How Much to Charge for Concrete, by the Yard and Square Foot

Short answer: How much to charge for concrete needs two units running at once. You buy and place by the cubic yard — square feet × thickness in feet ÷ 27, or square feet ÷ 81 for a 4-inch slab — and you sell the finished surface by the square foot. Then excavation, crushed base by the ton, forms by the linear foot, reinforcement, joint sawing, and cure protection are priced separately. A 640 sq ft driveway at 5 inches is 9.9 yards before any waste.

Concrete is the one trade where the material shows up on a schedule you do not control and starts setting whether or not you are ready. That changes how the price has to be built: almost everything expensive happens before the truck arrives, and almost everything that goes wrong happens in the ninety minutes after it does. A number built only from dollars per square foot hides both halves.

Which unit does concrete actually price in?

Three units, each attached to a different part of the job.

Part of the job	Unit	Why it cannot share a unit with the others
Ready-mix material	Cubic yards at a stated psi	The supplier bills volume, and volume comes from thickness
Excavation and spoil	Loose cubic yards, or truckloads	Dirt swells when you dig it, so the pile is bigger than the hole
Crushed base	Tons delivered	The quarry sells weight, the plan is in inches
Forms	Linear feet of edge	A 640 sq ft square and a 640 sq ft ribbon are different form jobs
Reinforcement	Sq ft for mesh, linear feet of bar for rebar	Grid spacing changes bar quantity with no change in slab size
Place and finish	Square feet, by finish type	Finish labor tracks surface, not volume
Control joints	Linear feet of saw cut	Panel layout, not slab area
Cure and weather protection	Square feet, or per day	Forecast driven, and often the only line left off entirely

The trap is quoting a single dollars-per-square-foot figure that has all of this baked in, then meeting a job where one of the layers doubles.

How do I turn a slab into cubic yards, and how much do I over-order?

Volume in cubic yards = square feet × thickness in feet ÷ 27. Because 27 ÷ (thickness in inches ÷ 12) is a constant, the shortcut is a single divisor.

Job	Common thickness	Divide square feet by	640 sq ft becomes
Sidewalk, patio	4 in	81	7.90 yd³
Residential driveway	5 in	64.8	9.88 yd³
Garage slab, light truck traffic	6 in	54	11.85 yd³
Heavy equipment pad	8 in	40.5	15.80 yd³

Footings and grade beams are pure volume: width × depth × length ÷ 27, run by run. Thickened edges and turndowns get added on top of the slab volume rather than absorbed into it.

Then over-order deliberately. Subgrade is never perfectly graded, forms bow slightly, and the last wheelbarrow always goes somewhere. Five to ten percent over the calculated figure is normal, and suppliers sell in quarter-yard increments, so 9.88 becomes 10.5. Running out with 40 square feet left is a cold joint in the middle of a driveway and a short-load fee on top of it.

What does the dirt cost before any concrete shows up?

Excavation depth is slab thickness plus base thickness, and the spoil you haul is larger than the hole you dug. Bank yards swell by roughly 20 to 30 percent when loosened.

On a 16 ft × 40 ft driveway at 5 inches of concrete over 4 inches of base, you are digging 9 inches:

Step	Calculation	Result
Bank volume	640 × 0.75 ÷ 27	17.8 yd³
Loose volume after 25% swell	17.8 × 1.25	22.2 yd³
Truckloads at 12 yd³	22.2 ÷ 12	2 loads
Base stone volume	640 × 0.333 ÷ 27	7.9 yd³
Base stone weight at about 1.4 tons per yd³	7.9 × 1.4	11.1 tons, order 12

Compaction is not optional and it is not free. Base goes in lifts, each one compacted, and a plate compactor is a machine-hour like any other. Soft or wet subgrade means undercutting and importing more stone, which is a conditional line, not a surprise you absorb.

What does the ready-mix truck really cost me?

More than the yard price, and the extras are where a tight quote goes sideways.

