Hire a Concreter Perth WA 2026 - Costs and Jobs Explained

Hiring a Concreter in Perth, Task by Task

Concreting in Perth in 2026 runs from about $85 a square metre for plain concrete placed and finished up to $280 for polished, and the spread is explained by the finish, the preparation and the access, not by the contractor. What follows prices each job and sets out what the concreter is doing for the money.

Four things account for nearly every difference between two Perth concreting quotes. The ground comes first, because clean sand costs almost nothing to excavate and cemented limestone has to be broken. Preparation comes second, meaning how much sand is imported and how well it is compacted. The finish comes third and is the only one you actually choose. And access comes fourth, since a truck that cannot reach the pour turns into a line pump and a different price.

What Concreting Costs in Perth

Concreting is quoted by the square metre almost everywhere, and the statewide bands in our WA concreting services guide hold across the metropolitan area. Plain concrete supplied and placed runs $85 to $135 a square metre, and every figure above that is paying for a finish, extra thickness, more steel or more preparation before the truck arrives. The mix itself comes from much the same handful of suppliers across the metropolitan area, with Hanson, Holcim, Boral and the BGC group, meaning the Buckeridge building materials business, batching most of what gets poured here and Cockburn Cement making the cement behind a good deal of it.

The square metre rate is doing a lot of work, so it helps to know what sits inside it. A standard quote covers setting out, formwork, a layer of compacted sand or crushed base, reinforcing mesh, the concrete itself, placing and screeding, the chosen finish, and stripping the forms afterwards. The concreting cost guide breaks each of those down. What sits outside it is the part that moves a price. Excavation and disposal of whatever is already there, imported sand to bring a surface up to level, breaking limestone, a line pump where a truck cannot reach, sealing a decorative finish, and the vehicle crossover if a driveway meets the street. Any of those can add a thousand dollars or more, and all of them should appear as named items.

Thickness and steel are set by what the slab carries. A path or a courtyard works at 75 to 85 millimetres with one layer of mesh. A domestic driveway wants a full 100 millimetres under it. A slab taking a caravan, a boat trailer or a work ute goes to 125 or 150 millimetres with heavier mesh, and anybody quoting the same thickness for all three is guessing at the loading.

Small jobs carry a disproportionate cost and that surprises people every time. A concrete truck has a minimum load of around two cubic metres, so a ten square metre path at 85 millimetres uses less than one cubic metre and still pays for the minimum. Below about fifteen square metres the economics reward either combining it with another pour or using bagged mix mixed on site.

Building on Sand and Why It Helps

Perth concreters work on ground that most of the country would envy. The metropolitan area sits on deep dune sand, and sand is granular, free draining and almost inert through the seasons, so it does not swell when it rains or shrink when it dries. Reactive clay, which is soil that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, does both of those things by fifty millimetres or more a year, and that is the ground under Melbourne, Adelaide and much of Sydney. The consequence of that shows up directly in slab design. Residential slabs and footings are designed against a site classification, and most Perth blocks fall into the most stable category because the ground beneath them barely moves. That permits a lighter slab, shallower edge beams and less reinforcement than an identical house on a reactive clay site, and the saving is real money, not a technicality.

Sand asks for two things in return and both are about preparation. First, it will not hold a vertical face, so an excavation batters back and formwork has to be braced and pegged where a clay site would hold its own shape. Second, sand fill compacts in layers, meaning two hundred millimetre lifts with a plate or roller over each one, and a pad dumped in a single lift will settle unevenly under load. That second point is the single most common cause of a cracked Perth slab, and it has nothing to do with the concrete. A properly specified slab poured on poorly compacted sand will crack where the support disappears beneath it, and no amount of extra mesh fixes bad preparation. A plate compactor from Kennards or Coates, or a Wacker Neuson unit on a larger job, is what that work actually looks like, and compaction testing costs $300 to $800 on a larger pad.

