How Much Does Concrete Cost?

What a yard actually costs, from real price lists

Most pages on this topic quote an average. Averages hide the thing you need to know, so here are published prices with the publisher and the date attached. Every row is 3,000 psi or the nearest equivalent, per cubic yard.

Two things jump out of that table before you even get to the regions.

Same state, 12 percent apart. American Concrete in Augusta publishes $174 for 3,000 psi and Quick Mix in metro Atlanta publishes $195 for the same mix, and Quick Mix adds a $75 fuel and environmental charge that Augusta does not have. No input cost explains that. It is local demand and congestion.

Same company, same county, same day, 57 percent apart. In Allegany County's March 2025 bid tabulation, Wayne Concrete bid $299.00 per cubic yard for 3,000 psi in the county's northeast quadrant and $190.50 for the identical mix in the southwest quadrant. One producer, one document, one date. Nothing about the concrete changed. Only the haul did.

For context on where those sit, the ready-mix industry's own benchmarking survey puts the average selling price at $160 per cubic yard, and an index built from four public producers' reported selling prices put 2025 at $179.95. Our cost per cubic yard guide works through why those two figures differ and which one your supplier is closer to.

Why two quoted prices are not comparable

The single biggest reason published per-yard prices look wildly inconsistent is that they are measuring different things. Compare two California suppliers from the table above:

• Supreme Concrete, Los Angeles: $127.05 for 3,000 psi. That is ex-plant. Add 9.5 percent sales tax and it is $139.12. Then add a zone delivery fee, and a $55 per trip environmental fee.
• Townsend Concrete, Vacaville: $162 retail for the same strength. Also before delivery, which runs $120 to $350 per load depending on the zone.

On paper that is a 27 percent gap. In practice it is mostly a quoting convention. A published price per yard may or may not include delivery, and it almost never includes sales tax. Before you compare two quotes, make both of them answer the same four questions: is delivery in the number, is tax in the number, is there a fuel or environmental surcharge per load, and is there a fee for time on site. American Concrete, for instance, gives you one free hour and then charges "$75 per hour after first hour ($1.25 per minute)."

The truck minimum is three different numbers

This is where most writing on concrete pricing, including the earlier version of this page, goes wrong. There is no single minimum. There are three separate figures and they get run together:

And a fourth number matters more than any of them: the minimum charge. American Concrete's price list, effective 1 April 2026, reads "$820 FOR 4 CUBIC YARDS OR LESS." Its list price is $174 a yard. So:

• Order 4 yards and you pay $820, an effective $205 per cubic yard.
• Order 1 yard and you still pay the $820 minimum, plus its "$85 ON DELIVERY OF LESS THAN 6 CUBIC YARDS." That is about $905 for one cubic yard of concrete, roughly five times list.

Townsend Concrete shows the same mechanism as a function of distance. Its minimum order is 1 yard in Vacaville and Dixon, 2 yards in Davis and Fairfield, 3 yards in Woodland, and 5 yards out at Calistoga, with the order minimum rising from $162 to $810 across roughly a forty mile radius.

How the short-load fee is actually charged. Of six real sources we read, five charge a flat fee and only one has any sliding element. The published fees: $85 (American Concrete), $100 or the cost of the difference if that is lower (Townsend), $120, $125 and $175 for the three bidders in Allegany County, and $200 (Quick Mix). So a flat charge of roughly $85 to $200, most often near $125, triggered somewhere around 5 to 6 yards. Our ready-mix delivery guide has the fuller fee schedule, including waiting time, Saturday surcharges, washout and pump minimums.

Our own calculators use a simpler model, a $30 per cubic yard surcharge on anything under 10 cubic yards, and it is worth knowing where that diverges from the real thing. On a 1 yard order the real flat fee is far higher than our model charges. On a 7 to 9 yard order our model charges more than most suppliers would. If you are ordering a short load, take the flat fee off your own supplier's list and ignore ours.

The practical consequence has not changed: under about a yard, bags usually win. An 80 lb bag yields 0.60 cubic feet, so a cubic yard takes 45 of them, about $360 of material at $8 a bag, against $160 for the concrete plus a flat short-load fee that can be more than the concrete. The concrete bag calculator gives you the count, and bags per yard covers the crossover properly.

Where the money goes

The ready-mix industry publishes its own income statement per cubic yard, which is rare in construction pricing, and the concrete cost estimator sets the full table out line by line. Three things in it matter for understanding a quote.

Delivery is about a fifth of the price, $32.07 of $159.68 in the 2023 survey of 174 producers covering a third of the US industry. That is why haul distance and diesel move the number as much as they do, and why the fuel surcharges on the price lists above exist.

Materials are about 56 percent, $89.01 per yard, covering cement, aggregate, sand and admixtures together.

Pre-tax profit is $14.59 a yard, 9.1 percent of revenue. So the supplier who takes $10 off for a cash account is giving up most of the margin on the load, which is worth knowing before you push on price. The same survey's three-year series also shows profit per yard falling in 2022, from $7.98 to $7.65, in a year when prices rose 12 percent, because materials outran price. Those increases were cost recovery rather than margin.

What moved the price, and what is moving it now

There is exactly one free, authoritative, monthly US price series for this, and it is the Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index. The series for ready-mix is WPU1333, "Producer Price Index by Commodity: Nonmetallic Mineral Products: Ready-Mix Concrete."

There are in fact two of them, and the difference trips people up. The commodity series WPU1333 is on a 1982 = 100 base and read 395.186 in August 2026. The industry series, PCU327320327320, "Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing", is on a June 1981 = 100 base and read 402.650 the same month. They are not in conflict; they are different baskets on different bases. We use the commodity series here and the cost estimator cites the industry one.

