How much does concrete cost per cubic yard?

Published ranges vary widely — roughly $110 to $195 per cubic yard across national cost guides, a spread real enough that only a batch-plant quote narrows it locally. HomeGuide runs low ($119–$150, citing an NRMCA figure near $108); ConcreteNetwork runs high ($160–$195, with a 2025 US average around $180). The calculator uses the full span and marks it low confidence.

How much does concrete cost per square foot?

A finished concrete slab costs about $6 to $12 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026), covering concrete, forming, placing, finishing and labour. Materials are roughly $3 to $7 of that and labour $3 to $5. A decorative finish pushes it well above the range. The per-square-foot figure is a turnkey rate; the per-cubic-yard figure is the concrete alone.

How much does a concrete slab cost?

A poured slab is five line items: concrete ($110–$195 per cubic yard), place-and-finish labour ($3–$5 per square foot), a gravel base ($1–$3 per square foot), reinforcement ($0.15–$0.30 per square foot for mesh), and delivery fees. It scales with area and thickness and rises with poor access, a decorative finish and tear-out of an old slab. The calculator breaks the estimate into those parts.

How much does it cost to pour a 20x20 concrete slab?

A 20-by-20-foot slab is 400 square feet; at the all-in $6 to $12 per square foot a finished 4-inch broom slab runs roughly $2,400 to $4,800 (HomeGuide, February 2026). It takes about 5 cubic yards of concrete — below the ready-mix minimum, so a short-load fee applies. A 5-to-6-inch or reinforced slab, hand-carry access or a stamped finish pushes it higher.

How much does a bag of concrete cost?

Ready-mix runs about $110 to $195 per cubic yard delivered; bagged concrete costs several times more per yard but skips delivery and short-load fees, so it only wins for pours under roughly half a cubic yard. Mixing your own from bulk cement, sand and gravel is cheaper still per yard, but it is slow, physical and strength-variable — worth it only for very small or access-restricted pours. For the exact bag count and the crossover point, the concrete slab calculator does the quantity maths — this page prices ready-mix.

How much does concrete delivery cost?

A "delivered" price is the per-cubic-yard concrete ($110–$195) plus a flat delivery charge of about $55 to $65 a load, and covers only the mix in the truck. On top sit a short-load fee under about 10 cubic yards, a washout or environmental fee ($25–$50), a fuel surcharge, and standby time if the truck waits past roughly five to seven minutes per yard. The calculator lists each separately.

How much does a concrete driveway cost?

A concrete driveway is priced per square foot as a turnkey rate — about $6 to $15 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026) — covering concrete, base, forming, finishing and control joints. It costs more up front than an asphalt driveway but lasts longer with less upkeep. A thicker 5–6 inch vehicle section, curves and removing the old surface all raise it.

How much does it cost to pour concrete?

Labour to place and finish concrete is charged per square foot of finished surface — about $3 to $5 per square foot for a plain slab (HomeGuide, February 2026), a similar order of magnitude to the concrete itself. It covers forming, placing, screeding, floating, edging, jointing and the finish. A decorative finish, heavy reinforcement or restricted access raises the rate.

How much does a concrete foundation cost?

A footing or foundation wall is priced per cubic yard of concrete ($110–$195) plus per-linear-foot forming and excavation, not per square foot. Cost drivers are depth below the frost line, wall height, the rebar schedule, over-excavation in poor soil, and pump access. The calculator returns the concrete line; forming and excavation are shown as quantities without a sourced price.

How much does a concrete floor cost?

A concrete pad or garage floor is priced per square foot — about $6 to $12 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026) — plus a gravel base ($1–$3 per square foot) and, for a garage, a vapour barrier and thickened perimeter. Interior floors add a trowel finish over the broom baseline. Detached pads pay the short-load fee on the concrete.

Does a concrete driveway cost more than asphalt?

Yes, up front. A concrete driveway costs more to install than an equivalent asphalt one, but it lasts longer and needs less maintenance over its life, which narrows the gap over time. This page prices concrete only; the trade-off against asphalt is a durability-versus-upfront-cost decision, not a line item.