Charge	How it works	What to do about it
Yard price at a stated psi	3,000, 3,500, and 4,000 psi are different prices	Put the psi you quoted on the estimate so nobody substitutes down
Air entrainment, fiber, accelerator, retarder, color	Per yard add-ons	Freeze-thaw markets need air; write it in
Short load fee	Below a minimum yardage per truck	Combine small pours or price the fee explicitly
Fuel and environmental surcharge	Per load	Multiply by the number of loads, not the number of jobs
Unloading time	Free window, then per minute	Your crew size and your pour plan set this
Pumping	Setup fee plus per hour or per yard	Booked and billed whether or not you use the window
Washout	Trucks have to wash out somewhere legal	Either a containment setup or a disposal charge

Unloading time is the line most often ignored and the one most within your control. A three-person crew wheelbarrowing a load through a gate is paying by the minute for the privilege.

How much do the finish, the joints, and the weather add?

Finish labor tracks surface area and multiplies with complexity.

Finish	Relative finish labor	What has to be stated
Float and broom	Baseline	Broom direction and border width
Hard steel trowel	About 1.5×	Interior only; it is slick when wet
Exposed aggregate	About 2×	Retarder, next-day wash, and where the wash water goes
Stamped and colored	2.5× to 4×	Pattern, release color, sealer trip, and an approved sample

Joints are linear feet of saw cut, and the layout comes from a rule rather than taste: maximum spacing in feet is roughly two to three times the slab thickness in inches, and the cut goes about one quarter of the way through. A 5-inch slab wants panels no more than 10 to 15 feet across, cut about 1.25 inches deep. On the 16 × 40 driveway that means one long cut down the middle plus three across, about 88 linear feet of sawing on a separate visit with its own saw, blade wear, and dust control. Dust control is not a nicety on that line — OSHA’s respirable crystalline silica standard covers concrete sawing, and wet cutting or vacuum capture is part of what you are pricing.

Weather is a real line. A hot pour needs a retarder, fogging, and an earlier start; a cold pour needs heated water or an accelerator plus blankets left on for days. Both cost money on a forecast you cannot see when you quote, so they belong on the estimate as forecast-triggered lines with a stated rate.

What does the math look like on a real driveway?

New 16 ft × 40 ft driveway on virgin grade, 5 inches, 4,000 psi air-entrained, #4 bar at 18 inches on center both ways, broom finish, sawed joints, cured and sealed.

Crew hours, three-person crew
Layout, string lines, grade check	1.5
Excavate, load out spoil	5.0
Place and compact base in lifts	3.0
Form and stake 112 linear feet	3.5
Cut, place, tie, and chair rebar	3.0
Pour, screed, bull float, edge	3.5
Broom finish on the concrete’s timing	2.5
Return day: saw 88 lf of joints	1.0
Strip forms, backfill edges, clean up	2.0
Total	25.0

Layer	Calculation	Per crew hour
Wages plus burden	($31 + $23 + $21) × 1.32	$99.00
Equipment	Mini excavator, skid steer, compactor, saw, power trowel, truck and trailer: $42,000 ÷ 1,600 crew hours	$26.25
Operating cost		$125.25
Overhead	Yard, insurance, bonding, phone, software, advertising, admin: $62,000 ÷ 1,600	$38.75
Fully loaded		$164.00

Cost line	Calculation	Amount
Labor, equipment, overhead	25.0 × $164.00	$4,100.00
Spoil trucking and dump fees	2 loads × $310.00	$620.00
Crushed base delivered	12 tons × $46.00	$552.00
Form lumber, stakes, release	112 lf × $1.35	$151.20
Rebar, chairs, tie wire	872 lf of bar = 45 sticks × $11.40, plus $86.00	$599.00
Ready-mix	10.5 yd³ × $198.00	$2,079.00
Load surcharges	2 × $45.00	$90.00
Expansion joint at garage and apron	40 lf × $1.80	$72.00
Cure and seal	3 gal × $38.00	$114.00
Total cost		$8,377.20
Price at 22% margin	$8,377.20 ÷ 0.78	$10,740.00

That works out to $16.78 per square foot — for a driveway with full excavation, twelve tons of imported base, a rebar grid, and sealing. A plain 4-inch patio poured on existing grade over mesh lands nowhere near it, which is exactly why a single per-square-foot rate cannot carry both.

Markup on material, margin on the job — which one am I using?

Both words describe adding money, and they add different amounts.

