Cost

Concrete Patio Cost: How to Read Three Bids

You will collect three numbers for one patio and they will not agree. Here is what the published data says, and how to work out which quotes are describing the same job.

Updated August 2026 · Antioch Concrete

The usual advice is to get three quotes. Nobody tells you what to do when they come back thousands apart, which is the situation almost everyone actually ends up in.

The gap is rarely about profit. It is about four things that no photograph of a finished patio will ever show you.

The published anchor

HomeGuide prices a basic 20 by 20 concrete patio at $1,600 to $4,800, and puts decorative stamped or stained work as high as $28 per square foot.

Their national figure. Note that even for one fixed size, on plain concrete, the range is a factor of three. That spread is not noise. It is the four variables below, and every bid you are holding sits somewhere inside it.

Variable one: how deep the concrete is

Depth is decided before anyone arrives and cannot be adjusted once the truck is on site. It is also the easiest place to save money invisibly, because a finished slab looks identical whether it is four inches thick or noticeably less.

A bid that does not state a depth is not a bid you can compare. Ask for the number, and ask whether it is measured after the stone underneath has been compacted, because those are two different answers.

Variable two: what is underneath

This is where the real money hides. A patio sitting on properly excavated ground with graded stone consolidated in layers behaves completely differently through a Lake County winter than one poured over whatever happened to be there.

Ground that lifts as it freezes will find any weakness in that preparation, and it will do so within a few seasons rather than eventually. Two bids can differ by a thousand dollars on this line alone and look identical on the day the concrete goes down.

Variable three: the edges and the shape

A rectangle is cheap to form. Curves, steps, a seat wall, a border in a contrasting finish or anything that has to tie into an existing surface all take carpentry time before the pour and hand-finishing afterwards.

If one quote is markedly lower, check whether it has quietly simplified the shape you asked for.

Variable four: what leaves the property

An old patio, a deck, a slab, the soil from the excavation. All of it is charged by weight, all of it needs transport, and it is a line item some bids include and others assume you noticed was missing.

What a good bid tells you without being asked

Rather than a list of questions to interrogate people with, here is the simpler test. A quote worth trusting already contains most of this:

• A stated slab depth, and whether that is measured over compacted stone
• The depth of granular base and how many passes it gets
• An air entrainment specification, because this surface will freeze every year
• A joint layout, or at least a note that one will be set out before the pour
• Demolition and haulage priced as their own line, not folded into a rate
• The finish named exactly, including who is responsible for sealing and when

Anything a contractor volunteers before you ask is a good sign. Anything you have to extract three times is worth thinking about.

The finish is a separate purchase

Keep the surface treatment mentally apart from the slab. The slab is the thing that either survives twenty winters or does not. The finish is what it looks like while it does.

A plain broom finish is the durable default and the one most of our patios get: grippy underfoot when wet, nothing to maintain, and it weathers without looking like it is failing. Exposed aggregate costs a little more and has no colour in it to fade. Stamped and stained work climbs toward that $28 ceiling, and it repays the money on a patio that is meant to be the centrepiece of the garden, so long as you go in knowing the colour sits inside a sealer that becomes your job to maintain.

What we would push back on is spending the finish budget before the base budget. A beautiful surface on poor ground is a short-lived thing.

Frost, and what it does and does not require

Patios in northern Illinois are cast on grade. They ride the ground, moving very slightly with it, and that is intentional. Frost footings are a requirement for structures that carry load, which a patio does not.

So if a bid has deep piers priced into a plain patio, that is worth a direct question about what they are holding up. What your patio actually wants from you is good stone underneath and joints that decide in advance where the cracking goes.

Looking after it

New concrete needs a specific first year, and the single most damaging thing you can do is treat it the way you treat an established surface. The full schedule, including which winter products to keep away from it and when sealing should happen, is set out on our driveway cost page and applies equally to a patio.

Settled on a band? Our concrete patio page runs through the build itself, from chalking the shape onto the lawn to the surface you finish up with.