Concrete Driveway Cost Calculator: Yards, Cost and Price per Sq Ft

October 19, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To price a concrete driveway, work out the cubic yards from length, width and thickness plus waste, cost the delivered concrete with its truck fees, add the base, reinforcement, forms, labor, any old slab removal and a share of overhead, then divide that full cost by one minus your margin. Divide the bid by the slab’s square feet and you have its cost per square foot. In the illustrative example below, a 48 by 20 foot driveway at 4 inches takes 13 cubic yards, costs $8,585.22 in full, and bids at $12,270, which is $12.78 per square foot all in.

Every price, fee, crew speed and overhead figure on this page belongs to one made-up contractor. None of them is a market rate. The thickness, base depth and rebar spacing are the example’s specification too, not structural advice: that is yours, your engineer’s or your local code’s.

The concrete driveway cost formula

cubic yards        = length x width x (thickness in inches / 12) / 27
yards to order     = cubic yards x (1 + waste), rounded up to the
                     supplier's increment
full cost          = ready-mix delivered + base + reinforcement + forms
                     + labor + demolition + other + overhead share
bid                = full cost / (1 - margin)
cost per square ft = bid / slab square feet

Step 1: the yards of concrete you need

A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet, so the volume in cubic feet is divided by 27. Thickness goes in as feet, inches divided by 12.

The 8% waste allowance covers spillage, a low spot in the subgrade and forms that bulge; set it from your own pours. The supplier in this example sells in steps of 0.5 yard, so the order rounds up to the next step. At 4 inches one yard covers 81 square feet.

Thickness moves the order faster than it looks. Every added inch on this slab is another 2.96 net yards:

At 6 inches the same driveway needs 19.5 yards. Check the subgrade before the truck is booked, because a low base is extra thickness you pay for in concrete.

Step 2: ready-mix delivered, with the truck fees

The example plant quotes $165 a yard in 10-yard trucks, with a short-load fee on any truck carrying under 6 yards.

All in, the concrete costs $181.54 a yard, not $165, and $2.46 per square foot of slab. The fee comes from the last truck carrying only 3 yards. Ask for the load split 6.5 and 6.5 and neither truck is short, which saves $75 if the plant will dispatch it that way.

Step 3: the full cost and the bid

The base gravel, rebar, forms and labor each come from their own working in the pack: the crew of 4 takes 2 days, 62.72 person-hours at $32 each, and the old 800 square foot slab comes out as 19.75 tons in 2 loads. Add a share of the year’s overhead and you have the full cost.

The bid leaves $3,679.38 of profit at the margin price, 30% of the price.

Concrete driveway cost per square foot

The bid divided by 960 square feet is $12.78 per square foot. The lines behind it, at cost and per square foot of the new slab, largest first:

Notice the old slab. Removing it costs $2,451.19 once the margin is added, $2.55 of every square foot. Quote it as its own line and the new slab is $10.23 per square foot. A customer comparing two quotes per square foot needs to know whether demolition is inside the number, and so do you when you compare this job with the next one.

That per-square-foot figure belongs to this job. A smaller slab still carries the $600 overhead share and its own truck fees, spread over fewer feet. Price each slab from its own quantities rather than carrying this rate to it.

Margin is not markup

The bid divides by 0.7. It does not multiply by one plus 30%. Adding 30% to the full cost gives $11,160.79, which is $1,103.81 less than the margin price and leaves a margin of only 23.1%. To get a 30% margin by marking up cost, the markup has to be 42.9%. The same rule is worked in the break-even analysis formula. Get it wrong and the bid comes up short even when every quantity above was right.

After the pour: did the bid hold?

The example estimate allowed 88.72 person-hours and $5,146.18 of materials, fees and rentals, for an expected profit of $3,684.78. The crew’s timesheets came to 101 hours, 12.28 over, and the receipts to $5,420.00. Profit fell to $3,018.00, a 24.6% margin, so $666.78 went to overruns. If that repeats on the next slab, the crew speeds are too fast: multiply future hour estimates by 1.14, or time a pour and enter the rates you measure. The same habit of pricing from your own hours runs through how much to charge for pressure washing.

How these were calculated

Cubic yards are length x width x thickness / 12 / 27, times one plus waste, rounded up to the supplier’s increment. Ready-mix is yards x price plus a short-load fee when the last truck carries less than the threshold, plus delivery and standby per truck. Base gravel is the base area x depth with a compaction allowance, converted to tons by the supplier’s density and rounded up. Rebar counts bars each way at the spacing, adds laps at each splice and cutting waste, and adds chairs. Labor is crew-hours from each task’s production rate, rounded to whole days with daily setup and cleanup, times crew size and labor cost. Demolition is tons from the old slab’s area and thickness, with break-out labor, haul trips, disposal fees and a day’s rental. The bid is full cost / (1 - margin), rounded up to $10. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program written from the formulas alone, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices, measured crew speeds or structural requirements. None of this is financial, legal, tax or engineering advice.

To run this on your own slab, prices and crew speeds, the pack below has the same eight calculators linked together, including the mesh price set against rebar and the after-the-pour profitability check.