Should you hire a plant service or water them yourselves?
We ran the numbers on watering the office plants yourselves against paying somebody. On watering time alone, doing it yourselves wins. Here is the one figure that changes the answer.
Last updated: September 2026 · Written by Augustin and Luca, the family behind Area Indoor Plants, interior plantscapers in Los Angeles and Orange County since 1986.
The short answer
If your office has fewer than about a dozen plants, all within a few feet of a real window, and one named person who actually wants the job, water them yourselves and keep the money. Past that, the arithmetic turns. It turns on the replacement bill, not on watering time. The minutes really are cheap. But in a dark room, a practitioner's estimate puts replacement at 50 to 60 percent of the plants inside two years, and a floor plant that size costs $152 to $399 to buy again. The condition that flips the answer is light, not headcount, so measure the light before you decide anything else.
The rest of this page is that arithmetic, with every input sourced, including where doing it yourselves wins.
The arithmetic, with every input shown
Take an office with about 22 plants: a couple of specimens near the entry, dracaenas along the windows, desk plants, a conference room.
First the time. The published standard in this trade is no more than about one minute per plant, on plants installed for quick service, with the individual steps running 5 to 15 seconds each. An operator who serviced a 315-plant account weekly in five hours works out to about 0.95 minutes a plant, the same number from the other direction.
State the caveat before using the figure. It is a trained technician's time, on plants chosen and placed to be serviced fast, and it leaves out travel, ladder work, replacements and spraying. It is not your time. You fill a jug at the kitchen sink, walk the floor, and stop to talk to people. We have no sourced number for how much longer that takes, so we will not invent one. We will hand the do-it-yourself case the technician's minute anyway.
22 plants at one minute each is 22 minutes a visit. Checked once a week, that is 1,144 minutes a year, a little over 19 hours.
Then the wage. The federal wage survey for Los Angeles, Long Beach and Anaheim gives a mean hourly wage of $21.37 for receptionists, $24.51 for general office clerks, and $27.95 for office and administrative support as a whole. Those are wages, not what the person costs you. Across private-industry full-time workers, wages are 68.5 percent of total compensation and benefits the other 31.5 percent, so the loaded cost is the wage divided by 0.685.
| Who ends up doing it | Mean hourly wage | Loaded cost (wage ÷ 0.685) | 19 hours a year costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Receptionist | $21.37 | about $31.20 | about $593 |
| General office clerk | $24.51 | about $35.78 | about $680 |
| Office and administrative support, all | $27.95 | about $40.80 | about $775 |
Against that, our own service starts at $225 a month for every other week, which is $2,700 a year. Note that the column above assumes somebody checks weekly. On the same every-other-week rhythm the labor halves, to roughly $300 to $390, and the do-it-yourself case looks better still. What LA offices actually pay, and the five things that move the number, is broken down on our page on what office plants cost in Los Angeles.
So here is the honest result: on labor alone, doing it yourselves wins, and it is not close. Roughly $593 to $775 of somebody's paid time against $2,700. If watering were the only thing a plant program did, nobody should hire us, and no rearrangement of those numbers would change it.
Sources: wages from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Anaheim, May 2025. Benefits load from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, released September 9, 2026. Time per plant from “One Minute Maintenance” by Linnaea Newman at plantpaws.com, corroborated by an operator's 315-plant weekly route posted on forum.interiorscape.com in June 2011.
The cost nobody counts: replacement
Plants die. That is the line item the sum above leaves out, and the one that decides the answer.
A practitioner in this trade published replacement rates by light level in September 2026: in low light, 50 to 60 percent of the plant inventory is replaced within two years; in medium light 30 to 40 percent; in high light 10 to 20 percent. That is an experienced estimate, not a study, and we are labeling it as one. Those rates are sorted by light, not by who waters. We have no sourced figure comparing a service's losses with a volunteer's, so we are not claiming one.
| Light the plants actually get | Share replaced within two years | On an office with 22 plants |
|---|---|---|
| High light, 1,000 foot-candles and up | 10 to 20 percent | 2 to 4 plants over two years |
| Medium light, 250 to 1,000 foot-candles | 30 to 40 percent | 7 to 9 plants over two years |
| Low light, 50 to 250 foot-candles | 50 to 60 percent | 11 to 13 plants over two years |
Now put prices on them, read at retail in September 2026. A snake plant is $36 to $62. A fiddle-leaf fig tree is $75. An extra-large ZZ plant is $195. A Janet Craig is $81 as a bush and $152 in cane form. A mass cane at 5 to 6 feet is $369, a braided marginata at 6 to 7 feet $399. If the new plant does not fit the old pot, a decorative container is another $45 to $60.
Run the medium-light row. Seven to nine plants over two years is three or four a year. If every one is a desk plant, that is a couple of hundred dollars and the do-it-yourself case survives. If two are the floor specimens people actually see, at $369 and $399, that is $768 over the two years, call it $384 a year, before a single desk plant. Against a gap of roughly $2,000 a year between doing it yourselves and paying us, two floor plants have taken back about a fifth of it, and the desk plants have not been counted yet.
Now run the low-light row, which is the lobby. Eleven to thirteen plants over two years is five to seven a year out of 22, about a quarter of the office annually. Six snake plants a year is only a few hundred dollars, true.