Slabs, Site Classification and Footings

A house slab is engineered, so it is not quoted off a rate card, and the engineering starts with a soil report that assigns a site classification. The classification describes how much the ground is expected to move, and the slab and footing design follows from it through the residential slabs and footings standard published by Standards Australia, with the overarching requirements in the National Construction Code from the Australian Building Codes Board. Perth sand returns the most stable classification in nearly every case, which is why a metropolitan house slab is typically a waffle or a stiffened raft with modest edge beams. Where a block has been cut and filled, or where clay appears in the eastern suburbs and the hills, the classification shifts and the design gets heavier. A soil report costs $500 to $1,200 and the engineering $900 to $2,600, and both are cheaper than redesigning after a failure.

Shed and garage slabs are the job most often done badly because they look simple. A shed slab carries point loads at the column bases and takes vehicle traffic across the middle, so it wants 100 to 125 millimetres with a thickened perimeter and a footing under each column position, set out to match the shed supplier drawings. Our concrete slab guide covers the thickness and reinforcement decisions.

Service penetrations are the detail that causes the most expensive rework. Plumbing, electrical conduit and any drainage passing through or under a slab has to be set, inspected and signed off before the pour, because cutting a hole through a finished slab for a forgotten waste pipe damages the steel and the waterproofing at once. A pre pour inspection is routine and costs nothing extra when it is planned. Where a slab abuts an existing structure or a retaining wall, the detail matters more than the price. A slab tied rigidly to a wall it was not designed to load will push it, and one butted hard against a house without an expansion joint will transmit movement into the brickwork. Both are avoidable with the correct joint, and retaining wall builders and the concreter should be talking to each other before either starts.

Limestone Under the Coastal Suburbs

Perth sits on two different dune systems and the difference matters the moment anybody digs. Inland, through the eastern and inner suburbs, the Bassendean system is clean sand to considerable depth and a bucket cuts it quickly. Closer to the coast the Spearwood system carries a cemented limestone layer, known locally as caprock, that can sit anywhere from half a metre down to the surface.

Cemented limestone cannot simply be dug out. It has to be broken with a rock breaker, a rock saw or in tight spots by hand with a jackhammer, and the rate for removal lands at $180 to $420 a cubic metre against almost nothing for the equivalent volume of sand. On a footing excavation or a pool surround cut down to level, that single item can add two or three thousand dollars. Which suburbs is a fair question and the honest answer is that it varies street by street. The coastal corridor from Mindarie through Scarborough, City Beach, Cottesloe, Fremantle and down to Rockingham is where it is most likely, and the eastern suburbs least likely, but a single block can have limestone at one corner and clean sand at the other. The spoil from any previous excavation on the property is the best evidence available.

Limestone also works in your favour in one respect, because it is the reason Perth builds retaining walls out of limestone block where other cities use timber or concrete sleepers. A cut and fill site in the coastal corridor commonly ends up with limestone retaining walls holding the levels, and the concreter pours against them, so the sequencing between the two trades is worth settling early. For quoting purposes, make the ground an explicit assumption. A competent Perth quote states that it assumes clean sand to the depth required and prices limestone separately as a rate per cubic metre, so if the breaker comes out you know what it costs before it starts. A single lump sum with nothing said about rock has an open end in it, and the open end is not in your favour.

Finishes, From Brushed to Liquid Limestone

The finish is where most of the price variation above the plain rate lives, and Perth has a local preference that visitors notice. Exposed aggregate and liquid limestone are everywhere here and far less common in the eastern states, which means the local trade is thoroughly practised at both and the pricing is competitive, where elsewhere both would be specialist work. Brushed or broomed is the workhorse at $95 to $145 a square metre. The surface is textured with a broom while the concrete is still green, which gives grip, hides small blemishes in the surface and costs almost nothing beyond the labour of doing it. For a side path, a clothesline area or a budget driveway it is entirely adequate and it will outlast a decorative finish nobody ever sealed.

