How much does a new driveway cost?

Price a sealcoat, a resurface, a blacktop replacement or a concrete pour, then see what American households actually paid for the same work. The gap between those two numbers is the whole point of this page.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

What the job actually is

This is the input that matters. On the same driveway, these answers run from a few hundred dollars to five figures. Picking one fills in the two lines below, and you can change either.

Driveway area (square feet)

A single-car drive is roughly 10 by 40 feet (400 sq ft). A two-car drive is roughly 16 by 40 (640 sq ft). Measure it rather than guessing: area is what you are buying.

Is there an old surface to tear out?

Removal is its own job. It is crew time plus a tipping fee, and concrete is heavier and harder to break than asphalt.

Where you live

Measured, not guessed. These are the Census AHS regional medians for a contractor-hired driveway or walkway job, as a ratio to the national median. The South really is the cheap one.

Materials, per square foot

The contractor's cost for the stuff, not retail and not what they bill you for it. For concrete and gravel there is now a federal price underneath this box. For asphalt, which is the default, there is not.

This box used to tell you that no free federal source published a price for hot-mix asphalt OR ready-mix concrete. Half of that was false, and our own facts list on this page already contradicted it. The Economic Census products file publishes ready-mix concrete at $110.02 a CUBIC YARD, which works out at $1.36 per square foot of an ordinary 4-inch slab, and crushed limestone at $12.94 a SHORT TON for the base course and for a gravel drive. Those are FACTORY-GATE prices: the concrete leaving the plant, not the truck arriving at your house, and not the rebar, the forms, the base or the finishing, which is why the concrete default here sits above $1.36 rather than at it. What genuinely is NOT published is hot-mix asphalt: NAICS 324121's quantity cells are suppressed in that same file, every one of them, so no factory-gate price for blacktop can be derived and the asphalt materials line stays our estimate. The PPI tracks the price CHANGE (asphalt mix is up 29% since 2021) but an index can never give a dollar.

Crew hours per 100 square feet

Our estimate. Field hours for the whole crew: sealing is under a quarter of an hour per 100 sq ft, forming and finishing a concrete slab is about five. Setup, driving and cleanup are added on top as a fixed block, which is why small jobs cost more per square foot.

Contractor billing per field hour

This one is NOT a guess.

The 2022 Economic Census publishes what NAICS 238990 firms take in and the construction-worker hours they work: $115.72 per field hour in 2025 dollars, against the $32.14 the firm pays the worker. Machines, insurance, the truck, overhead and profit live in that 3.6x gap.

Estimated cost

$4,025

Typical range $3,220 – $5,233

Materials (what the contractor pays for them)$1,650
Crew, equipment, overhead and profit$1,578
Tear-out and disposal$797
Total$4,025

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Half of contractor-hired driveway and walkway jobs cost less than $4,349, and only 21% top $10,000. That is not our estimate. The Census American Housing Survey asks households what a completed job actually cost, and our extraction reproduces Census's own published table to the dollar.

The "average" of $7,114 you will see quoted is a mean, and it runs 1.64x the median because a handful of enormous jobs drag it up. But the bigger point is the fork in the road: on the same 600 square feet, sealing an intact asphalt drive runs a few hundred dollars, an overlay runs a couple of thousand, and tearing the whole thing out and pouring concrete runs to seven thousand and up. That is a spread of more than twenty times, and it is settled before anyone measures anything. The familiar "$8 to $15 a square foot" is not a made-up number, and we are not going to pretend it is: our own model lands at $12.45 a foot for a concrete tear-out and replace. It is the price of the most expensive job on the menu, quoted at you as though it were the price of "a driveway". And the sites quoting it are, for the most part, contractor lead-generation businesses that get paid when you request a quote. Price the repair before you price the replacement.

§ 02 What Americans actually paid

US median, contractor-hired (Census AHS)$4,349

Half of hired jobs land between$2,083 and $8,699

Materials line (our model, at contractor cost)$1,650

Crew, equipment and overhead (our model)$1,578

The first two figures are the survey. The other two are our model, and the materials line is what a paving contractor pays for the stuff, not what you would pay at a retail counter, so it is not a do-it-yourself budget. AHS costs are self-reported and recalled up to two years after the job, some are imputed by Census, and the survey does not record what the job was, how big it was or what it was made of. Our square-foot model is a way to read a quote, not a quote. Real bids on the same driveway vary widely, and a paving crew's price depends on how far they have to drive and what else they have booked that week.

