathroom, better than almost any interior dollar you can spend. Get it wrong and you'll spend $15,000 to actively lower your sale price.

Here's the math that supports the yes.

The Numbers

A professional landscape design typically runs $3,000 to $15,000 for an average suburban lot, depending on hardscaping, tree size, and irrigation. Full high-end installs with retaining walls, lighting, and mature trees can hit $30,000 to $50,000.

The return is where landscaping beats the interior competition. The National Association of Realtors and Virginia Tech studies consistently peg landscape ROI at 100% to 215% — meaning a $10,000 investment can add $10,000 to $21,500 in perceived home value. Compare that to a mid-range kitchen remodel, which recovers around 70% to 80%, or a bathroom at 60% to 67%.

Mature trees alone are the single biggest lever. A healthy, established shade tree can add $1,000 to $10,000 in value per tree, and mature landscaping overall raises perceived value by roughly 5% to 12%. On a $400,000 home, that's $20,000 to $48,000 — often several times what the work cost.

Payback timeline: unlike a roof or HVAC that only pays at sale, good landscaping starts working on day one through curb appeal, faster time-on-market (homes with strong landscaping sell 5% to 10% faster), and lower energy bills from shade trees cutting cooling costs 10% to 30%.

Buyers decide within the first eight seconds of pulling up. Landscaping is the only renovation they see before they walk through the door.— residential real estate agent

The Catch That Flips It

The verdict flips the moment your landscaping reads as a maintenance liability instead of an asset.

Over-planting is the classic mistake. Dense beds of exotic perennials, koi ponds, elaborate water features, and sprawling annual gardens all say the same thing to a buyer: 'this yard is a second job.' A $12,000 water feature can lower your sale price because the average buyer mentally subtracts the cost of ripping it out or hiring someone to maintain it.

The same goes for anything hyper-personal or high-upkeep — tennis courts, extensive vegetable gardens, tropical plantings in a cold climate, or trees planted too close to the foundation. These narrow your buyer pool and turn a value-add into a value-drain.

The designs that hit that 100%-plus return share three traits: they're native or drought-tolerant, they're mature enough to look established, and they require minimal ongoing work. Clean lines, healthy lawn, structural trees, and simple layered beds beat a botanical showpiece every time. Spend on the bones — grading, trees, hardscape, irrigation — not on plants a new owner has to babysit.

Do the honest gut check before you sign: would a stranger see your finished yard as one less thing to worry about, or one more? If it's the second, you're spending money to make your home harder to sell.

Before You Hire

Landscaping projects are notorious for the pattern where money goes out before the mature trees and finished hardscape ever go in — deposits paid, plants half-installed, contractor gone. Because so much of the cost is front-loaded into materials and plant stock, protecting your payment until the work is verifiably done matters more here than on almost any other home project.

If you're ready to invest in the kind of low-maintenance, resale-friendly design that actually returns your money, start by getting matched with contractors who'll structure payment around completed milestones.