A concrete hardstanding is one of those jobs where quotes can vary wildly, and it is hard to know what a fair price looks like. This guide sets out realistic UK costs per square metre, explains what pushes the figure up or down, and covers the questions worth asking before you book anyone in.
For a straightforward domestic hardstanding, most UK homeowners pay somewhere between £70 and £130 per square metre, fully installed. That covers excavation, a compacted sub base, formwork and a concrete slab around 100mm to 150mm thick. In the North West, including Chorley and the surrounding Lancashire towns, prices tend to sit in the lower half of that range because access is usually decent and local quarried stone keeps material haulage costs down.
As a rough worked example, a 40 square metre pad for a car and caravan might come in between £3,000 and £5,000. A smaller 15 square metre base for a shed or hot tub often costs proportionally more per metre, perhaps £100 to £150, because the fixed costs of machinery, waste removal and concrete delivery are spread over less area. Treat all of these as ballpark figures rather than guarantees, since ground conditions and access can move things significantly.
Two identical looking hardstandings can differ by thousands once you dig down, quite literally. The biggest variables are what is under the surface and what the slab needs to carry. A pad for foot traffic and a shed can be thinner than one taking a 3.5 tonne van or agricultural machinery, which needs a deeper sub base, thicker concrete and usually steel mesh or fibre reinforcement.
Access matters too. If a digger and dumper can drive straight onto the area, excavation is quick. If everything has to come through a narrow gate or be barrowed round the back of the house, labour time climbs fast. Finally, drainage can add cost but is not optional: a hardstanding that sheds water towards your house or the road causes problems, and larger areas draining towards a highway may need soakaways or permeable margins to satisfy planning rules.
Most failed hardstandings fail from underneath. If the topsoil is not fully removed, or the sub base is too thin or poorly compacted, the slab will settle and crack within a few winters, and Lancashire's wet clay soils are unforgiving on this front. A proper job means excavating to firm ground, laying and compacting a stone sub base in layers, then pouring concrete at the right thickness with movement joints in the right places.
A quote that undercuts everyone else by a third has usually saved that money somewhere you cannot see. Common corners cut include skipping the membrane, using too little stone, pouring a thin slab, or leaving spoil for you to deal with. Ask any contractor to specify the dig depth, sub base thickness, concrete grade and slab thickness in writing. A firm doing the job properly will happily put those numbers on the quote.
In England you do not normally need planning permission for a hardstanding behind the building line, but front gardens are different. If you are creating more than five square metres of impermeable surface at the front that drains towards the road, permitted development rules require either a permeable surface or drainage to a soakaway within your own boundary. It is a simple thing to design in from the start and awkward to retrofit.
Timing wise, concrete should not be poured onto frozen ground or in heavy frost, so winter jobs sometimes wait on the weather. Allow the slab at least a week before parking a car on it and around a month to reach full strength. If you get two or three like for like quotes with the specification written down, you will quickly see which prices are realistic for your particular site.
Generally yes. Concrete usually comes in below block paving and is broadly comparable with tarmac for small areas, though tarmac becomes more economical on large areas. Concrete tends to need the least maintenance of the three over its lifetime.
Around 100mm over a compacted sub base is typical for cars and light use, increasing to 150mm or more with reinforcement for vans, motorhomes or plant. The sub base underneath matters just as much as the slab itself.
A typical domestic hardstanding takes two to four days on site, covering excavation, sub base preparation and the pour. You then need to keep vehicles off the new slab for about a week while it gains strength.