Concrete Cost Per Square Foot

What a square foot of concrete costs

Start with the material, because it is the one part that is simple arithmetic. A square foot of slab at a given thickness is a fixed volume, and ready-mix is priced by the cubic yard. At our default delivered price of $160 per cubic yard, as of 2025:

That is concrete in the chute and nothing else. No forms, no base, no reinforcement, no crew, no waste allowance. Thickness scales it exactly: 6 inches is one and a half times 4 inches, every time, because you are buying volume and the price per yard does not care what shape it ends up in.

The $160 starting point is not a guess. The NRMCA Performance Benchmarking Survey, presented in October 2024 on 2023 data, puts the industry's average selling price at "$160 per cubic yard", with the bottom quartile at $150.03 and the top at $170.66. Our default sits on the industry's own average, and the quartile spread is a fair picture of how much room there is around it before anyone has quoted your specific job. For the full per-yard picture, including what delivery and short loads add, see how much a yard of concrete costs.

What the installed price adds

Finishing labor is the larger half of a slab bill, and it is the part the per square foot number is really measuring. Our defaults carry three tiers: $2 per square foot for a basic broom finish with easy access, a mid tier for a typical finished slab, and $8 per square foot for decorative work or a site that fights you.

Those rates reflect what the trade is paid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2025 median wage for cement masons and concrete finishers at $27.41 an hour, or $57,020 a year, with the tenth percentile at $18.84 and the ninetieth at $41.10. A finishing crew is three or four of those people plus a supervisor, and a slab is a one-day job that cannot be paused: once the truck discharges, the concrete sets on its own schedule. You are paying for a crew that has to be fully staffed on the day whether the pad is small or large.

Put the two layers together and the honest installed range falls out of the defaults rather than being asserted. A 4 inch slab with the cheapest finishing comes to about $3.98 per square foot. A 6 inch slab with decorative finishing comes to about $10.96. That is where the familiar "$4 to $10 per square foot" rule of thumb comes from, and the rule is sound at the ends. It is the middle that misleads, for the reason in the next section.

Cost per square foot by project size

Here is the same math applied to real projects, at the mid labor tier, with a 10 percent waste allowance and the short-load surcharge applied where the load falls under the 10 yard truck minimum:

Notice what that column does, or rather what it fails to do. Per square foot barely moves across a twelve-fold range of project sizes. The 4 inch jobs all land on the same $7.08, and the 5 inch jobs are higher only because they contain more concrete. If the price per square foot were really flat like this, it would be a useful number and you could stop reading.

It is not flat, because the table above is missing one line that every contractor carries.

Why a small pad costs double per square foot

A contractor has a floor under what a day is worth. Mobilizing a crew, a truck, forms and tools costs roughly the same whether the pad is 100 square feet or 400, so below a certain size the bill stops tracking the area and becomes a minimum. Our default minimum labor charge is $1250, drawn from a working contractor who publishes it: Day's Concrete Floors in Maine states a minimum labor charge for small slabs under 20 by 20 feet, and the figure holds up against the two to four times lower numbers the lead-generation aggregators quote. The contractor is the one sending the invoice.

Apply that floor and the flat column collapses:

The crossover is at about 278 square feet, roughly a 17 by 17 pad. Above it the minimum stops binding and the per square foot figure means something. Below it, the per square foot figure is an artifact of dividing a fixed charge by a small area, and quoting it back to a contractor will not get you a better price. A 10 by 10 pad at $15 per square foot and a 20 by 20 slab at $7 per square foot can be the same contractor charging the same way on the same day.

This is the single most useful thing to know before comparing bids. If you are pricing anything under about 300 square feet, ask for the number as a total, not per square foot, and expect it to look expensive per unit. Our slab cost calculator returns material, delivery and labor by the square foot without applying a floor, so on a small pad it reads low on purpose: compare its output against a real quote rather than treating it as one. The concrete pad cost calculator prices the small jobs where that floor bites hardest.

Cost per square foot by finish

Finish moves the labor tier, not the concrete. The slab underneath is the same volume at the same price per yard whichever of these you choose:

• Broom finish: the $2 per square foot end. The default for driveways, pads and garage floors, and the one most slabs should be.
• Integral color or pigment: a modest premium over plain, mostly material. The color goes in the truck, so it adds little labor.
• Stamped concrete: pushes labor to the $8 per square foot tier and beyond. Stamping is a timed job done on setting concrete by people who cannot stop, and the number of patterns and release colors drives it.
• Exposed aggregate: a wash and a retarder step on top of a normal pour, so it sits between broom and stamped.
• Stained or polished: varies more than any other option, because it depends on the number of grinding passes and coats rather than on the slab at all. For an existing floor, see concrete floor finishes.

For a patio specifically, where the finish choice usually carries the whole budget decision, concrete patio cost prices the common combinations.

Convert square feet to cubic yards

To price a slab from your own area, turn square feet and thickness into yards:

1. Multiply square feet by thickness in feet. Four inches is 0.333 feet, so a 400 square foot patio at 4 inches is 400 x 0.333, or 133.3 cubic feet.
2. Divide by 27 to get cubic yards. That is 4.94 yards.
3. Add 5 to 10 percent for waste. Call it 5.4 yards.
4. Multiply by your delivered price per yard, then add finishing labor by the square foot.

Below the 10 yard truck minimum, add the short-load surcharge, which our defaults put at $30 per yard. Most residential slabs are under that minimum, so for a patio or a shed pad the surcharge is the normal case rather than the exception.

Already have your area? Put it straight into the concrete cost estimator and it returns yards, bags and a total. Need the area first? The square footage calculator gets you there, and how much concrete do I need covers the volume side in full.

Why your price is not last year's price

Ready-mix has become substantially more expensive, and quoting a figure from an old article is the most common way people end up with a budget that does not survive first contact with a supplier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this directly in its Producer Price Index for Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing, an index set at 100 in June 1981. In August 2019 it stood at 287.0. In August 2026 it stood at 402.7.

That is a rise of about 40 percent in seven years. The sharpest part is behind us: from August 2021 to August 2026 the index rose 31 percent, but from August 2023 to August 2026 it rose only about 8 percent, and the most recent year added roughly 2 percent. Prices have not come down, they have stopped climbing as fast.

On top of the national trend, your own number moves for reasons no average can carry: how far the plant is from your site, how many yards you are ordering, what psi and mix you specify, whether you pour in winter and need a hot-water or accelerated mix, and how competitive your local market is. Two suppliers twenty miles apart routinely differ by more than the quartile spread in the national survey. Treat every figure on this page as a starting point for a phone call, not a substitute for one.

Why per square foot is only a starting point

Two slabs with the same square footage can cost very different amounts, and now you can see exactly which levers are responsible. Thickness changes the concrete layer proportionally. Finish changes the labor tier. Size decides whether the minimum charge binds. Access, demolition of whatever is there now, a thicker base, reinforcement and jointing all sit outside the per square foot figure entirely, and on a replacement job the demolition alone can rival the pour.

Use the per square foot number for what it is good at, which is sanity-checking a bid that is wildly out of range, and use a real breakdown for anything you are about to sign. For the other common unit, see concrete cost per yard. For the full price anatomy, see how much does concrete cost. For a slab specifically, concrete slab cost runs through a finished job line by line.