What concrete actually costs

The per-yard number, and why it is a range

Ready-mix concrete commonly runs $140 to $190 per cubic yard delivered in 2026, and a national average is close to useless because the spread within a single metro can be $30. The price is mostly haulage: concrete is heavy, it has a working life of about ninety minutes, and a plant forty minutes from your site costs more to serve you from than one ten minutes away.

The mix matters next. A 3000 PSI mix is the cheap end and fine for a shed floor; 3500 to 4000 PSI is standard for driveways and anything that freezes. Fibre, accelerator for a cold pour, retarder for a hot one, and air entrainment for freeze-thaw regions each add a few dollars a yard. None of them are optional in the conditions that require them.

The only figure worth quoting from is your own supplier's, for your own mix, this month. Put it in your price book once and every estimate uses it — that is the whole reason a price book exists, and what the paid plan is for.

The fees that arrive after you have quoted

Short-load fee. Under about 3 yards most suppliers add $60 to $150, because they are sending a full truck either way. This is the one that most often eats a small job's margin, because it appears on the invoice after the client has accepted a price.

Standby or demurrage. You typically get somewhere between five and eight minutes of unloading per yard included. Past that it is often $2 to $4 a minute. A crew that is not ready when the truck arrives is paying for the privilege.

Saturday, after-hours and winter surcharges. Weekend delivery is commonly $75 to $150. Hot-water mix in winter and ice in high summer both carry a charge.

Environmental and washout fees. Small, fixed, and on almost every invoice — $15 to $40. Worth knowing they exist rather than absorbing them silently on every job of the year.

The short-load fee lands hardest on the small pours, which is most of the work a lot of crews do. A flight of steps is usually a yard and a bit and a set of deck piers is often under one — work out exactly where you land with the steps calculator or the Sonotube calculator before you accept the fee, because combining the two into a single pour frequently clears the threshold on its own.

Per square foot, which is how clients think

Homeowners ask what a driveway costs per square foot, and a bare concrete number will not answer it, because the concrete is usually only a third of the job. Excavation, base stone, forming, steel, placing, finishing, control joints and cleanup are the rest.

As a broad guide, plain finished flatwork often lands somewhere around $8 to $14 per square foot installed, with stamped or coloured work substantially higher. Your own numbers will differ, and they should — the point of pricing from your own costs rather than a published average is that you are not quoting somebody else's market.

Work out the concrete first, then add base, steel and labour as separate lines. A quote that shows the client what they are paying for wins more often than one flat figure, because it survives being compared against two other bids.

Do not price off a national average

Every number on this page is a range, and that is deliberate. The most expensive mistake in concrete pricing is treating a figure from an article as your cost — including this article. Ring your supplier, get their yard price for the mix you actually use, ask what their short-load threshold and fee are, and write both down.

Then price every job off those numbers rather than off memory. Contractors who quote from memory drift low over time, because the number they remember is the one from before the last price rise.