“How much for a driveway?” A flatwork price is built from quantities you can measure before anyone sets a form: the area, the thickness, what has to come out, what goes under the slab, and the finish on top. Then come the delivery extras that a small pour attracts and many price sheets forget. This article writes the chain down, with the published specifications that set thickness and strength, and walks one job through as an example with illustrative numbers.
Yards from square feet and thickness
Concrete is bought by the cubic yard and sold, to the homeowner, by the square foot. The conversion is: square feet × thickness in inches ÷ 12 ÷ 27. Per 100 square feet, that comes to:
| Thickness | Cubic yards per 100 sq ft | Compared with 4 inches |
|---|---|---|
| 4 inches | 1.23 | — |
| 5 inches | 1.54 | 25% more |
| 6 inches | 1.85 | 50% more |
Round the order up, never down: running short means a second, small delivery, and small deliveries carry the charges described below. To set your own allowance for uneven grade and spillage, compare your last few delivery tickets with the yards you calculated for those jobs.
How thick, and how strong
For driveways and sidewalks, the Michigan Concrete Association’s 2025 design and placement guidelines recommend a minimum thickness of 4 inches, and 5 inches “when traffic will include delivery vehicles.” They call for a minimum specified strength of 4,000 psi at 28 days, a water-cement ratio of 0.45 or less, and a total air content of 6.5 percent, plus or minus 1.5. A driveway that will see a delivery truck is a 5-inch driveway, and that should be in the price before the homeowner asks why yours is higher.
Inside the building code the numbers differ. The 2021 International Residential Code requires concrete slab-on-ground floors to be at least 3½ inches thick and lets them be designed under that section or ACI 332 (R506.1). ACI 332-20 is limited to footings, foundation and above-grade walls and slabs-on-ground for homes and their accessory structures, and its preface says it has no legal status unless a government adopts it. For porches, carport slabs, steps exposed to the weather and garage floor slabs, the IRC’s Table R402.2 sets minimum strengths of 2,500, 3,000 and 3,500 psi for negligible, moderate and severe weathering, with footnotes calling for 5 to 7 percent entrained air, or as little as 3 percent for a steel-troweled garage floor at 4,000 psi. Your town may have adopted a different edition, or amended it.
The apron in the public right-of-way is the city’s. Bloomington, Minnesota is one example: a permit is required to build, replace or alter a residential driveway approach, the concrete there must be 6 inches deep with 3,900 psi strength and 4 to 6 percent air, and a contractor must post a $5,000 performance bond and proof of liability insurance before working in the right-of-way. The IRC lists sidewalks and driveways as work exempt from a building permit (R105.2), but that exemption does not authorize work that breaks other laws or ordinances. More on what the model code exempts is in Do You Need a Permit?
Under the slab: base and tear-out
The Michigan guidelines ask for a subgrade free of organic and uncompacted material, removal of unstable material to at least 6 inches and replacement with crushed stone, gravel or sand compacted to 95 percent, a compacted sub-base at least 4 inches thick, a slope of at least 1/8 inch per foot for drainage, and never a pour on a frozen subgrade. Each of those is crew time and material, so price the base as its own line per square foot, from your own crew hours and stone deliveries.
Tear-out is two costs: breaking and loading, which rise with thickness and with any mesh or rebar in the old slab, and disposal, which you pay by the load. Measure the old slab’s thickness at an edge before you quote. Cutting or breaking it raises silica dust, covered in Silica Dust: OSHA’s Table 1.
Finish, joints and curing
A broom finish is the baseline. The Michigan guidelines end their finishing sequence with a broomed texture, warn against steel trowels and other tools that seal the surface too early, and recommend at least one ACI-certified flatwork finisher on the pour. Integral color, exposed aggregate and stamped finishes each add material and finisher hours; price them as per-square-foot adders measured on your own jobs, not as a guess.
The same guidelines set control joints in both directions at intervals of no more than two times the slab thickness, which their own example reads as 8 feet for a 4-inch slab (two feet per inch of thickness), cut at least a quarter of the slab depth deep, with the sawing window typically 8 to 12 hours after placement. If you saw, that is often a second trip. Curing must last at least three days; the slab may open to traffic after 7 days of curing, or sooner when tests confirm 3,000 psi; and a penetrating sealer can go on after 30 days and is typically reapplied every three to five years, which is an add-on worth offering.
The delivery extras on a small pour
Small pours carry extra charges, and public bid records show what they look like. In Jefferson County, Missouri’s 2025 ready-mix bids, both bidders quoted a short-load charge for loads of less than 5 cubic yards: one line reads “$40.00/yd to minimum” beside “6 cubic yards,” the other “$125.00 (2 yard minimum).” The same bids list winter service at $6.50 and $6.00, and calcium accelerator at $3.00 for 1 percent and $6.00 for 2 percent. In Montgomery County, Tennessee’s June 2025 bids, 3,000 psi concrete ran $145 to $170 a cubic yard, and bidders’ notes added a $20 environmental fee per truck, a $30 fuel charge per load and a $50 to $200 delivery fee. Your supplier’s sheet will differ; ask for its minimum load, short-load charge and per-truck fees in writing.
If the truck cannot reach the forms, a pump or buggies become their own line. Get the pump company’s written rate before you quote rather than after. Cold weather adds more: the Michigan guidelines want a subgrade of at least 40°F and the concrete kept at 50°F or more for at least three days, which means blankets, accelerators and winter charges. That is why the concrete page talks about a winter booking rate.
Labor and the price of concrete
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual wage of cement masons and concrete finishers at $57,020 in May 2025, and notes that masons work mostly outdoors, so weather affects their schedules. That is a wage, not a billing rate; the loaded cost of an hour is worked out in Your Real Hourly Cost.
Material moves too. The BLS producer price index for ready-mix concrete stood at a preliminary 395.3 in September 2026, about 2.3 percent above September 2025 and about 31 percent above September 2021. A quote that is good for months needs a validity date or an escalation clause, as in Material Price Escalation Clauses for Small Jobs.
A worked example
Say a concrete contractor is replacing a cracked 14 by 18 foot patio with a 4-inch broom-finished slab. That is 252 square feet and 3.11 cubic yards, so the order is 3.5 yards, which is under a 5-yard short-load line. The unit costs below are illustrative, not market prices; use your own.
| Line | Basis | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Tear-out and haul-off | 252 sq ft × $3.00 | $756.00 |
| Base, 4 inches compacted | 252 sq ft × $1.25 | $315.00 |
| Forms, joints, curing compound | Allowance | $250.00 |
| Concrete | 3.5 yd × $165 | $577.50 |
| Short-load charge | Flat | $125.00 |
| Crew labor, including the saw-cut trip | 27 hours × $55 loaded | $1,485.00 |
| Direct cost | $3,508.50 | |
| Price at a 35% gross margin | Cost ÷ 0.65 | $5,398 |
That is about $21.42 a square foot, and the small size is part of the reason: the short load, the haul-off trip and the setup do not shrink with the slab. Make the same patio 5 inches thick and the order becomes 4 yards, still a short load. A 20 by 24 foot patio at 4 inches needs 5.93 yards, so an order of 6 or more clears the 5-yard line. The margin step is explained in Markup vs. Margin, and checking the job afterward in Job Costing.
Most of these lines can be answered online: the size, a picture of the old slab, driveway or patio, the finish, and whether a truck can reach. If you want a range on your own website from your own rates, NapkinPrice™ asks the homeowner those questions, shows a price range, and sends you the lead with the answers attached.
General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change and vary by state; check with the agency named above or a professional for your situation.