Concrete Cost Calculator — Slab, Driveway & Patio

Reading this estimate

The width of the range is the honest part — the concrete band alone spans $110 to $195 a yard because two national cost guides disagree by about 40% and nobody can reconcile them from public data. A calculator that hands you one confident number has not removed that uncertainty, only hidden it.
It is a materials-and-labour figure, not a quote and not a budget — it covers the lines shown and nothing else. Permits, design, site drainage, a retaining wall, utility relocation and finance charges are all outside it. Treat the number as the core of what the pour costs, then add for your site.
Check how much of the high end rests on low-confidence bands — the result states that fraction. Ready-mix is usually the biggest single line and it is the least certain, so the top of the range is softer than the bottom. Plan against the middle, budget against the top.
The lines with no price are counted, not free — removing an existing slab, and a footing's forming and excavation, show a quantity and no dollar figure because no sourced price met this site's standard. They still cost money — get those quoted separately rather than reading the blank as zero.
Every figure carries a date, and you can see it — each band shows when its source published it. Some are several months old. Whether that still holds for your project is a judgement — which is why the date is shown rather than buried.
For a number you can act on, take two quantities to two people — the square footage to a concrete contractor for a labour-and-finish quote, and the cubic yards — from the concrete slab calculator — to a batch plant for a delivered price. Those two quotes together beat any national range.

Concrete Slab Calculator — Work out the concrete a slab, footing, round pier, post-hole or set of steps needs — volume in cubic yards and cubic feet, 40/60/80 lb bag counts, and the ready-mix order.
Rebar Cost Calculator — Estimate what rebar costs by the linear foot, from a dated national price band for black or galvanized bar, with a same-size per-pound and per-ton conversion for four common sizes.

Methodology

This page multiplies quantities by published price ranges and adds them up. Both halves matter: where each range comes from, how old it is, how confident it is, and which lines carry no price at all. Every figure below is a range, never a point estimate, because that is how the sources publish them and because a single number would imply a precision nobody has.

How concrete work is priced: per cubic yard and per square foot

Ready-mix concrete is sold by the cubic yard and covers the mix in the truck only. A finished slab is quoted per square foot as a turnkey rate — concrete plus forming, placing, finishing and labour. This calculator keeps the two apart: a concrete line in cubic yards, a labour line in square feet, and each add-on on its own line, so you can see what every part contributes.

The concrete quantity is the same geometry the concrete slab calculator uses — length × width × thickness in feet, ÷ 27 for cubic yards, carried at full precision. This page applies the waste allowance and prices the post-waste volume; the slab calculator is where bag counts and the ready-mix order rounding live.

A footing is priced differently again: per cubic yard of concrete plus per-linear-foot forming and excavation. Those last two lines show a quantity but no price on this page — see "What this page will not price" below.

concrete_yd³ (to price) = area_ft² × thickness_ft ÷ 27 × (1 + waste%)
labour            = area_ft² × labour band ($/ft²)
add-ons           = area_ft² × add-on band, itemised, never blended
footing           = concrete_yd³ × band  +  forming_lf + excavation_lf (unpriced)

What a slab costs by size: 10×10 to 30×40

The quickest way to size a slab budget is area times the all-in rate. A finished 4-inch slab with a broom finish runs about $6 to $12 per square foot (HomeGuide, February 2026), so the cost scales straight with the footprint. The table below is the common sizes; a gravel base, mesh or rebar, a thicker 5-to-6-inch vehicle section, a decorative finish, or tearing out an old slab all add on top of it.

