Key takeaways
- Plastic or steel strip edging, straightforward ground: £15-£25 per metre installed
- Timber edging with posts: £20-£30 per metre installed
- Brick or block edging on a mortar bed: £35-£55 per metre installed
- Natural stone, cut and mortared: £60-£90 per metre installed
What You’re Actually Paying For
Garden edging prices get quoted in confusing ways because “per metre” can mean the material alone, the material plus installation, or a vague ballpark that doesn’t survive contact with your actual garden. The honest answer: material costs range from under £2 per metre for basic plastic strip edging to £40+ per metre for cut natural stone set in mortar. Labour, where you pay for it, usually adds £10-£25 per metre on top. Most domestic jobs land somewhere in the middle, and the right choice depends more on what you’re containing (lawn creep, gravel, mulch) than on what looks nicest in a catalogue photo.
Material Costs Per Metre
Here’s roughly what you’ll pay for materials alone, buying in reasonable quantities rather than single offcuts, which always cost more per unit.
| Material | Price per metre (material only) | Typical lifespan |
|---|---|---|
| Plastic/rubber strip edging | £1.50 – £5 | 5-10 years |
| Steel edging (galvanised or Corten) | £8 – £20 | 20+ years |
| Aluminium edging | £10 – £18 | 20+ years |
| Timber (treated gravel boards) | £4 – £10 | 8-15 years |
| Brick-on-edge or block paving edging | £12 – £25 | 25+ years |
| Natural stone setts | £25 – £45+ | 30+ years |
These figures assume you’re not paying for delivery of small quantities, which can add 20-30% to an order under 20 metres. If your garden perimeter is long, say 40 metres or more, it’s worth phoning a builders’ merchant directly rather than buying from a DIY shed, since trade pricing on steel and stone often beats retail by a decent margin.
Labour Costs If You’re Not DIYing
Installed prices vary a lot by region and by how much ground prep is involved. As a rough national average for the UK, expect:
- Plastic or steel strip edging, straightforward ground: £15-£25 per metre installed
- Timber edging with posts: £20-£30 per metre installed
- Brick or block edging on a mortar bed: £35-£55 per metre installed
- Natural stone, cut and mortared: £60-£90 per metre installed
The jump between “strip edging” and “brick on a mortar bed” is the real decision point for most people. Strip edging is a weekend job with hand tools. Mortared edging means excavating a trench, laying a concrete haunch, and getting the levels right before anything goes in, which is why the labour cost roughly triples.
DIY Versus Hiring a Landscaper
If you’re edging a straight run along a lawn or border, doing it yourself is genuinely the better value most of the time, not just the cheaper one. Steel and plastic strip edging both install with a rubber mallet and a half-moon edging spade to cut the groove, no special skills needed. A half day gets you 15-20 metres done.
Where hiring makes sense is curved runs with mortared materials, or anywhere the edging needs to retain a height difference (a raised bed next to a path, for instance), because getting the haunch and drainage right matters for long-term stability. A botched mortar bed cracks within a year or two and you’re redoing the labour cost anyway.
For the DIY route, a decent edging spade is worth buying rather than borrowing, since you’ll use it again for border maintenance long after the edging job is done. If you’re going with steel or aluminium strip, a rubber mallet and a length of string line for keeping the run straight are the only other tools you need beyond what’s already in most sheds.
The Costs That Don’t Show Up in the Quote
A few things inflate the real per-metre price beyond what’s advertised:
- Curves cost more than straight runs. Rigid materials like brick or stone need more cutting and waste on curves, which can add 15-20% to material cost on a winding border.
- Ground conditions matter. Clay or rocky soil slows installation significantly, which is where labour quotes creep up from the low end of a range to the high end.
- Joining and corner pieces for steel and plastic strip systems are often sold separately and get left off initial estimates. Budget an extra 5-10% for these on anything with more than two straight runs.
- Removal of old edging isn’t always included in a landscaper’s quote. Ask specifically, because breaking out old concrete-set edging can take as long as installing the new material.
When the Cheap Option Is Genuinely Fine
Plastic strip edging gets dismissed as the budget-bin option, and in some ways it is, but it’s the right call more often than garden forums suggest. If you’re containing a lawn edge against a border and you’re happy to replace it in 7-8 years, there’s no functional reason to spend four times as much on steel. It won’t survive a strimmer hit as well, and it can lift slightly with frost heave, but for a straightforward lawn-to-border line it does the job.
Where it falls short is any edge that takes real load or impact, like next to a driveway, path, or anywhere a mower wheel runs along it repeatedly. That’s where steel earns its higher price, since it holds a straight line under pressure that plastic will eventually bow out of.
If you’re still deciding between materials, it’s worth browsing a range of steel edging and plastic lawn edging options side by side on length and gauge before committing, since thickness varies more between listings than the photos suggest, and that’s what actually determines how long the edging holds its shape.
