What the pour costs, fees and all

A surcharge for taking a truck out with less than a full economic load in it, usually applied below somewhere between three and five cubic yards. The plant's cost is the truck and the driver, not the concrete, so a two-yard delivery costs it almost what a nine-yard one does. That is why the fee often gets bigger as the load gets smaller, and why it is worth asking what the threshold is before deciding how much to pour: adding a path or thickening an edge to cross the line can be cheaper than staying under it.

Because the price per cubic yard is the price of the material, and the ticket carries everything else. Delivery or haulage, the short-load surcharge, an after-hours or Saturday premium, an environmental or washout charge, a fuel adjustment and standby time all sit outside the rate you were quoted on the phone. On a small residential pour those additions routinely come to as much as the concrete, which is the arithmetic this page exists to make visible before the truck is booked rather than after it leaves.

Charged waiting time, once the truck has been on site longer than the free unloading period that comes with the load. Suppliers commonly allow around five to seven minutes per cubic yard, so a three-yard load might arrive with twenty minutes of free time attached, and every minute past that is billed at a per-minute rate. It is the one charge entirely within your control: forms finished, screeds set, a barrow crew ready and a clear path for the truck turn a standby line into nothing.

It depends on the fees, not on a fixed number of yards, which is why this page walks the crossover in quarter-yard steps at your two prices. Bagged material costs several times more per cubic foot than delivered concrete, so the bag column climbs steeply while the truck column starts high and then flattens — the fixed charges are paid whether the drum is full or empty. Where the lines meet is your crossover, and a big short-load fee or a delivery charge pushes it out, sometimes to twice the volume the rule of thumb would suggest.

No. What arrives is wet concrete at the end of a chute that reaches roughly twelve to eighteen feet from the drum; everything after that is labor. Forming, screeding, floating, troweling, edging, cutting joints and curing are usually quoted per square foot by a finisher, and getting the material to where the chute will not reach is a pump or a barrow crew charged separately again. A quote for supply and a quote for a finished slab are answers to two different questions, and this page keeps them on two different lines.

Ten percent as a starting point, and kept as a visible line rather than folded into the rates. Concrete has few surprises once the hole is open compared with a remodel, but the ones it does have are expensive and quick: a subgrade that turns out soft, a form that bows and takes an extra quarter yard, rain in the window between placing and finishing. A total with the allowance built silently into every rate cannot be compared with a contractor's quote, which is the whole reason for having one.

Because a national average would be wrong in most of the country on the day it was published and out of date within a month. Concrete is one of the most local commodities there is: the price is set by how far the plant is from the aggregate, from the cement terminal and from your driveway, and it moves with fuel and with the season. Two quotes twenty miles apart differ more than most people expect, so the fields on this page start empty and stay empty until you fill them with figures somebody has actually offered you.