The 20-by-20 is called out because it is the size asked about most often: 400 square feet, roughly 5 cubic yards of concrete, and — being under a full truck — a short-load fee on the delivery.

slab       area        finished cost  (4 in, broom, $6-$12/ft2)
10 x 10    100 ft2     $600 - $1,200
12 x 16    192 ft2     $1,152 - $2,304
20 x 20    400 ft2     $2,400 - $4,800
24 x 24    576 ft2     $3,456 - $6,912
30 x 40    1,200 ft2   $7,200 - $14,400

add: gravel base . mesh / rebar . thicker vehicle section . decorative finish . tear-out

Where the ready-mix price comes from — and why the range is wide

The ready-mix band on this page is $110 to $195 per cubic yard. That range is wide on purpose. Two national cost guides measuring the same thing disagree by about 40%: HomeGuide puts standard 3,000 PSI ready-mix at roughly $119–$150 per yard (and cites an NRMCA figure near $108), while ConcreteNetwork puts it at $160–$195 with a 2025 US average around $180. There is no public way to reconcile them.

So the band spans both, and it is marked low confidence. That is not hedging — it is the honest shape of the evidence. The one reliable way to narrow it is a quote from a batch plant in your area, which is why this page ends with that recommendation rather than a confident total. The provenance box below records both publisher ranges, not just the merged one.

Regional pricing is not modelled. Three city figures from a single source is not a multiplier table, and an invented multiplier would be worse than none. The band is national.

The other seven bands

Place-and-finish labour is $3 to $5 per square foot (HomeGuide, February 2026 — "$3 to $5 per square foot for labor … includes concrete form creation"), corroborated at the low end by Homewyse. A gravel sub-base is $1 to $3 per square foot. Welded wire mesh is $0.15 to $0.30 per square foot; a rebar grid is priced at $0.25 to $0.50 per linear foot of bar, laid out at 18 inches on-centre both ways.

The short-load fee is a flat $60 to $130 per delivery, added whenever the order is under about 10 cubic yards — the point below which suppliers charge for a partial truck. Some plants instead quote a per-cubic-yard penalty of $30 to $60 on the shortfall; this page uses the flat form. Concrete pumping, where truck access is blocked, runs $150 to $300 an hour for a line pump and $150 to $500 for a boom pump, with a two-to-four-hour minimum.

The mesh band was corroborated in a 2026-09-04 re-source: HomeGuide and Homewyse (May 2026, isolated material line) agree on $0.15–$0.30 per square foot, so it now carries medium confidence. Rebar stays low: the same re-source found the two qualifying sources disagree — Homewyse works out to about $0.24–$0.28 per linear foot, HomeGuide says $0.30–$0.50 — and the band spans both. The producer price index for reinforcing steel rose about 11% over the first half of 2026, but that is a mill-gate figure and does not carry straight through to the price of a cut foot of bar at a yard, so it was recorded and not applied. Both pump bands still rest on one source each and stay low. Labour, gravel and the short-load fee carry medium confidence on their own corroboration.

Confidence, and how old the prices are

Every band carries a source, a date it was published, and a confidence rating — low, medium or high. The result shows which bands contributed and flags what fraction of the high end of the range rests on low-confidence figures. Ready-mix is usually the largest single line and it is low confidence, so that fraction is rarely small; the page states it rather than letting it disappear into the total.

The prices are re-checked on a fixed cadence. The build warns during the last 90 days before any band goes stale and refuses to build once one passes 365 days old — a constraint on the people maintaining this site, so a stale price cannot be served quietly under a current heading.

None of this is a quote. It is a planning range with its working shown. For a number you can act on, take the square footage and the concrete volume to a contractor and a batch plant.

What this page will not price, and why that is the honest answer

Removing an existing slab shows as a line with its square footage and no dollar figure. The best-sourced removal figure available is more than a year old, and the only recent one has no stated methodology — neither meets the standard the rest of this page holds. So the line is counted, not costed, and the section on removal describes what drives the cost instead.

A footing's forming and excavation are counted in linear feet and not priced: no cost guide found this pass itemises footing forming together with trench excavation per linear foot. A garage floor's vapour barrier is the same — named as a line, no sourced per-square-foot band.

A decorative finish — stamped, stained, exposed aggregate — is handed off, not priced here. And a precast concrete fence has no sourced band at all, so the fence option prices nothing and says so.