Where the money goes

Materials (what the contractor pays for them)$1,650

Crew, equipment, overhead and profit$1,578

Tear-out and disposal$797

By the numbers

TWO OF THE SIX JOBS ON THIS PAGE CAN NOW BE ANCHORED TO A FEDERAL PRICE, AND THE DEFAULT ONE STILL CANNOT. The Economic Census products file prices ready-mix concrete at $110.02 a cubic yard, which is $1.36 a square foot of a 4-inch slab, and crushed limestone at $12.94 a short ton for the base course and the gravel option. But asphalt paving mixtures are SUPPRESSED in the same file, and asphalt is the default job here. So we publish the two we can source and keep refusing on the third, which is a more useful page than one that pretends about all three. We had previously told you the file had nothing in it at all.
Census American Housing Survey (2023): the median contractor-hired driveway or walkway job cost $4,349 in 2025 dollars.
More
A quarter cost under $2,083 and a quarter over $8,699. The mean is $7,114, or 1.64x the median, which is why an 'average driveway cost' is a misleading number and we do not lead with one.
Census AHS: 30% of all driveway and walkway projects are done by the household itself, at a median of $1,096.
More
That figure excludes the value of your own weekends, so it is the materials bill and not the true cost. Sealcoating is the most do-it-yourself job on this page; pouring and finishing concrete is the least.
2022 Economic Census: for the trade that paves residential driveways (NAICS 238990), materials are only 33% of the value of the work.
More
Two thirds of your bill is crew, machines, insurance, overhead and profit. Firms bill $115.72 per construction-worker hour and pay the worker $32.14, a 3.6x gap. That gap is not greed, it is a paver, a roller, a dump truck and a payroll, but it does mean you are buying a crew far more than you are buying a driveway.
USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: crushed stone averaged $17.50 per metric ton in 2024 (USGS's own estimate for that year), up from $12.69 in 2020.
More
That is a real government price level rather than an index, and it makes the point better than anything else on this page. It is the value at the quarry gate and excludes haulage, but the rock under your driveway is still not what you are paying for.
BLS Producer Price Index: asphalt paving mixtures are up 29% and ready-mix concrete up 31% since 2021.
More
These are indexes, so they give the price CHANGE and can never give a price per ton or per yard. If your remembered price for a driveway is from before 2021, it is stale by about a third.
2 more
- Census AHS: 80% of households who hired the work out paid for it with cash from savings.
  More
  Only 1.3% used contractor-arranged financing, which is the option pushed hardest at the kitchen table. Insurance paid for 0.2% of these jobs, so unlike a roof, a driveway is almost always your own money.
- Census AHS, by region: the median hired job runs 19% above the national figure in the Northeast and 25% below it in the South. Regional labor cost, not regional taste, is doing most of that work.

Which half of this page is a statistic, and which half is ours. Sourced: everything about what Americans actually paid. The median, the quartiles, the regional spread, the do-it-yourself share and the way people paid all come straight from the Census American Housing Survey, and our extraction reproduces Census's own published table C-16-OO to the dollar, including the $20.93bn national total. Ours: the square-foot build-up and the job types.

AHS records one number per job with no area, no material and no scope, so it can never give a price per square foot, and it cannot tell a sealcoat from a tear-out. The crew hours per 100 square feet are therefore our estimate, and we have made them editable rather than hiding them. TWO of the modelled inputs are measured, and this box used to say only one was. The billing rate: $115.72 per field hour, from the 2022 Economic Census, rather than the usual "contractors mark up two to three times" folklore. And the MATERIALS, for two of the six jobs: the Economic Census products file prices ready-mix concrete at $110.02 a cubic yard, which is $1.36 per square foot of a 4-inch slab, and crushed limestone at $12.94 a short ton. Those are FACTORY-GATE prices, so they exclude haulage, the base, the reinforcement, the forms and the finishing, and our concrete default sits well above $1.36 for exactly that reason. Hot-mix asphalt is the one that stays a guess: its quantity cells are suppressed in that file, so the asphalt materials line is ours. We would rather publish the two we can source and name the one we cannot than call all three "our estimate" when two of them are not. One more honesty note: AHS fuses driveways with walkways, and a garden path is a much smaller job than a double driveway. So the $4,349 median describes a driveway-or-walkway job, and a full replacement should land above it. We would rather tell you that than quietly drop the word "walkways".