One warning before the numbers, because it is being got wrong in print. The PPI is an index on a 1982 = 100 base. It is not a dollar price. An index reading of 395 does not mean $395 per cubic yard, and at least one 2026 article has published the index value as a per-yard price. Percent changes on the index are meaningful. The level is not a price.

Read those four rows together and the 2026 story is not the one you would guess. Cement, the largest single input, got cheaper over the year. Ready-mix went up anyway. Cement is below its September 2025 peak of 360.462, and trade coverage from late 2025 reported that "quarterly reports from major cement players are showing a flat or even negative outlook for cement prices." Meanwhile aggregate kept climbing and diesel rose 78 percent. Delivery is a fifth of the price. The 2026 increase is a fuel and freight story, not a cement story.

Over longer periods the series shows three clean phases:

• 2021 to 2023, the surge. Ready-mix rose 29 percent in three years.
• 2024 to 2025, the plateau. August 2024 read 386.394 and August 2025 read 386.359. Flat to two decimal places across twelve months.
• 2026, modest re-acceleration. Up 2.28 percent year over year, which on a $175 yard is about $4.

Across five years ready-mix is up 30.78 percent, and across ten years 55.52 percent. That ten-year figure has a useful independent check: an index built from four public producers' own reported selling prices rose 59.1 percent between 2016 and 2025, against 52.05 percent for the PPI over the same span. Two completely unrelated methods, within seven points over nine years, which tells you the index is tracking what buyers really pay.

Cement is not concrete, and what the cement is worth

People search for cement prices when they mean concrete prices, and the two are genuinely different products at very different prices. NRMCA's definition is the clean one: the paste "composed of cement and water, coats the surface of the fine (sand) and coarse aggregates (rocks) and binds them together into a rock-like mass known as concrete," and "typically, a mixture is by volume about 10 to 15 percent cement, 60 to 75 percent aggregates and 15 to 20 percent water." Cement is the powder. Concrete is the finished material. Our cost per yard guide has more on the distinction.

So how much of your yard of concrete is cement, in dollars? This is derivable from published figures, and here is the arithmetic so you can check it:

• Cement content. Quikrete's own portland cement data sheet states that "five to six 94 lb (42.6 kg) bags of QUIKRETE Portland Cement is typically used with appropriate proportions of sand and gravel to produce 1 yd3 (0.76 m3) of concrete." That is 470 to 564 lb per cubic yard. Townsend's price list agrees exactly, mapping 5 sack to 3,000 psi and 6 sack to 4,000 psi.
• Cement price. The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 puts the average mill value of US cement at $160 per metric ton for 2025, after $127 in 2021, $139 in 2022, $152 in 2023 and $160 in 2024.
• The result. 564 lb at $160 per metric ton is $40.93 of cement in a 4,000 psi cubic yard. For a 3,000 psi, 5 sack mix it is $34.11.

Against the cost stack above, that $40.93 is about 46 percent of the producer's $89.01 materials bill and about 23 percent of a $174 delivered retail yard. One caveat to carry with it: USGS mill value is the price at the cement plant gate, before freight to the batch plant, so $40.93 is a floor on the real in-mix cement cost, not an exact figure.

And here is the argument for buying concrete rather than making it. Bulk cement is $160 per metric ton at the plant. The same cement in 94 lb bags at retail was $21.99 at one named US supplier and $39.70 at another on 3 October 2026, which works out at $516 and $931 per metric ton, roughly three to six times the bulk price. Those two retail prices disagree with each other by 80 percent, which is worth knowing before you assume the first bag price you see is the market. If you are mixing from cement, sand and gravel yourself, the concrete mix calculator works out the quantities and how to mix concrete covers the ratios.

Why your price is not the national average

Five things move it, in roughly this order of importance.

1. Haul distance from the batch plant. This dominates everything else and the Wayne Concrete figures above are the proof: 57 percent apart inside one county, from one company, on one day. Townsend's zone table shows the same thing in retail form, with the per-load delivery fee running $120 near the plant to $350 at the edge of its service area.
2. Fuel. Diesel is up 78 percent year over year and delivery is a fifth of the price, which is why fuel surcharges have become explicit line items: $75 per delivery at Quick Mix, $55 per trip at Supreme Concrete.
3. Season, if you are north. All three Allegany County bidders charge a heated load fee from 15 November to 15 April, at $16.50 to $19.00 per cubic yard, which is roughly a 9 percent winter premium on a $190 base. The Georgia and California lists carry no such charge at all. Concrete has a season, and in cold weather it also has a different curing problem.
4. Cement plant proximity. USGS counted 97 cement plants across 34 states in 2025, down from 99 the year before, with clinker production falling from 76.8 million tons in 2023 to an estimated 69 million in 2025. Sixteen states have no plant at all, so more cement travels further, and imports arrive at coastal terminals rather than inland.
5. Local demand and market structure. The Augusta against metro Atlanta gap, $174 against $195 for the same mix in the same state, is purely this.

Which is why a national figure is a sanity check and not a quote. Call two plants, ask both of them the four questions in the section above, and you will learn more in ten minutes than any price page can tell you.

Which number do you actually want

"How much does concrete cost" splits into several different questions, and most of them have their own page here:

For a finished, installed figure rather than the material price, the site's own model puts a 4 inch slab at $1.98 per square foot of concrete delivered plus $2 to $8 per square foot of finishing labor, so roughly $4 to $10 per square foot installed for plain flatwork, with decorative work above it. Mix strength also moves the per-yard price, and over-specifying it costs money without buying durability: see what psi concrete you need. Every price on this page is reviewed as of 2025.