What it costs to redistribute or replace turf infill

Redistribution means brushing and leveling the infill you already have back to an even depth across the yard, without adding material. It is included in every Premium Restoration and can be booked on its own at $0.35 to $0.65 a square foot. The range depends mostly on how uneven the yard is: a lawn that just needs a general pass is at the lower end, one with deep drifts against a fence line or a badly thinned path takes longer and lands at the upper end.

Replacement means extracting infill that has actually failed as a material and installing new, at $0.75 to $1.50 a square foot. The lower end is plain silica sand replacing sand that simply washed out; the upper end is an odor-control infill, a zeolite-type mineral or a coated sand, going into a pet zone being upgraded at the same time. Labor to extract old, caked infill before installing new is most of what separates this from redistribution's price.

Within redistribution's $0.35 to $0.65 range, the deciding factor is how uneven the yard actually is: a lawn needing a general leveling pass sits at $0.35, while a yard with deep drift lines against a fence or a badly thinned main path, requiring more passes and hand-correction at the edges, sits nearer $0.65. Within replacement's $0.75 to $1.50 range, the deciding factors are material and access: plain silica sand replacing washed-out sand sits at the low end, while an odor-control infill installed in a pet zone that also needs the old, caked material broken up and hauled out sits at the high end. Access matters in both cases; a yard reachable straight from the driveway costs less to service than one requiring material to be moved by hand through a gate or around a pool. Neither range moves because of brand preference alone; two odor-control infills at a similar price point cost about the same to install, since the labor of extraction and leveling is the larger part of the number, not the material itself.

A 1,000-square-foot yard has a 150-square-foot pet zone with crusted, saturated infill, and the rest of the lawn just needs general leveling. Redistributing the 850 square feet that is only uneven: 850 × $0.50 (mid-range) is about $425. Replacing the 150-square-foot pet zone with odor-control infill: 150 × $1.25 (mid-range) is about $188. Total for both: around $613, usually done inside one visit alongside the Premium Restoration itself, which is priced separately by the yard's overall square footage. A yard with a smaller, 75-square-foot pet zone instead would roughly halve the replacement portion of this example, to around $94 at the same mid-range rate, which is the more typical size for a single-dog household.

A Premium Restoration's redistribution step is included in the visit price, no separate charge, for infill that is simply uneven. Extracting and replacing infill in any zone is priced per square foot on top of the visit, because it involves removing old material, hauling it off, and installing and leveling new material. Extra costs come up when a pet zone needs an upgrade to odor-control infill rather than a like-for-like replacement, which raises the per-square-foot rate toward the top of the $0.75–$1.50 range.

Part the fibers and press the infill with a finger. Loose, pale material that moves is healthy and just needs redistributing. A crust that holds together, feels greasy, or smells stronger the closer you get has failed and needs to come out. Our redistribution vs. replacement comparison has the full five-minute check.

Infill that is only uneven costs nothing extra to leave for another season beyond the redistribution price staying the same. Infill that has started to crust does not hold at that stage; left alone, more of it fails, and what would have been a small pet-zone replacement becomes a larger-area job as the crust spreads. Catching it at the uneven stage, before it fails as a material, is the cheaper path both ways.