Exposed aggregate at $115 to $180 a square metre works by washing the surface cream off to reveal the stone in the mix, so the stone selection is the design decision and the timing of the wash is the skill. Washed too early and the stone drops out, too late and it stays buried. Decorative mixes such as the Geostone range are what most Perth suppliers batch for that, and the surface needs sealing on completion with a product like Crommelin or Sika and resealing every three to five years, and exposed aggregate concrete covers the stone options. Liquid limestone is the finish most particular to Western Australia and worth explaining, since it is not actually limestone poured as liquid. It is a concrete mix using crushed limestone as the aggregate and a white or cream cement, screeded and then honed smooth, which gives a pale surface that stays noticeably cooler underfoot than grey concrete in February. That last property is why Perth puts it around so many pools, at $110 to $165 a square metre.

Honed and polished sit at the top at $160 to $280 a square metre and the two words get used interchangeably when they should not be. Honing grinds the surface flat with a matte result. Polishing continues through finer grits to a reflective finish and exposes more aggregate at each stage. Both are done after the slab has cured with progressively finer diamond pads, both generate a great deal of dust, and polished concrete sets out the grind levels and what each one looks like.

Driveways and What They Cost

A driveway is the most commonly quoted concreting job in Perth and the one where quotes diverge most, because the visible part is only half of what is being priced. The other half is the removal of whatever is there now, the preparation underneath, the fall and drainage across the surface, the crossover at the street, and the edges where the slab meets garden beds or a boundary. Begin with the demolition and disposal. Lifting and disposing of an existing concrete driveway runs $45 to $95 a square metre depending on thickness and whether it holds mesh, and lifting pavers is cheaper at $20 to $45 if they are being kept or sold. Tip fees are a real cost on this item, so a quote that includes disposal is worth more than one that leaves it to you.

Fall is the engineering nobody looks at until it rains. A driveway needs enough slope to shed water somewhere sensible, and in Perth that somewhere is a soakwell or a grated drain, never the street kerb, because the property handles its own stormwater. A new driveway that drains toward the garage door is a defect, and the fix after the fact is a cut in grated drain at $180 to $380 a metre.

Thickness follows whatever is going to park on it. Cars alone are fine at 100 millimetres with one layer of mesh. A caravan, a boat on a trailer or a dual cab with a loaded tray wants 125 millimetres and heavier mesh, and a concrete truck or a delivery vehicle crossing it regularly argues for 150. Our concrete driveway cost guide works through the loading decision.

Joints are the last detail and the one that separates a driveway that ages well from one that cracks in a pattern nobody wanted. Concrete shrinks as it cures and it will crack, so the job of a control joint is to decide where. Cut or tooled at roughly three metre intervals in a sensible grid, joints keep the cracking inside the lines, and a large driveway poured with no joints at all will craze across the middle within the first summer.

Vehicle Crossovers and Council Approval

The crossover is the piece of concrete between the kerb and your front boundary, and it is the one part of a driveway that is not yours. It sits in the road reserve, the local government owns that land, and the specification for width, fall, kerb treatment and materials is set by whichever council the property is in. Building one without approval risks being told to remove it. Approvals are straightforward and cheap when they happen in the right order. An application goes to the local government with a sketch showing the proposed width and position, the council checks it against sight lines, street trees, services and the distance from intersections, and issues an approval with the specification attached. Application fees run $80 to $350 and some councils offer a partial subsidy on the first crossover to a property.

Service clearances are where most crossover applications come unstuck. Water meters, sewer access chambers, telecommunications pits, gas mains and street light footings all live in that same strip, and none of them can be covered or built over without permission from the owner of the asset. Water Corporation has its own requirements for building near or over its assets, and the underground services should be located through Before You Dig Australia before anybody breaks ground. Where a property fronts a main road instead of a local street, the approval authority changes and the standard is higher, with Main Roads Western Australia as the authority for access onto roads under its control. Those applications take longer and the geometry is less negotiable, so a property on a highway frontage should start the process well before booking a concreter.

