A price and a scope are two different documents
A number by itself tells you what something costs. It does not tell you what it is. Two crews can put the same figure on the same driveway and be describing two different slabs. One is four inches on packed stone with steel in it. The other is thinner, on less base, with nothing in it at all. You find out which one you bought in the fifth winter, not on the day you signed.
That is the whole reason this gets written down. The page carries your name, your address, and the work spelled out in enough detail that there is no room later for two honest ideas about what was agreed to. It is also the only version of the job that outlives the conversation. What you remember about a phone call and what the crew remembers are rarely the same document, and concrete is not something you redo cheaply when the two do not match.
Going down the page, item by item
Every line on the page is deciding something. Here is what each one settles.
- Scope and dimensions. How much concrete, written as the square footage we are pouring and how deep it goes. The whole price hangs off this line.
- Site prep. Everything that happens before concrete, including digging, breaking out and hauling away whatever is there now, cutting grade, and the compacted stone underneath. Most of the labor lives here, and so does most of the difference between two bids.
- Reinforcement. The steel, meaning whether the job gets mesh or bar, what size, and where it sits, along with any edge that gets thickened to take a heavier load.
- The mix. The mix, written out by strength for what the slab has to carry. On most work that lands at a 4,000 PSI air entrained design, chosen for the winters up here.
- Finish and joints. The surface you end up with, whether that is a broom texture, a smooth trowel, exposed aggregate, stamp or color, plus where the joints fall and whether sealer is on the job.
- Placement. Whether the concrete goes down the chute or has to travel through our trailer line pump to reach a back corner or get through a gate. On our own pours that sits inside the one price instead of appearing later.
- The number. One total, how payment is handled, and the workmanship warranty, terms confirmed on that same page.
Where two written pages stop agreeing
When two bids come back far apart, the gap is almost never in the concrete itself. It is in the list above. Take an inch out of the thickness, thin the stone base, drop the steel, or leave the old slab for somebody else to deal with, and the bottom line moves a long way while the top line still says driveway.
Some of that gap is readable if you know the going rates. Installed driveways generally run $8 to $12 a square foot and patios and walkways $9 to $14. A rebar or wire mesh grid adds $0.75 to $1.25 a square foot, and tearing out and hauling off old concrete adds $2 to $3. So a page that lands well under another one on the same square footage is usually not a bargain. It is a different job. Why two quotes for the same work come back different is worked all the way through on our cost pages.
Read them side by side and compare like for like. Where one page is silent on the base, the steel or the haul off, ask for it in writing rather than over the phone. A crew that intends to put stone down and wire in the slab has no reason at all not to write it on the page.
The lines that are not dollars
Two parts of the estimate carry no figure and matter as much as the total. Payment terms are written out before you sign, so you are reading them instead of hearing about them afterward. And the workmanship warranty is on there, with the terms confirmed on your written estimate rather than described to you from memory in a driveway.
The other thing a written page does is set a limit on itself. The number moves for two reasons and no others. You change the scope, and you approve the new figure in writing before any concrete is ordered. Or the ground opens up and there is something under it nobody could see from the surface, in which case we stop, show you, and price the fix before going further. The weather, our calendar and a truck running late are ours to solve, not line items that appear on your bill. How that gets handled in practice is spelled out on our free estimates page.