Sod Costs - Sodding.com
Simple information on sodding your lawn.

Sod lawns are expensive.  The commercial producer of sod has many variables and costs associated with creating your future lawn. Those costs involve an expenditure of large amounts of money by sod producers.  Generally 2 years to grow a quality turf sod to maturity. Constant irrigation. Thousands of $$ of equipment. Fertilizers, Herbicides & Insecticides 2 years of weed control & mowing & other daily maintenance. Some one has to pay for the great benefits of an instant sodded lawn. Guess who that is?

Okay... so you need a quickly established lawn and don't want to go through the uncertainties and longer establishment time of seeding, sprigging, or plugging your lawn.   Usually, lawns are sodded because of one or more of the following reasons:

• I need an instant beautiful lawn for aesthetic purposes.
• I want the fastest lawn possible and I don't care about cost.
• My area has slopes and is easily washed out.  I need something to hold it in place.
• I am seeding the majority of my lawn, but I want a instant lawn in the areas closer to the entrances to my home.
• I will have a lot of traffic (walkers / animals) across my lawn and I need something that can be walked on as soon as possible. (seeded areas must be relatively established before allowing traffic).

Sodded lawns are expensive, costing anywhere from 14 cents per sq. ft. to as much as 50-60 cents per sq. ft. - And that cost may not even include the site preparations.  Much of the cost (usually at least 50%) depends on if you are going to do the work yourself, or have a commercial sodding company do the grassing work.  Generally the rule of thumb is that sodded lawns are about 20 times as expensive as a seeded lawn, and 10 times more expensive than a sprigged or plugged lawn.

Sod itself costs in the range of 8-30 cents sq. ft. depending on sod kind and variety and the quantities you will purchase.  Also where you can buy the sod determines the price.  Many times there may be a local a sod producer in your area that will sell to you at wholesale prices ,compared to full retail prices at a local garden center.  It pays both to shop around and then to also inspect the sod at your choice of sod supplier if possible.  Quality of sod unfortunately can vary considerably from producer to producer. 

Sod commercially installed has dropped in price due to the ability to use machines instead of labor to install large quantities of rolled sod efficiently (sometimes with netting installed like in picture below) .   This has helped to reduce one of the biggest costs in commercially installed sod lawns... the manual labor cost.

Be sure and read our commercial contractor page to decide if using a grassing contractor might be your best choice of action.  Laying sod is difficult, dirty work. Sod is heavy and to properly install the small "pieces" or rolls a homeowner must lay, requires a lot of back bending and lifting.