Soakwells, Grading and What Not to Pour Over

Perth properties dispose of stormwater on their own land instead of piping it to a street kerb, and they do it through soakwells buried in the yard. That single fact has two consequences for concreting that no eastern states concreter would think about, and both of them are expensive to discover afterwards. The first of those is grading the surface. Every new slab has to shed water toward a soakwell, a grated drain feeding one, or at minimum toward a garden bed that can absorb it, and never toward the house. A large driveway or alfresco area that was graded by eye and ends up falling back toward a wall has converted a drainage system into a problem, and our stormwater drainage guide sets out where the water should end up.

The second is far simpler and catches people constantly. A soakwell has a removable lid because it needs to be opened and desilted every few years, so pouring a slab across the top of one seals it permanently. The soakwell then silts up, stops accepting water, and the only remedy is cutting a hole through new concrete at $280 to $700 plus the patch. Mark every soakwell lid before the formwork goes in.

Where a slab genuinely has to cover a soakwell, plan a proper access arrangement into it from the start. A trafficable access cover set flush into the slab over the lid position costs $280 to $780 installed and keeps the soakwell serviceable for the life of the concrete. It is one of the cheapest pieces of foresight available on a Perth pour.

Pool Surrounds and Barrier Compliance

Perth has one of the highest rates of pool ownership in the country, so pool surround concreting is ordinary work here in a way it is not elsewhere. The job is a slab like any other with three extra constraints, being the finish underfoot, the interaction with the pool shell and coping, and the barrier the surround has to keep compliant. Finish choice here is driven by heat and grip more than by appearance. A dark grey slab around a Perth pool becomes unwalkable barefoot in February, and that is the practical reason liquid limestone and pale exposed aggregate dominate here. Both stay meaningfully cooler and both keep their grip when wet, and our concrete pool surrounds guide covers the options.

The pool shell itself needs an expansion joint between it and the surround, because the two move independently and a slab bonded hard to the coping will crack along that line or lift it. The joint is filled with a flexible sealant that needs replacing every five to eight years, and a surround poured without one is a repair waiting to happen. Barrier compliance is where a concrete job can create a legal problem. Pool barriers are measured from the finished ground level on the outside of the fence, so raising that level with a new slab reduces the effective barrier height and can take a compliant fence out of compliance. The same applies to anything climbable placed within the non climbable zone, and pool fence compliance explains the measurements that matter.

Reinforcement, Cover and Coastal Corrosion

Steel does the tensile work in a slab and concrete does the compressive work, which is why nearly every slab has mesh in it. What matters as much as the mesh size is where it sits, because reinforcement only works if it is in the right part of the thickness and it only lasts if there is enough concrete between it and the air. That distance is called cover, and in Perth it carries extra weight because of where the city is. A coastal environment drives salt into concrete over time, salt reaching the steel starts it corroding, and corroding steel expands and pushes the concrete off in sheets. That failure is what people call concrete cancer, and it is why specified cover is larger within a kilometre or so of the ocean.

Getting cover right is almost free and getting it wrong is almost unfixable. Mesh from InfraBuild or an equivalent needs to sit on bar chairs at the correct height, and not be pulled up with a hook partway through the pour, a shortcut that leaves the steel resting on the ground across half the slab. Bar chairs cost a few dollars a square metre and anybody who objects to using them has told you something. The repair end of this is worth knowing because it sets the stakes. Spalled concrete with exposed corroding steel has to be cut back past the corrosion, the steel treated or replaced and the section rebuilt, at $350 to $1,100 a square metre through concrete cancer and spalling repairs. Against that figure, bar chairs and correct cover on the original pour are not a cost at all.