But in our experience the plants that fail in a dark lobby are not the tolerant ones. A ZZ plant or a sansevieria holds in low light. What dies is the fiddle-leaf fig, the calathea, the fern, the specimen somebody picked for the drawing. Rarely the $36 snake plant, in other words, and often the mass cane at $369.
One last piece, because it explains the monthly number. The published pricing guide in this trade takes the retail price, marks it up 30 to 50 percent, and divides by twelve.
So replacement gets priced into a monthly rate rather than billed as it happens. On our Guarantee plans, any plant that declines is replaced free, so the risk sits with us instead of your budget. On plain maintenance it does not, and we would rather you read that here than at renewal.
Sources: replacement rates from Robbin Voight at NewPro Containers, September 8, 2026, a practitioner's estimate rather than a study. Pricing method from the NewPro pricing guide, March 2024, modified March 2026. Retail prices read at plantvine.com and thesill.com on September 26, 2026.
Where doing it yourselves genuinely wins
There is a real version of the do-it-yourself office, and we have walked into offices that should never have hired anyone. Four things have to be true at once.
- Under about a dozen plants. Our service is priced from a monthly floor, not per plant, so the fewer plants you have the worse the trade looks for you. At six plants you would be paying that floor for the least work we do all week. We are the ones telling you that.
- Real light, measured. Not glass you can see out of, light the plants can use. A free light-meter app on a phone tells the zones apart. If the spot reads 250 foot-candles or better, the plant has a fighting chance with ordinary care.
- One person, by name, who wants it. Not a rota, not the whole team. Someone who likes doing it and will still be here next year. How plant duty gets handed out, and who it lands on, is its own subject: who ends up looking after office plants, and why it keeps failing.
- Plants chosen for the spot, not for the photo. The tolerant species survive being forgotten. The fashionable ones do not, and a fiddle-leaf fig bought for a lobby is a replacement waiting to happen.
If all four are true, you do not need us. The labor is a few hundred dollars of somebody's time a year, the replacement rate at that light level is low, and nothing we quote would undercut it. Keep the money.
Where it reliably fails
- A lobby. The lighting handbook architects design offices from recommends 20 to 30 foot-candles for a lobby. That is a number for human eyes. A plant sold to you as low-light wants 50 to 250 foot-candles, and a university extension service puts the floor bluntly: “few plants can tolerate light intensities below 50 foot candles.” A lobby lit correctly for people sits below the bottom of the band a plant needs. No watering routine fixes it. It is also the first thing we check when the same corner keeps killing plants.
- Weekends and closures. Nobody is in the building for roughly 65 hours from Friday evening to Monday morning, and whatever the building does to the plants in that stretch, the person with the jug is not there to see it.
- More than about a dozen plants. The routine that survives at eight plants quietly stops at twenty. It is not laziness. Twenty-two minutes of walking the floor with a jug is a real errand in the middle of a working day, and the plants that get skipped are the ones furthest from the kitchen.
- The volunteer leaves. This is the one we get called about after the fact. The plants were fine for two years because of one person, and nobody noticed that was the reason until their last day. Nothing declines that week. It shows up a month later, all at once.
Sources: office light levels from the IESNA Lighting Handbook as tabulated by Archtoolbox, updated March 7, 2021. Plant light requirements from University of Missouri Extension guide G6515. The 50 foot-candle floor is quoted from Colorado State University Extension, PlantTalk 1352.
What a service does that a watering can cannot
If you do hire somebody, this is what you are buying, and it is not the water.
When it is somebody in the office, a dead plant is nobody's fault, and nothing happens. When it is a company, it is our fault, and there is somebody to call. That is most of what the monthly number buys.
Visits run weekly or every other week, 52 or 26 visits a year, and crews start at 6am so the work happens before the floor fills up. What is covered on each visit, and which plans carry the guarantee, is on the office plant service page. Which species hold up in an LA office, and how to tell when a plant is actually dry, is on our care guide.
When we tell people not to hire us
The threshold we use is two numbers: about a dozen plants, and the 250 foot-candle line between low light and medium. Under a dozen plants, with every one reading 250 foot-candles or better, water them yourselves. Over a dozen, or any real specimen sitting below that line, the replacement bill is the number that decides it, and on our Guarantee plans that bill is ours instead of yours.
Here is the uncomfortable half: the situations where we say no, at the walk-through.
- Six or eight plants in good light, with somebody who likes them. We will tell you to keep doing what you are doing. At that plant count you would be paying our floor rate for the least work we do all week, and you would notice.
- You want living plants in a windowless room. An office is lit for human eyes at 30 to 50 foot-candles, and few plants tolerate anything below 50, so a windowless room starts below the line. The honest options are a rotation program, real horticultural lighting, or non-living greenery. If what you want is three plants in a windowless suite, any maintenance program is a subscription to replacing them, ours included.
- You want the cheapest monthly number in a low-light space, without a Guarantee plan. The replacement bill does not disappear when you decline the guarantee. It moves to you, at the retail prices above.
The first question is always how many plants and how much light, not who has the lowest number. If you want a range without anyone visiting, our estimator asks six questions and gives you one. Month-to-month is available if you would rather not sign for a year.
Not sure which side of the line you are on?
If you cannot tell which office you have, send us a photo of the plant and the spot it lives in. We will tell you what we would do, including telling you to keep your money.
Send us a photo
Tell us about the space and send a few pictures. We will tell you what we see, what would fix it, and roughly what a service costs. No visit needed.
You will hear back from a real person by the end of the next business day.