Constants register

Constant	Value	Source	As of
Ready-mix concrete	$110–$195 per cu yd (national; low confidence)	ConcreteNetwork "Concrete Prices" (Sarah Hutchinson; $160–$195/yd³, 2025 US avg $179.95) AND HomeGuide "Concrete Cost Per Yard" (Tom Grupa; $119–$147/yd³, cites NRMCA $108) / "Concrete Delivery Cost" ($125–$150/yd³). Band spans both — the two publishers disagree ~40%.	2026-07-14
Place & finish labour	$3–$5 per sq ft (medium confidence)	HomeGuide "How Much Does a Concrete Slab Cost?" (Jennifer Carlson; fact-checked Tom Grupa) — "$3 to $5 per square foot for labor". Homewyse (May 2026) corroborates the low end.	2026-02-03
Gravel sub-base (~4 in)	$1–$3 per sq ft (medium confidence)	HomeGuide "How Much Does a Concrete Slab Cost?" — "Gravel costs $1 to $3 per square foot or $10 to $50 per ton".	2026-02-03
Welded wire mesh	$0.15–$0.30 per sq ft (medium confidence)	Two sources agree (re-sourced 2026-09-04): HomeGuide "How Much Does Concrete Cost Per Yard?" (2026-01-06, Tom Grupa) — "wire mesh costs $0.15 – $0.30 per square foot" — and Homewyse "Cost to Install Wire Mesh For Concrete" (May 2026, isolated material line, galvanized welded 6x6 10/10): $0.23–$0.25 per sq ft, inside the band.	2026-05-01
Rebar grid	$0.25–$0.50 per linear foot of bar (low confidence)	Two sources disagree; band is their union (re-sourced 2026-09-04). Homewyse "Cost to Install Rebar Reinforcement" (May 2026, isolated #4 Grade 40 material line at 18 in o.c.): ≈ $0.24–$0.28 per linear foot. HomeGuide "How Much Does Concrete Cost Per Yard?" (2026-01-06): "rebar ranges from $0.30 to $0.50 per linear foot". BLS producer price index for reinforcing steel +10.6% Jan–Jul 2026 recorded but not applied — a mill-gate index, not a retail-by-the-foot multiplier. Grid length derived at 18 in o.c. both ways.	2026-05-01
Short-load fee	$60–$130 per delivery, flat (medium confidence)	HomeGuide "Concrete Delivery Cost" ($30–$60/yd³ penalty below the ~10 yd³ minimum) + "Concrete Cost Per Yard" (flat $60–$110 on-site-mixing charge). Shipped as a flat per-order line.	2026-05-01
Concrete pump — line / trailer	$150–$300 per hour, 2–4 hr min (low confidence)	HomeGuide "Concrete Delivery Cost" — "Line pumps (boom-less) cost $150 to $300 per hour".	2026-05-01
Concrete pump — boom	$150–$500 per hour (low confidence)	HomeGuide "Concrete Delivery Cost" ($200–$500/hr) + "Concrete Cost Per Yard" (boom truck $140–$190/hr).	2026-05-01
Short-load threshold	≈ 10 cu yd	Convention — a full ready-mix truck is ~10 yd³ (HomeGuide). Below it, a short-load line is added. Not a price.	n/a
Reinforcement grid spacing	18 in on-centre, both ways	Common residential convention (not a sourced price). Sets the linear feet of bar a rebar grid needs for a given area.	n/a
Default waste allowance	10% (adjustable 0–25%)	Planning convention for spillage and over-excavation — an adjustable input. Shown as its own consideration, applied to the concrete volume before pricing.	n/a

Every price band above carries its source and the date that source published it, is shown as a range rather than a point figure, and is re-checked on a fixed cadence — the build warns in the last 90 days before a band goes stale and fails at 365 days (docs/PRICING-ARCHITECTURE.md).

