Driveway and patio paving cost per m²

What block paving costs depends on what you are paving. A path takes thinner blocks and a shallower dig, a yard sits in the middle, and a driveway has to carry a car — thicker blocks and a much heavier sub-base. That is why a driveway costs more per m² than a path, even though a complete job on all three lands in the same £70–120/m² band.

The difference in price is not a surcharge for the word driveway. It is the volume you can see in the cross-sections above. Over the same 50 m², taking the mid of each sub-base range and MOT Type 1 at 1.7 t/m³, it comes out like this:

Against a path, a driveway takes roughly 8.5 tonnes more stone and produces 6.5 m³ more spoil. That is two muck-away skips and half a wagon of aggregate somebody has to pay for. On top of it the blocks go from 40–60mm to 80mm.

So when one job has more than one surface on it, price them separately. If a customer has a path and a driveway laid at the same time and gets a single rate per m², either they overpay for the path or you lose money on the driveway.

A UK driveway also carries a cost a path does not. Surfacing more than five square metres of front garden in an impermeable material needs planning permission, unless the water is dealt with inside the boundary — permeable block paving, or a fall into a soakaway or a border on the plot. That is the SuDS principle: rain stays on the property instead of running out into the road drain.

In a quote it is one of two lines: permeable blocks on a clean, open-graded sub-base with the fines left out so water can get through, or a channel drain and a soakaway. Either way it is money, and it belongs in the price from the start rather than turning up as a variation once the dig is open. Thresholds and wording differ around the UK, so check with the local authority before you commit to a figure.

On anything a car drives over they are not optional. Without edge restraint the outer rows spread under the wheel and the pattern opens up. A kerb is bedded on concrete — a bed of at least 100mm on firm compacted ground, haunched behind — so the concrete is part of the cost, not just the kerb unit.

At £14–22/m installed, the 30 m perimeter of a 10 × 5 m yard comes to £420–660. A path 1.2 m wide and 20 m long is 40 m of kerb against 24 m² of paving, so the same edging takes a far bigger bite out of the rate per m² than it does on a compact yard.

The rate per m² falls as the area grows, and it is not a bulk discount. Part of the cost is the same whether you lay 15 m² or 60 m²: getting plant to site and back, setting out and levels, delivery of materials, skip hire and disposal, the site visit and the paperwork.

Say those fixed items come to £500 between them. Over 60 m² that is a little over £8 a metre. Over 15 m² it is more than £33 a metre — four times as much for laying work that is identical. Cutting behaves the same way: a small, fiddly area has a much longer perimeter relative to its size, so more cuts and more waste.

Which is the argument for a minimum job value or banded rates. It is easy enough to explain once you show the customer everything that has to turn up on site regardless of how many metres get laid.

• Thickness of the blocks and the sub-base (more load = more material).
• Volume of the dig-out and carting the spoil away.
• A small, fiddly area — more cuts and more overhead per m².
• Laying pattern, and kerbs round the perimeter.
• Drainage on a driveway: permeable blocks or a soakaway instead of the road drain.

Put your dimensions into the block paving calculator and you will get the material and a ballpark price. The full breakdown of rates is on block paving cost, and the layer depths behind these figures are in the sub-base guide.