Cost

Concrete Patio Cost, One Square Foot at a Time

Take a single square foot apart and the wide published ranges stop looking arbitrary. Here is what you are buying, in the order the money gets spent.

Updated August 2026 · Burlington Concrete

Patio cost guides publish ranges so wide they are almost useless: four dollars a square foot at one end, thirty at the other. That is not vagueness. It is seven separate things stacked on top of each other, and a quote is just a bet on how much of each your ground needs.

The split that explains everything else

HomeGuide breaks patio installation into two halves: materials at $2 to $12 per square foot and labour at $2 to $18, for a combined $4 to $30. They put labour at roughly 50 to 60 percent of the total.

Read those two ranges against each other. Labour is both the larger share and by far the wider spread. Whatever is making one quote differ from another, it is almost never the concrete.

Layer one: getting the old thing out

If something already occupies the space, it leaves before anything else happens. Breaking, loading, hauling and tipping, charged on weight because that is how disposal is billed.

Zero on an empty lawn. A meaningful number over an old slab or a deck footing. Worth having as its own line so you can see it.

Layer two: the hole

Excavation to depth, and then the part that surprises people, which is that the soil has to go somewhere. A patio dug to the right depth generates a pile of spoil, and spoil is a haulage cost exactly like demolition is.

This is also the layer where an honest contractor cannot promise you a number. What is under your lawn is not visible until it is open.

Layer three: the stone, and how many passes it gets

Granular fill, brought in and consolidated. The critical word is passes. Stone tipped in and raised to level in one go looks identical on the day to stone brought up in layers and compacted between each one, and behaves completely differently once the ground freezes.

Around Racine County this is the layer that decides whether a patio is flat in fifteen years. It is also the easiest thing in the world to trim quietly, because you will never see it again.

Layer four: forms and edges

Carpentry, effectively. A rectangle is quick. Curves, steps, a raised edge, a border, tying into an existing surface at a fixed level - all of it is hours before any concrete arrives, and all of it is invisible in the finished photograph.

Layer five: the concrete itself

The predictable layer, and the smaller half of your bill. The variable here is specification rather than price: air purposely introduced into the mix so that water freezing inside the slab has room to expand into. In this climate that is not an optional extra but the starting point, and which specification has been ordered is a fair thing to raise.

Layer six: the finish

Everything that happens in the couple of hours while the surface is still workable. A broom finish is quick and is what most patios should have. Exposed aggregate takes a wash-back stage. Stamping takes mats, timing, colour and release agent, and it cannot be rushed or repeated.

This is where labour hours climb fastest, which is why the finish decision moves the total more than almost anything except the size.

Layer seven: joints, and then leaving it alone

Control joints get cut in, on a layout that should have been drawn before the truck arrived. Concrete is going to crack; the joints decide where. Then the slab is left alone, which costs nothing and is the step people are least willing to accept.

What this means when you compare quotes

Two patios of the same size and finish can differ by thousands, and now you can see where the difference lives: layers one, two and three, none of which show up in a photograph.

So when a bid comes in low, the useful question is not "why are you cheaper" but "which of these seven layers is thinner in your price". Contractors who have genuinely priced the work can answer that immediately.

The exception: a patio you already have

If the slab is structurally sound and you simply dislike how it looks, you are not in this article at all. Staining an existing patio runs $3 to $15 a square foot, including surface preparation and sealer, which skips layers one through five entirely.

The condition attached is real, though. A treatment bonded to a slab that has cracked through or shifted will mirror those faults within a season or two, and you will have paid toward the replacement you were avoiding.

Frost, and what it does not require

Wisconsin's 48 inch footing depth applies to footings and foundations carrying a building. A patio carries furniture. It is cast on grade, it moves fractionally with the soil, and that is the design rather than a defect. If deep piers appear in a plain patio quote, ask what load they are there to support.

Looking after it

New concrete needs a particular first year, and the schedule is the same for a patio as for a driveway. It is set out in full on our driveway cost page.

Know roughly what tier you are in? Our concrete patio page covers the build from chalking the outline onto the lawn through to the surface you end up living on.