How Much Does a Concrete Patio Cost?

What the sources actually say

There is no government or industry survey of residential patio prices. Every per square foot figure in circulation comes from a home services marketplace, and they do not agree.

The full spread is $4 to $18. The clustering is $5 to $13. Two cautions on reading these. Angi and HomeAdvisor are the same company, which merged in 2017, and they publish the identical national average of $3,556 and the identical range of $1,919 to $5,394, so anyone averaging "the aggregators" is counting one survey twice. And Homewyse is an algorithmic cost model, not collected job data.

Treat any of these as a sanity check on a quote, not as a price. The thing you can actually pin down is the material side, which is covered below and comes out around a quarter of the installed price.

Patio cost by size

Most patio cost tables multiply an area by a flat rate per square foot, and on a patio that is the one shortcut that reliably produces a wrong number. Patios are small, and small concrete jobs do not price by the square foot.

A contractor has a floor under what a day is worth. Mobilizing a crew, a truck, forms and tools costs about 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, and the crossover where it stops binding is about 278 square feet, roughly a 17 by 17 patio. Concrete cost per square foot works through where that figure comes from.

Nearly every patio people actually build is below that line. Here is what that does, at our default prices, for a 4 inch plain broom-finished patio with a 10 percent waste allowance:

Read the last column rather than the totals. It is flat at $7.08 from 320 square feet upward, because above the crossover the price really does track the area. Below it the figure climbs steeply, and a 10 by 10 patio works out at more than double the per-square-foot rate of a 20 by 20 poured by the same crew on the same day.

That has a practical consequence worth knowing before you call anyone. If you are weighing a 10 by 10 against a 12 by 12, the larger patio is about $114 more in total, not the $500 a flat rate would suggest. The concrete is the cheap part. You are mostly buying a crew's day either way, so buy the patio you actually want rather than the one that looks cheaper per foot.

Above the crossover the arithmetic is ordinary: a plain patio lands near $7 per square foot at our defaults, and the slab calculator will size any dimensions you like.

Patio cost by finish

Finish is mostly labor, which is why it moves the number so hard. The stamped tiers below are the one place three separate sources agree closely.

For the other finishes:

• Broom finish: the baseline, about $6 to $12 per square foot installed
• Colored concrete: roughly $8 to $11 for one coloring method, $11 to $18 for two or three colors or a contrasting border, per Concrete Network. The material side is small: integral color is dosed at 1 to 4 percent of cement weight, about one bag per cubic yard for a medium shade, which is roughly $0.22 to $0.89 per square foot of slab. The rest of the upcharge is labor and care.
• Exposed aggregate: about $7 to $18 installed. Be careful with one widely copied table here: Angi lists exposed aggregate at "$2 to $3 per square foot" under a heading that reads as an installed cost, which would make it cheaper than a broom finish. HomeAdvisor publishes the same figure correctly as plus $2 to $3, an upcharge over plain.
• Sealing: $1 to $3 per square foot applied, and it is not a one-time cost. See the lifecycle section below.

What is actually in the price

The material side of a patio can be priced from published figures rather than guessed at. Here is a 4 inch slab, per square foot:

• Concrete, about $2.00. One cubic yard covers 81 square feet at 4 inches. NRMCA's benchmarking survey puts the industry average selling price at $160 per cubic yard, which is $1.98 per square foot.
• Gravel base, $0.30 to $0.52. A 4 inch compacted base is about 5 tons under 300 square feet, at $18 to $31 per ton.
• Reinforcement, $0.15 to $0.75. Welded wire mesh runs $0.15 to $0.30 per square foot of material. Number 4 rebar on an 18 inch grid uses about 1.4 linear feet per square foot, which at $0.30 to $0.50 per foot is $0.42 to $0.75, plus the labor to chair and tie it.
• Sealer, about $0.34 of material for two coats, at roughly 200 square feet per gallon.

That is $3 to $4 per square foot of material against a $7 to $11 installed price, which lines up with the one sourced labor share available: HomeGuide puts labor at 50 to 60 percent of the total, rising toward 70 to 78 percent on stamped and decorative work where the material barely changes but the crew hours double.

This arithmetic also disposes of a claim that circulates widely, that patio materials "work out to about $10 per square foot." At $160 per yard the concrete alone cannot exceed about $2. A source claiming $10 in materials while also quoting a $4 per square foot installed floor is contradicting itself.

To price the concrete for your own patio dimensions, the concrete cost estimator takes the material, delivery and fees, and the slab calculator works out the yards.

What drives a patio estimate

• Thickness. Patios are usually 4 inches. Bumping to 5 or 6 inches for heavy furniture adds concrete, and a hot tub pad has its own specification, because a filled spa concentrates 105 to 130 pounds per square foot on the slab.
• Base prep. Grading, gravel and forming take labor before any concrete arrives. It is also where your yardage goes: ACI's tolerance on a fine-graded subgrade is three quarters of an inch, and every eighth of an inch the grade runs low costs about 0.39 cubic yards per 1,000 square feet.
• Short-load fees. A 300 square foot patio at 4 inches is about 3.7 cubic yards, which trips a short-load charge at most suppliers. Real published schedules set the threshold at 3 to 6 yards depending on delivery zone, with the fee capped at about $100 or the value of the shortfall, whichever is less, plus a zone delivery charge of $120 to $350. Note that this is far gentler than the widely repeated claim that ready-mix carries a 10 yard minimum with a $53 per yard penalty below it. Ten yards is a truck's capacity, not a minimum order.
• Access. If the truck cannot reach the yard, a pump is added. For a patio-sized pour the binding number is the minimum charge, roughly $400 to $600 for a line or trailer pump, not the hourly rate.
• Finish. Decorative work is mostly labor, and labor is where patios get expensive.