Curing and Cracking Through a Perth Summer

Concrete does not dry, it hydrates, and the chemical reaction that gives it strength needs water present for days after the pour. A Perth summer afternoon with thirty-eight degrees, low humidity and an easterly wind pulls that water out of the surface faster than the reaction can use it, and the result is a weak dusty surface and cracking that appears within hours. The specific failure is plastic shrinkage cracking, which means cracks forming while the concrete is still soft because the surface is shrinking as it loses water faster than the body beneath it. It shows as short random cracks across the surface, usually within the first few hours, and the cause is purely a curing failure. Nothing about the mix or the steel causes it.

Preventing it is a matter of scheduling and attention. Pours happen early in the day through summer, the surface is kept damp or covered with plastic or a curing compound as soon as it can take it, and windbreaks go up where an easterly is cutting across an exposed site. A concreter who books a forty degree afternoon pour and leaves at four o clock has not planned the job.

Control joints handle the other kind of cracking, meaning the slow shrinkage that happens over weeks as the slab loses moisture. Concrete shrinks and it will crack somewhere, so joints cut or tooled at roughly three metre centres decide where. Sawcut joints go in within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and leaving it a week means the slab has already cracked where it wanted to. A slab that has already gone that way moves the work from pouring to concrete and crack repair, which is dearer per square metre than cutting the joints on time would have been.

Full strength takes twenty-eight days and the practical implications are worth hearing before you plan around the pour. Foot traffic is fine after twenty-four to forty-eight hours, cars after seven days, and a heavy vehicle or a caravan should wait the full twenty-eight. Driving onto a four day old driveway leaves a crack pattern that no amount of later sealing hides.

Access, Line Pumps and Infill Lots

A concrete truck discharges down a chute and a chute reaches about three metres. That one measurement decides a surprising amount of the price, because anything beyond it has to be moved by wheelbarrow or pumped, and Perth has a great deal of housing where a truck cannot get close to the pour. Infill and subdivision housing is the reason for that. Two decades of battleaxe subdivision across the metropolitan area has produced thousands of rear lots reached down a long narrow driveway, and a rear alfresco slab on one of those is twenty-five or forty metres from where a truck can legally stand. Barrowing that distance is possible and slow, and above a few cubic metres it stops being realistic.

A line pump solves it at $550 to $1,400 for a single pour depending on volume, hose length and time on site. The pump sits at the street, hose runs through the side access or over a fence, and concrete arrives at the formwork at a controlled rate. For anything over about three cubic metres with poor access it is cheaper than the labour it replaces, and far better for the concrete, which suffers from sitting in barrows. Overhead clearance and standing room are the other two constraints people forget. A truck needs firm level ground to stand on and a pump needs room to set up and outriggers down, so a narrow verge with a street tree over it can rule out both. Low power lines across a frontage are a genuine stop, since a pump boom cannot go near them.

Permits, Warranties and Who Carries the Risk

Concreting sits in an unusual regulatory position in Western Australia, worth understanding before you compare quotes. Unlike plumbing or electrical work, there is no concreter licence, so nobody is checking a trade qualification at the door. What does apply is building registration above a value threshold, building permits for structural work, and the consumer protections that cover any trade.

Residential building work above a set value has to be carried out by a registered building contractor, and the registration is administered by the Building Services Board through Building and Energy within the state government at the WA Government. A driveway or a path generally sits well under the threshold, while a house slab as part of a build does not, and the threshold is also what triggers the insurance obligation described below. Building permits come from local government and attach to structural work, leaving flatwork alone. A path, a driveway or an alfresco slab on natural ground usually needs no permit. A shed slab, a slab forming part of a dwelling, anything involving retaining above a set height, and anything altering drainage or levels near a boundary generally does, with the technical requirements flowing from the National Construction Code and the planning framework at the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage.

