What Is Quikrete?

Quikrete the brand vs concrete the material

This trips people up, so it is worth being clear. Concrete is a material. Quikrete is a company that sells that material in a bag. Concrete is a mix of cement (the glue), sand and stone (the filler), and water. Cement on its own is just the powder that binds everything together, so cement and concrete are not the same thing either.

Quikrete pre-blends the dry ingredients in the right proportions and seals them in bags of 40, 50, 60, and 80 pounds. All you supply is water and muscle. That is the whole appeal. You do not need a truck, a plant order, or a minimum load. For a set of steps, a mailbox footing, or a dozen fence posts, a few bags off the shelf beat calling a ready-mix supplier who charges short-load fees on anything under about 10 yards.

If you want the full breakdown of how bagged mix compares to a truck, and which one wins for your job, the mix types guide covers it, including the Quikrete vs Sakrete question that comes up constantly (short version: they are competing brands of nearly identical product).

Who owns Quikrete?

The Quikrete Companies is a private, family-owned business run by the Winchester family. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and the company dates its founding to 1940. Gene Winchester, a former aeronautical engineer, built the operation into the packaged-concrete giant it is today, and his three sons took over leadership in 1981. The family has kept an unusually low profile for a business this size, but Forbes reported in 2026 that the Winchesters are worth an estimated $18 billion, essentially all of it from concrete in a bag (Forbes).

The company calls itself the largest manufacturer of packaged concrete in the country, with dozens of plants spread across North America so the heavy bags do not travel far (Quikrete). In February 2025 Quikrete acquired the publicly traded producer Summit Materials for $11.5 billion, which pushed its estimated revenue toward $12 billion. None of that changes what is in the bag, but it explains why the brand is on every shelf.

The main Quikrete mixes at a glance

Quikrete makes a lot of products, and grabbing the wrong bag is the most common DIY mistake. These are the ones you will actually reach for. Strengths and set times below come from Quikrete's own Concrete Mix Selector Guide (Quikrete).

A few plain-language notes on these. The standard Concrete Mix is the workhorse and what most projects want. It is not a "fast" product, despite the brand name fooling people. Fast-Setting is the one you dump dry into a post hole and hit with water, and it is grabbing in half an hour, so mix only what you can place. 5000 is the pick for a driveway or anything carrying vehicle weight. Crack Resistant has fibers in it and suits thinner pours. For the full decision tree on which bag to buy, see the which mix to use guide.

Quikrete also sells the non-concrete cousins that share the shelf: mortar mixes for laying block and brick, sand mix (a cement-and-sand topping with no gravel) for thin repairs and setting stone, and blacktop and self-leveling products. Those are different animals and are not interchangeable with concrete mix.

How much is in a bag

Bag size tells you the weight, not the volume, so this is the number that actually matters when you shop. Per Quikrete's data sheet, an 80-pound bag of Concrete Mix yields about 0.60 cubic feet of wet concrete. Scale down from there:

• 80 lb bag = 0.60 cu ft
• 60 lb bag = 0.45 cu ft
• 40 lb bag = 0.30 cu ft

It takes roughly 45 bags of 80-pound Concrete Mix to make one cubic yard (27 cubic feet), which is the point where a ready-mix truck usually gets cheaper and a lot less exhausting (Concrete Captain). Mixing 45 bags by hand is a genuinely bad day, so use the bag count to decide when to switch to a truck.

To turn your slab or footing into a bag count, run it through the Quikrete bag calculator, which is built around these exact yields, or use the general-purpose concrete bag calculator if you are pricing several brands. The how many bags guide walks through the math by project type with worked examples.

The DIY workflow, start to finish

Every Quikrete job follows the same four steps. Get each one right and the pour comes out fine.

1. Pick the right mix. Match the product to the job using the table above. Slab or footing, use Concrete Mix or 5000. Fence post, use Fast-Setting. Guessing here is what leads to weak or cracked results.

2. Work out how many bags. Measure length, width, and thickness, convert to cubic feet, and divide by the bag yield. A quick example: a walkway 10 feet by 3 feet at 4 inches thick is 10 x 3 x 0.33 = 9.9 cubic feet. At 0.60 cubic feet per 80-pound bag, that is 9.9 / 0.60 = 16.5, so 17 bags, and you round up and add one for waste. Never buy the exact count.

3. Mix it. For Concrete Mix, add clean water a little at a time, around 6 pints per 80-pound bag as a starting point, and mix to a stiff, oatmeal-like consistency that holds its shape. Too much water is the number one homeowner error; it weakens the concrete and invites cracks. The full method, by hand and by machine, is in the how to mix Quikrete guide.

4. Place it and let it cure. Get it in the forms, screed it flat, and finish the surface. Then leave it alone. Concrete is walk-on hard in about 10 to 12 hours but keeps gaining strength for days, hitting its rated 4000 psi at 28 days. Keep it damp for the first several days for a stronger result. Setting, curing, and full dry times are broken down in the set, cure, and dry time guide.

The fence post shortcut

The most popular Quikrete job is setting posts, and it has its own trick. With Fast-Setting Concrete Mix you skip the mixing entirely: set the post, pour the dry mix straight into the hole around it, then add water on top and let it soak in. It sets in 20 to 40 minutes and takes heavy load after about 4 hours (Quikrete).

DIYers back the method up. On the DIY Chatroom forum, one member's blunt summary was that "the procedure works fine and in fact it is an acceptable government standard," with the group noting the failures come from not getting enough water down to the bottom of the mix (DIY Chatroom). The full technique, how much per hole, and whether to add gravel first are in the Quikrete fence post guide.

Where to go next

That is the overview. If you know your project, jump straight to the guide that fits: figure out how many bags you need, learn how to mix it right, check the set and cure times, or handle a fence post. To size a job in seconds, the Quikrete bag calculator does the arithmetic for you.