Permits

A patio slab on grade often needs no building permit, but that is a local decision and not a code exemption. The IRC's list of work exempt from permit, section R105.2, covers sidewalks and driveways, detached accessory structures under 200 square feet, and decks under 200 square feet that sit no more than 30 inches above grade. Patios and slabs on grade are not named in it. Anyone telling you the code exempts patios under 200 square feet is reading the deck line.

What happens in practice varies. Prince William County, Virginia exempts concrete patio slabs on grade that are not designed to carry a future addition, while still requiring zoning or watershed approval. Portland, Oregon tells you to ask planning whether a zoning permit is needed. Setbacks, impervious surface limits and stormwater review are the usual triggers, and a raised patio or one that will carry a roof almost always needs a permit.

Where a fee applies, real schedules run from modest to meaningful: Houston charges $47 for a driveway with a $91.06 minimum permit fee, Tampa lists $214 for a residential driveway, patio slab or deck, and Dearborn, Michigan charges $100 plus $300 for pre-pour and post-pour inspections. The $50 to $400 range the marketplaces quote brackets all three.

The cost nobody quotes: resealing

A decorative patio is sealed, and sealer is consumable. The American Society of Concrete Contractors puts the interval plainly: "higher traffic and UV exposed areas should receive new sealer every 2-3 years, while lighter traffic and interior areas should last 4-5 years." Their chart is tighter still for the common chemistries, listing 1 to 2 years for water-based acrylics and 1 to 3 for solvent-based.

The material is cheap, about $0.34 per square foot for two coats. Applied, it is quoted at $1 to $3 per square foot, so most of a resealing bill is prep and labor. A 300 square foot patio resealed every three years at $1 to $3 per square foot is $300 to $900 each time, which over twenty years is $2,000 to $6,000, comparable to the original slab. A broom-finish patio left unsealed avoids that entirely, which is a real argument for the plain finish that price-per-square-foot comparisons never make.

Are concrete prices still climbing?

Not the way 2022 and 2023 conditioned everyone to expect. The Producer Price Index for ready-mix concrete manufacturing rose about 11 percent in 2023 and 5.7 percent in 2024, then 0.85 percent in 2025, and it is running about 2.3 percent year over year. USGS puts the average mill value of portland cement at $160 per metric ton in both 2024 and 2025, flat. Ready-mix price inflation decelerated sharply; it did not accelerate. Content claiming a 2026 surge is describing the 2022 cycle.

One more figure worth having before you spend: patios are often sold on resale value, with returns of 50 to 90 percent quoted without a source. The only large survey that measures it, the 2025 Cost vs. Value Report, puts a backyard patio at 46 percent of cost recouped, ranking it 21st of 28 projects. Its patio is a large upscale build at $51,454, not a plain slab, so it is not a direct read on a $3,500 pour, but it is at or below the bottom of the range people quote rather than inside it. Build a patio because you want a patio.

Concrete against the alternatives

Nobody prices a patio in a vacuum. The same square footage can be poured concrete, laid in pavers, spread as gravel or framed as a wood deck, and the install cost is only the first of three numbers that matter.

Those concrete, gravel and paver figures are the same surface defaults this site uses for the driveway comparison, where the sourcing is set out in full: supplier sheets for the paver units, DOT contract line items for the installed concrete, and county material bids for the aggregate. A patio is lighter duty than a driveway, so read the concrete range at its lower end for a plain patio and the upper end only once a decorative finish is involved.

Pavers against concrete is the comparison people actually ask about, and the honest answer has two halves. On install, a plain poured patio wins comfortably: $6 to $12 against $10 to $25. On repair, pavers win just as comfortably, because a paver patio is a field of individual units. A tree root lifts three of them and you pull those three, fix the base and put them back. The same root through a poured slab is a crack, and a crack in concrete is permanent. Patching is visible, and nothing short of replacement makes it not visible.

Where the two converge is decoration. Stamped concrete exists to look like pavers or stone, and it gets there by adding exactly the hand labor that makes pavers expensive in the first place. Once you are stamping, the gap narrows enough that the install-cost argument mostly stops being the deciding one, and the repair argument has not changed.

Gravel is a third of the price of anything else and stays that way only if you accept the maintenance: it migrates, it needs topping up, and it does not hold furniture level. The gravel calculator sizes it. A wood deck is not really a patio comparison at all once the ground is flat, since its cost is driven by framing height rather than area, and it is the only option on this list that needs refinishing every two or three years rather than every ten.

One thing that does not vary: all four want the same thing underneath. Compacted base, drained away from the house, at the fall covered in the slope calculator. The surface you choose changes the bill. It does not change the preparation.

Price your own patio

Start with your patio size and thickness, then run it through the concrete cost estimator for the material, delivery and fees. For the per square foot breakdown by thickness, see concrete cost per square foot, and to lay the whole job out line by line, the concrete estimate template has the sheet. Building a driveway too? Compare with the concrete driveway cost calculator, since driveways and patios price out much the same way.