Installed price ranges by project type
Every figure below is per square foot, installed. That means the finished job, not the price of concrete off a truck. Pick the line that matches what you are building and multiply by your square footage. The two add-ons at the bottom ride on top of whichever band applies, so tearing out an old driveway and putting rebar in the new one stacks both onto the driveway band.
- Driveway, 4 inches standard: $8 to $12
- Patio or walkway: $9 to $14
- Garage slab at 5 inches: $8 to $12
- Sidewalk: $10 to $15
- Foundation at 8 inches: $14 to $22
- Stamped or decorative: $14 to $22
- Rebar instead of wire mesh: adds $0.75 to $1.25
- Tear out and haul off the old slab: adds $2 to $3
What installed actually covers
A lot of concrete prices online are just the mud. Ours are the job. When we quote a slab in one of those bands, the work below is inside the number.
What sits outside the number is short. Permits and engineering when a job needs them, anything you change after approving the scope, and anything nobody could see from the surface. If we dig and find a buried stump or soil that will not compact, we stop, show you, and tell you what the fix costs before we keep going.
- Layout, excavation and grade cut so the slab sheds water away from the house
- Compacted crushed stone base under the pour
- Forms set and staked to hold shape, thickness and slope
- Reinforcement, wire mesh or a tied rebar grid held up in the slab
- The ready mix, strength specified to the load
- Placement, including our own line pump when the truck cannot reach the forms
- Finishing, control joints cut on schedule, form removal and cleanup
- The workmanship warranty, terms confirmed in writing on your estimate
How square feet turn into cubic yards
Concrete is sold by volume, so your slab gets converted before anybody orders a truck. Multiply length by width for square feet. Multiply that by thickness in feet, so 4 inches is a third of a foot and 8 inches is two thirds. Divide those cubic feet by 27 and you have cubic yards.
Then add 10 percent for waste. Forms flex, subgrade is never perfectly flat, and some gets left in the chute. Ordering the exact calculated number is how a crew ends up a wheelbarrow short. That allowance is built into every figure our estimator shows.
Ready mix comes in loads, and that changes small jobs
Ready mix is ordered in 10 cubic yard loads, and a job rounds up to the next full load. That is why a pour landing just over a load boundary can cost more per square foot than one under it.
Take a 40 by 20 driveway at 4 inches. That is 800 square feet, about 267 cubic feet, divided by 27 is about 9.9 cubic yards, and with the waste allowance it comes to roughly 10.9 yards. Two loads, not one.
Sometimes the move is to shrink and stay inside a load. Sometimes it is to widen, since that extra footage is the cheapest on the job.
Run your own numbers on the estimator
The cost estimator on our homepage does all of the above in about ten seconds. Pick the project type, punch in length, width and thickness, say mesh or rebar and whether old concrete has to come out, and it returns square feet, cubic yards, ready mix loads and an installed range.
It works in $50 steps and will not show a figure under $50, so treat it as a planning number, not a bid. It also flags when a pour wants the pump: foundations, pours around 8 cubic yards or more, and tight access.
Two pages that go deeper
This page is the summary. Two pages below carry the detail.
Our driveway cost page is the one to read if you have a drive in mind. It works real driveway sizes all the way through the math, from square feet to cubic yards to ready mix loads to an installed range.
Our page on what drives concrete prices is the one to read if you already have a number from somebody and it does not match what you found online. It covers thickness, reinforcement, sub-base, access, tear out, season and delivery minimums, which is where the difference between two bids almost always lives.
A range is a range. Only a written estimate is a number
We publish these bands because we would rather you know before you call. But nobody can price your concrete off a web page, and a crew that quotes a firm number sight unseen is either padding it or about to find a reason to raise it.
What moves your job inside its band is specific to your property. How much dirt has to move. Whether the subgrade is red clay that holds water. Whether a mixer truck can back up to the forms or the concrete travels through a gate on hose. None of that reads off a satellite photo.
So we come out, measure, and hand you one page with your address on it, the scope spelled out, and one number at the bottom. The visit and the estimate are free, and there is no charge if you go another direction.