How Much Does Landscape Lighting Cost in Bellevue? (2026 Guide)

If you’ve started calling around, you’ve probably noticed that landscape lighting quotes in Bellevue range wildly — one company throws out $2,000, another says $15,000, and neither one explains why. Both numbers can be correct. They’re just describing very different projects.

This guide breaks down what landscape lighting actually costs in Bellevue in 2026, what drives the price up or down, and what a realistic quote looks like for a typical Eastside home.

What Landscape Lighting Actually Costs in Bellevue

Most professionally installed landscape lighting systems in Bellevue run $150 to $400 per fixture, installed. That range includes the fixture itself, wiring, labor, and aiming. A basic path light lands at the low end; a large brass uplight for a mature tree, or a fixture requiring a longer trench run, lands higher.

Put together into full projects, here’s what we typically see:

• Small project (8–12 fixtures): $2,000–$4,500. A front entry, a couple of trees, and a short path. Common for townhomes and smaller lots in neighborhoods like Wilburton or Crossroads.
• Mid-size project (15–22 fixtures): $5,500–$9,500. Full front-of-house lighting plus some side or back yard coverage. This is the most common range we quote in West Bellevue and Somerset.
• Larger project (25+ fixtures): $10,000–$20,000+. Full property coverage, multiple zones, water features, or long driveways. Typical for larger lots in Bridle Trails or view properties.

These are installed totals, not fixture-only prices. A homeowner buying fixtures off a shelf and hiring separate labor will land somewhere else entirely, usually with a worse result.

What Changes the Price

A handful of factors move these numbers more than anything else.

Fixture count is the biggest lever. Every additional fixture adds both a hardware cost and installation time. This is also why a written, fixture-by-fixture design matters — it lets you see exactly where the money is going, and where you could scale back without losing the overall effect.

Wire run length matters more than people expect. A fixture 15 feet from the transformer costs less to run than one 150 feet away at the back of a large lot. Bellevue’s bigger properties, especially in Bridle Trails, often need more wire and a bigger transformer just to reach everything, which adds cost independent of fixture count.

Fixture material affects both price and lifespan. Cast brass and copper fixtures cost more up front than powder-coated aluminum, but they don’t corrode the way aluminum eventually does in our wet climate. We spec brass for anything embedded in a lawn or planting bed where it’ll sit in damp soil year-round.

Terrain and access add labor time. A flat, open front yard is straightforward to trench. A sloped lot with retaining walls, existing irrigation lines, or mature root systems takes longer to work around carefully, and that labor shows up in the quote.

Design complexity is the quiet cost driver. A plan with three lighting zones on separate timers, moonlighting through a mature canopy, and color-temperature matching across fixture types takes more design time than a straightforward front-yard uplighting scheme. That design work is worth paying for, but it’s fair to ask what you’re getting for it.

A Realistic Bellevue Example

Here’s a project we quoted recently, without the address: a two-story home in Somerset, moderate front yard, two large maples, a walkway from the driveway to the front door, and a request to highlight the home’s stone facade.

The plan came to 17 fixtures: four tree uplights, six facade grazing lights along the stone, five path lights, and two entry-adjacent accent lights near the garage. Total installed cost was $7,200, which included a $600 design fee credited into that total, a properly sized transformer, buried wiring, and a photocell-and-timer setup. That’s squarely in our mid-size range above, and typical for a West Bellevue home of that size.

For contrast, a Wilburton townhome we lit last fall came in much smaller: nine fixtures covering a compact front entry, one ornamental tree, and a short path from the sidewalk to the door. That project totaled $2,850, with most of the cost in labor and the transformer rather than the fixtures themselves — a reminder that even small projects carry a baseline cost for the electrical work, not just the hardware.

Common Ways Homeowners Overspend (or Underspend)

We see the same handful of cost mistakes repeat across Bellevue projects, in both directions.

Buying fixtures piecemeal, without a plan. A spotlight here, a path light there, added over a couple of years as budget allows. It feels cheaper in the moment, but it almost always costs more in total than one properly sized project, and the result rarely looks intentional. Wiring gets patched instead of planned, and transformers get overloaded and then replaced.

Going with aluminum fixtures to save money up front. Powder-coated aluminum costs less than brass or copper, but it corrodes faster in our wet climate, especially for fixtures sitting in damp soil or near sprinklers. We’ve replaced plenty of five-year-old aluminum fixtures that a brass equivalent would have outlasted by decades. It’s a real trade-off, not just an upsell — for a lawn-mounted uplight you’ll walk past daily for years, brass is usually worth the difference.

Skipping the design phase entirely. Without a plan, it’s easy to spend the whole budget on fixtures for the front of the house and run out before the parts of the property that actually get used at night — a back patio, a side entry, a driveway — get any attention at all. A written plan forces those trade-offs to happen on paper, before money is spent.

Undersizing the transformer. This one is invisible until it isn’t: a transformer sized for today’s fixture count with no room to add three more later means re-wiring instead of simply adding a fixture. We size every transformer with headroom, which costs a little more on day one and saves a service call two years later.

What’s Included vs. What Costs Extra

A few things homeowners are sometimes surprised by, one way or the other:

Usually included:

• The design fee, credited toward installation if you move forward
• Transformer sizing and installation
• Buried wiring and fixture mounting
• On-site aiming and focusing after dark
• A 5-year fixture warranty

Usually separate:

• Ongoing maintenance plans — most homeowners add this after seeing the system through one Seattle winter
• Major landscaping changes needed to support the design (tree work, hardscape repairs)
• Permit fees in the rare cases where they apply — see our guide on landscape lighting permits in Washington for when that comes up

How to Get an Accurate Quote

The only way to get a number you can actually trust is a real lighting design based on your property, not a phone estimate. We start every Bellevue project with a free dusk consultation, walk the property together, and hand you a written, fixture-by-fixture plan with pricing broken out by zone. You can install the whole thing at once or phase it over a couple of seasons — the plan doesn’t change either way, just the timeline.

If you want to see what finished projects like this actually look like, our portfolio includes real fixture counts from six Eastside homes, including a Bellevue new-build. Otherwise, the fastest way to get a number specific to your property is to book a consultation and let us walk the yard with you.