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau / HUD, American Housing Survey (2023 national PUF, JOBTYPE 32)
census.gov
US Census

Census AHS Table Creator (check our extraction yourself)
census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Construction sector (the measured billed rate)
census.gov
USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025, crushed stone (a real price level)
pubs.usgs.gov
HUD, CNA e-Tool Estimated Useful Life Table (the resealing interval we said nobody published). Asphalt Seal Coat: Standard EUL 5 years. Asphalt Pavement: 25. Concrete Pavement: 50. Gravel-surfaced parking: 15. It is a capital-planning standard for HUD-assisted multifamily property, described by HUD as the recommended average useful life and overridable by the assessor, not a survey of driveways
hud.gov
BLS Producer Price Index, asphalt paving mixture and block manufacturing (change, not level)
fred.stlouisfed.org
BLS Producer Price Index, ready-mix concrete manufacturing (change, not level)
fred.stlouisfed.org
Wage data

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (wages, which are not billed rates)
bls.gov
BEA, residential improvements price index (the deflator)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

A NAICS CODE IS A BUCKET, NOT A JOB, AND THE RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE BUCKET'S.

NAICS 238990 is titled 'All other specialty trade contractors', and only 24.2% of that class's receipts are asphalt, concrete, and brick paving contractor, residential . The largest single slice, 24.2%, is asphalt, concrete, and brick paving contractor, resident. So the billed rate here is the CLASS's rate, measured from real firms doing real work, and it is the measured figure we have for this job. It is not a rate for specialists in this job specifically, and we have four times called a class rate something it was not. We would rather show you the composition than let you assume it away.

WHERE WE LOOKED, AND HOW BIG EACH PLACE IS.

We name the universes rather than wave at them, because a refusal is a claim and we have got seven of them wrong: DOE and NREL's measures database is 93 sheets across two workbooks and we read the sheet list; the American Housing Survey asks the cost of 37 named improvement job types (36 of which occur in the 2023 data) and we read all 37; the Economic Census products file (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD) carries 137,429 US product rows with quantity and unit columns. We twice told you it did not exist, and then that it was all oil and ore. Both were wrong. What is TRUE, having read it properly: 789 rows publish a quantity and 669 of those also publish a dollar value, so prices ARE derivable for many building materials. For THIS material, every dollar-or-quantity cell is suppressed, so no factory-gate price can be derived, and that is the only refusal we are entitled to make; its Kind of Business file has 96 categories; and the 2022 NAICS index has 20,398 entries. If it is not in those, we have not found it, and that is a fact about us rather than about the world.

The headline figures are the Census American Housing Survey, 2023 national PUF, JOBTYPE 32, owner-occupied homes, jobs completed 2021 to 2023 and each deflated from its own completion year to 2025 dollars with the BEA price index for residential improvements.

Contractor-hired means the household did not do most of the work themselves.

The cost build-up is our model, but the materials line is no longer unsourced for every job, and this assumption used to claim it was.

It said: 'no free federal source publishes a delivered price for hot-mix asphalt or ready-mix concrete.' The concrete half was false, and this page's own facts list already said so two rows below, so the page was refusing a number it was simultaneously printing. The Economic Census products file prices ready-mix concrete at $110.02 a cubic yard ($1.36 per square foot of a 4-inch slab) and crushed limestone at $12.94 a short ton. What survives, narrowed to the one material it is actually true of: HOT-MIX ASPHALT has every quantity cell suppressed in that file, so no factory-gate price for it can be derived, and the PPI gives only the price change. So the materials line is measured at the factory gate for concrete and gravel, and is our estimate for asphalt. FACTORY GATE IS NOT DELIVERED and it is not installed: it excludes haulage, the base, the reinforcement, the forms and the finishing, which is why our concrete default sits well above $1.36. Crew hours per 100 square feet are our estimate throughout.

The billing rate of $116 per field hour is measured from the 2022 Economic Census for NAICS 238990, escalated to 2025 with the construction employment cost index.

Because that rate is a residual (value of work, less materials, less subcontracts, divided by construction-worker hours) it already contains the firm's markup on materials, so we price materials at what the contractor pays for them rather than at retail.

Setup is charged as a fixed block of crew hours: one hour for a seal, six for a concrete pour.

