Paver Patio Cost Calculator: How Much to Charge per Square Foot

October 23, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge to install a paver patio, count pavers, base, sand and edging from your plan and price them, add the dig, the haul and the equipment, add your crew’s hours and your own hours at the floor rate your year needs, then divide by one minus your margin. In the illustrative 324 square foot patio below, materials come to $3,043.28 taxed and delivered, the job costs $7,509.32, and a 25% margin prices it at $10,012.43, or $30.90 a square foot.

None of these are market prices. Every price, crew cost, pace and hour belongs to one made-up builder. And none of this is structural, drainage, slope or base-depth advice: the dig depth, base depth, bedding depth, compaction allowance and material weights are the example plan’s and supplier’s figures, entered to show the arithmetic. Yours come from your own plan, your supplier and your local requirements.

The paver patio cost formula

materials   = pavers + base + bedding sand + edging + joint sand,
              x (1 + sales tax) + delivery
ground work = haul loads x cost per load + equipment
labor       = crew hours x crew cost an hour + your hours x your floor
job cost    = materials + ground work + labor
price       = job cost / (1 - margin)
price per sq ft = price / patio area

Step 1: your own hourly floor

The example owner wants $75,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside, carries $20,000 of business costs, and books 38 hours a week on site for 40 weeks. Weather and delays take 12% of those hours, leaving 1,337.6 paid hours. Revenue from the owner’s own hours needs to be $120,000.00, so the floor is $89.71 per paid hour on site. With 12 unpaid hours a week of driving and admin, the owner keeps $37.50 per hour actually worked. Crew pay, rentals and materials are not in this floor; each job carries them.

Step 2: area and pavers

A 20 by 15 foot patio plus a 24 square foot bump-out is 324 square feet. A 9 by 6 inch paver with a 0.125 inch joint lays 2.576 to the square foot. With a 8% waste allowance for cuts and breakage that is 902 pavers, ordered as 4 pallets at 100 square feet each: $1,920.00, or $5.93 a square foot of patio.

Step 3: excavation and haul

The example plan digs 30 square feet past the patio edge, so 354 square feet at 9 inches is 265.5 cubic feet, or 9.83 cubic yards in the ground. The example’s hauler figure bulks spoil by 25%, making 12.29 yards to haul: 3 loads of 5 yards at $90.00, $270.00. At the example’s pace of 2 cubic yards an hour, digging is 4.92 hours of crew time.

Step 4: base and bedding sand

The plan’s 6 inches of base under the whole 354 square feet is 6.56 cubic yards. At the supplier’s 1.4 tons a yard, with 15% extra ordered for compaction and loss, that is 10.55 tons, so 11 tons ordered. 1 inch of bedding sand under the 324 square feet of pavers is 1.00 cubic yard, 1.495 tons at 1.3 a yard with the same extra, so 2 tons. Base and sand cost $432.00.

Step 5: paver patio materials cost

58 feet of open edge in 8 foot pieces takes 8 pieces of edge restraint, and joint sand at 60 square feet a bag is 6 bags.

That is $9.39 a square foot. Pavers are 71% of the materials before tax.

Step 6: equipment

That is $2.45 a square foot. A $2,400 compactor of your own, spread over 40 jobs with $15.00 of upkeep a job, costs $75.00 a job against the $190.00 rental here. The estimate above prices the rental; run that line on your own numbers before choosing.

Step 7: paver patio estimate calculator with labor

The example runs a crew of 2, each on site 24 hours at a cost of $26.00 an hour, pay plus the payroll costs the owner carries. The owner works 24 hours on site, priced at the floor.

That is $30.90 a square foot to the customer, against a cost of $23.18 a square foot.

The insight: the pavers are the small part

A per-square-foot price built from the paver is the easy mistake. The pavers here cost $5.93 a square foot, and the price is $30.90, about 5.2 times as much. Pavers are only 19% of the price. The ground work under them, the spoil haul, the base and sand and the equipment, comes to $1,497.00, and the crew’s time and the owner’s together are $3,401.04, or 34% of the price. All materials together are 30%.

The second trap is the last line. A 25% markup on cost gives $9,386.65, which is only a 20.0% margin of the price. A 25% margin needs $10,012.43, a 33.3% markup: $625.78 more on this one patio. The markup vs margin chart works the conversion both ways. The concrete driveway cost calculator prices a slab the same way, and the fence estimate calculator bids another outdoor build from the plan up.

Did the patio pay?

Say the patio sold at $10,400 and ran over: 52 crew hours against the 48 planned, 26 of the owner’s, and $3,100.00 of materials, paid by card at a 3% fee. After crew, materials, equipment, hauling and the fee it leaves $4,571.00, or $175.81 per hour of the owner’s time against the $89.71 floor, so it clears the floor. But after the owner’s time the margin is 21.5%, short of the 25% the estimate was built on, even though the patio sold above the estimate. The price that pays exactly the floor on those hours was $8,092.23. Clearing the floor and earning the margin are two different tests.

How these were calculated

Patio area is length x width plus the extra area. Pavers per square foot are 144 / ((length + joint) x (width + joint)); pavers to buy are area x that x (1 + waste), rounded up, and pallets are area x (1 + waste) over pallet coverage, rounded up. Cubic yards are square feet x inches / 12 / 27; haul loads are bulked yards over load size, rounded up; tons are cubic yards x tons per yard x (1 + extra), rounded up to whole tons. Edge pieces and joint sand bags are rounded up to whole units. Materials are taxed at the example’s own share, and delivery is added untaxed. The floor and the materials total are carried into the price as the spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Job cost is crew hours x crew cost + owner hours x floor + materials + equipment + haul, and the price is job cost / (1 - margin). Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that works in exact fractions, goes through cubic feet before cubic yards and taxes each materials line separately, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices or measured paces, and not structural, drainage, slope, base-depth or code advice. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own plan, supplier figures and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to a check on whether a finished patio paid.