FAQ

How much does concrete cost per cubic yard?: Published ranges vary widely — roughly $110 to $195 per cubic yard across national cost guides, a spread real enough that only a batch-plant quote narrows it locally. HomeGuide runs low ($119–$150, citing an NRMCA figure near $108); ConcreteNetwork runs high ($160–$195, with a 2025 US average around $180). The calculator uses the full span and marks it low confidence.
How much does concrete cost per square foot?: A finished concrete slab costs about $6 to $12 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026), covering concrete, forming, placing, finishing and labour. Materials are roughly $3 to $7 of that and labour $3 to $5. A decorative finish pushes it well above the range. The per-square-foot figure is a turnkey rate; the per-cubic-yard figure is the concrete alone.
How much does a concrete slab cost?: A poured slab is five line items: concrete ($110–$195 per cubic yard), place-and-finish labour ($3–$5 per square foot), a gravel base ($1–$3 per square foot), reinforcement ($0.15–$0.30 per square foot for mesh), and delivery fees. It scales with area and thickness and rises with poor access, a decorative finish and tear-out of an old slab. The calculator breaks the estimate into those parts.
How much does it cost to pour a 20x20 concrete slab?: A 20-by-20-foot slab is 400 square feet; at the all-in $6 to $12 per square foot a finished 4-inch broom slab runs roughly $2,400 to $4,800 (HomeGuide, February 2026). It takes about 5 cubic yards of concrete — below the ready-mix minimum, so a short-load fee applies. A 5-to-6-inch or reinforced slab, hand-carry access or a stamped finish pushes it higher.
How much does a bag of concrete cost?: Ready-mix runs about $110 to $195 per cubic yard delivered; bagged concrete costs several times more per yard but skips delivery and short-load fees, so it only wins for pours under roughly half a cubic yard. Mixing your own from bulk cement, sand and gravel is cheaper still per yard, but it is slow, physical and strength-variable — worth it only for very small or access-restricted pours. For the exact bag count and the crossover point, the concrete slab calculator does the quantity maths — this page prices ready-mix.
How much does concrete delivery cost?: A "delivered" price is the per-cubic-yard concrete ($110–$195) plus a flat delivery charge of about $55 to $65 a load, and covers only the mix in the truck. On top sit a short-load fee under about 10 cubic yards, a washout or environmental fee ($25–$50), a fuel surcharge, and standby time if the truck waits past roughly five to seven minutes per yard. The calculator lists each separately.
How much does a concrete driveway cost?: A concrete driveway is priced per square foot as a turnkey rate — about $6 to $15 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026) — covering concrete, base, forming, finishing and control joints. It costs more up front than an asphalt driveway but lasts longer with less upkeep. A thicker 5–6 inch vehicle section, curves and removing the old surface all raise it.
How much does it cost to pour concrete?: Labour to place and finish concrete is charged per square foot of finished surface — about $3 to $5 per square foot for a plain slab (HomeGuide, February 2026), a similar order of magnitude to the concrete itself. It covers forming, placing, screeding, floating, edging, jointing and the finish. A decorative finish, heavy reinforcement or restricted access raises the rate.
How much does a concrete foundation cost?: A footing or foundation wall is priced per cubic yard of concrete ($110–$195) plus per-linear-foot forming and excavation, not per square foot. Cost drivers are depth below the frost line, wall height, the rebar schedule, over-excavation in poor soil, and pump access. The calculator returns the concrete line; forming and excavation are shown as quantities without a sourced price.
How much does a concrete floor cost?: A concrete pad or garage floor is priced per square foot — about $6 to $12 per square foot installed (HomeGuide, February 2026) — plus a gravel base ($1–$3 per square foot) and, for a garage, a vapour barrier and thickened perimeter. Interior floors add a trowel finish over the broom baseline. Detached pads pay the short-load fee on the concrete.
Does a concrete driveway cost more than asphalt?: Yes, up front. A concrete driveway costs more to install than an equivalent asphalt one, but it lasts longer and needs less maintenance over its life, which narrows the gap over time. This page prices concrete only; the trade-off against asphalt is a durability-versus-upfront-cost decision, not a line item.