Bringing a paver, a roller and a dump truck to your house costs the same whether the driveway is 400 square feet or 1,000, which is why the price per square foot rises as the job shrinks and why contractors quote minimum charges.

The regional adjustment is the measured ratio of each Census region's median hired job to the national median.

It is a real difference, but it is measured on a mix of job types, and the Midwest figure in particular carries a wide standard error.

The low and high band is our own estimate of quote-to-quote spread, at 20% below and 30% above.

The much wider spread you see in the survey (a quartile under $2,083, a quartile over $8,699) is mostly different jobs, not different prices for the same job.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a driveway cost?

Half of contractor-hired driveway and walkway jobs cost less than $4,349, and only about one in five costs more than $10,000, according to what households told the Census American Housing Survey. But that bucket mixes a garden path with a full concrete pour. On our square-foot model, a 600 sq ft two-car driveway works out around $1,800 to resurface in asphalt, around $4,000 to tear out and replace in blacktop, and around $7,500 to tear out and replace in concrete. Pick the job before you argue about the price.

Is asphalt or concrete cheaper for a driveway?

Asphalt, and it is not close. On our model, replacing a 600 sq ft driveway costs roughly $4,000 in blacktop against roughly $7,500 in concrete, because concrete needs forming, reinforcing and finishing, and finishing a slab is skilled hand work that a paving train does not require. Concrete lasts longer and does not need periodic sealing, so the gap narrows over decades. Asphalt wins on the day you pay for it.

Should I sealcoat my driveway or replace it?

Sealing protects a surface that is still structurally sound. It does not repair one that is not. If you have alligator cracking, potholes, or sections that flex under your foot, the base underneath has failed and sealing over it is money burned. If the surface is intact and simply faded and porous, a seal costs a few hundred dollars against several thousand for a replacement. Notice who is telling you which one you need: the sites that publish driveway costs are usually paid when you request a contractor quote.

How often should I reseal an asphalt driveway?

There is a federal number, and this page used to tell you there was not. HUD publishes a Standard Estimated Useful Life for an asphalt SEAL COAT of 5 years, in the table its assessors are required to use when they plan a property's replacement reserves. The same table gives the asphalt pavement underneath it 25 years, and a concrete pavement 50. So the federal planning assumption is that a seal coat is a five-year item sitting on a twenty-five-year surface. Now read it for what it is, because it is not a study of American driveways. It is a capital-planning standard for the paving at HUD-assisted apartment buildings, HUD calls it a 'recommended average useful life', and HUD explicitly lets its own assessors override it with a justified figure. It is a budgeting convention, not a measurement, and it bounds nothing about your drive, which is shaded or baked, and driven on by a hatchback or a delivery truck. What still settles the decision is the cost asymmetry: a seal is a few hundred dollars and a replacement is several thousand, so the case for sealing an intact drive is easy, and the case for sealing one that is already breaking up is nonexistent. And it is still worth noticing who publishes the SHORTER intervals. They tend to sell sealing.

Why is my quote so much higher per square foot than the figures online?

Usually because the online figure prices a different job than the one you need. Published per-square-foot numbers tend to cover the bare paving line on a big, simple, rectangular drive: no tearing out the old surface, no rebuilt base, no awkward access, no minimum charge. Put those back in and the number moves a long way. The second reason is structural and unavoidable: setup does not scale. The crew, the paver, the roller and the dump truck cost the same to bring to a 400 sq ft driveway as to a 1,000 sq ft one, so the smaller your job, the higher its price per square foot. Make each quote state the compacted thickness, whether the base is being rebuilt, and whether removal and disposal are included. That is the difference between two quotes you can compare and two you cannot.

Does a gravel driveway actually save money?

Yes, by a wide margin on day one. Our model puts a 600 sq ft gravel driveway near $1,300 against roughly $4,000 for blacktop, because you are buying crushed stone (which USGS prices at $17.50 a metric ton at the quarry) and a few hours of a machine, rather than a paving crew. The costs come back as regrading, weeds, potholes and the stone you track into the house, and gravel is a poor idea on a slope.

Why is the Census median so much lower than every driveway cost I read?

Three reasons, and all three are worth knowing. The survey fuses driveways with walkways, so small path jobs pull the median down. Everyone else quotes a mean, and the mean here is $7,114 against a median of $4,349 because a few huge jobs drag it up. And the sites doing the quoting are selling contractor leads. The honest summary is that the typical American driveway job is a repair, not a replacement.

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