On this driveway	Amount	Per cubic yard poured
Cost	$8,377.20	$797.83
Cost plus 22% markup	$10,220.18	$973.35
Cost ÷ 0.78 for a 22% margin	$10,740.00	$1,022.86
What the mistake costs	$519.82	$49.51

Markup is a percentage of cost; margin is a share of price. The conversion is markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin), so a 22 percent margin requires a 28.2 percent markup, and a 25 percent margin requires 33.3 percent. Fifty dollars a yard is not a rounding error when you pour four hundred yards a year.

How do I check the per-square-foot number?

Break your own quote into three comparable figures before looking outward: total dollars per square foot, dollars per cubic yard placed, and crew hours per 100 square feet. Those three tell you far more than a competitor’s number does, because they let you compare a patio against a driveway on your own books.

Published concrete prices vary by more than double between markets and move with cement, fuel, and haul distance to the plant. They also usually assume no excavation, no imported base, and mesh instead of bar. Use them to catch an order-of-magnitude error only. If your figure lands well above local pricing, look first at crew hours and haul distance; if it lands well below, check whether you priced the base, the rebar, the sawing, and the sealer at all. The line-by-line version of this discipline is in the concrete estimate template, and small-volume bag math for post holes and footings shows up again in fence installation pricing.

What has to be recorded on pour day?

Three things, and none of them survive a week in memory: the actual yardage delivered against what you ordered, the actual crew hours by phase, and the delivery tickets with their surcharges and wait time. Those tickets are also the only proof of what psi went into the ground if a crack argument shows up in year three.

Keel is built for capturing that from the site rather than from a shoebox. Delivery tickets, quarry scale tickets, and rental invoices get photographed at the moment they are handed over and read on the device by Apple Intelligence. The invoice goes out with your own numbering, your logo, and a payment link rendered as a QR code, which matters on a trade where deposits and progress draws set the cash rhythm — the collection side of that is covered in how to get clients to pay. The Freeboard view nets cash against tax reserve, committed work, and a buffer, so a fat deposit for next month’s pour never reads as spendable money, an easy mistake to make before the arithmetic in how much to set aside for 1099 taxes catches up with you. Nothing leaves the phone: no account, no bank connection, no cloud, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. Keel is free with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate cubic yards of concrete for a slab? Multiply square feet by thickness in feet and divide by 27. The shortcut is a single divisor per thickness: divide square feet by 81 for a 4-inch slab, 64.8 for 5 inches, 54 for 6 inches, and 40.5 for 8 inches. Add five to ten percent over the result for subgrade irregularity, then round up to the supplier’s quarter-yard increment.

How much should I charge per square foot for concrete? There is no single right figure, because two 600 square foot pours can differ by twelve tons of base, a rebar grid, and a day of excavation. Build the price from crew hours, yardage, base tonnage, forms, reinforcement, and finish type, add margin, then divide by square feet. Use the resulting per-square-foot number to compare your own jobs, not to set them.

How much extra concrete should I order? Five to ten percent above the calculated volume. Subgrade is never perfectly flat, forms move slightly under load, and screeding pushes material around. Running short mid-pour means a cold joint you cannot undo plus a short-load fee on the second truck, so the over-order is cheap insurance compared with the alternative.

How far apart should control joints be cut? Maximum spacing in feet is roughly two to three times the slab thickness in inches, so a 4-inch slab gets joints 8 to 12 feet apart and a 5-inch slab 10 to 15 feet. Cut about a quarter of the way through the slab. Lay panels out as close to square as you can, and price the sawing as its own linear-foot line with its own visit.

Should the pump be included in my concrete price? Price it as a separate line whenever there is a chance you need one. Pumps are booked in advance and billed for the scheduled window whether or not the whole window is used, and access is what decides the answer — a truck that cannot reach the forms turns into hours of wheelbarrow work you did not price. Decide on the site walk, not on the phone.

What weather conditions change a concrete quote? Both ends. Hot weather brings retarder, fogging, an earlier start, and a shorter finishing window. Cold weather brings heated water or accelerator, insulating blankets left in place for days, and sometimes a delayed saw cut. Put both on the estimate as forecast-triggered lines with a stated daily rate so the conversation happens before the truck is scheduled.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.