Home indemnity insurance is the protection most people have never heard of until they need it. Above the value threshold the builder has to take out that cover before work starts, and it protects the owner where the builder dies, disappears or becomes insolvent before finishing. Work under the threshold carries no such cover, so a large project is worth staging with some care. Over all of it sit the consumer guarantees administered by the ACCC, which require work to be carried out with due care and skill and cannot be removed by a clause in a quote. Disputes about residential building work can go to Building and Energy and from there to the State Administrative Tribunal, and a dispute over finance or insurance can reach the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. Every one of those turns on the written quote and the written scope.

Builder Registration and Checking a Concreter

Because there is no concreter licence in Western Australia, the checks that work on a plumber do not translate, and a homeowner comparing quotes needs a different method. The good news is that the available checks are free and most of them take five minutes, and they are considerably more revealing than a licence number would be. Begin with the registered business entity. Any legitimate concreting business has an Australian Business Number and it belongs on the quote, so you can confirm the name trading matches the name invoicing and that the entity has existed for more than a fortnight. A trading name on a vehicle with no registered entity behind it on the paperwork is the clearest signal available in a trade with no licensing.

Where the work value crosses the registration threshold, the builder registration itself is checkable on the public register held by the Building Services Board, and so is any disciplinary history. For work under the threshold there is no register to consult, which puts the weight onto insurance, references and the quality of the written quote instead. Insurance is the one check worth doing carefully. Public liability cover of at least ten million dollars is the industry norm and the certificate should name the same entity as the quote, and workers compensation is required where anybody is employed. Concrete cutting and grinding with a Husqvarna saw or a diamond grinder also generate respirable crystalline silica, which is dust fine enough to reach the lungs, and the duties around it sit with WorkSafe WA and Safe Work Australia.

What to Look Out For When Hiring a Perth Concreter

Concreting complaints in Perth cluster around a handful of recurring causes, and almost all of them are visible in the quote before any concrete is ordered. The pattern to watch is a price quoted on the square metre rate alone with the preparation and the exclusions left vague. The first warning is a lump sum with no ground assumption stated. Limestone in the coastal corridor and imported sand on a low or cut site are the two items that move a Perth concreting price most, so a quote that says nothing about either has an open end that will be filled in later at the contractor discretion. The honest version states the assumed ground and prices rock and fill as separate rates.

Second is a quote that says nothing about compaction. A slab cracks because the support under it moved, so the preparation matters more than the mix, and a quote with no mention of layer compaction or testing on a job involving imported fill has skipped the part that decides whether the slab lasts. Put the compaction question to every quoting contractor and judge the reply on how specific it is. Third is mesh with no mention of bar chairs. Reinforcement resting on the sand is structurally useless and the only thing holding it at the right height is chairs, which cost a few dollars a square metre. A concreter who talks about mesh size without mentioning how it will be held up is describing a slab with the steel in the wrong place.

Beyond those three, all the familiar tests apply here too. No exclusions listed at all, since exclusions are where variations come from. A summer pour booked for a hot afternoon with no curing method named. No control joint spacing stated on a large area. A driveway quoted with no reference to the crossover approval or to where the water will run. And a decorative finish quoted without the sealing, which arrives later as an unwelcome extra.

Getting Quotes Worth Comparing

Three concreting quotes only mean something side by side when all three describe the same job on the same ground, and the square metre rate is the easiest part of that to match and the least useful. The preparation and the exclusions are where the money hides, so the preparation work you do before anybody visits is what makes the comparison honest. Measure the area carefully and write it down. Length by width in metres for each separate section, noted individually and left unadded, because a hundred square metres in one rectangle prices differently to the same area split across a path, a courtyard and a side strip. Awkward shapes and lots of edges cost more per square metre than one clean slab, and that is a legitimate difference.

Then tell every quoting concreter the same five things. The suburb, because that is what predicts limestone. Whether the ground is at the level you want or needs filling or cutting. What is there now and whether it has to be removed and disposed of. How close a truck can get to the pour. And what the surface will carry, meaning foot traffic, a car, or a caravan and a boat.

Ask for the quote to be set out so its assumptions show, with the preparation separated from the concrete, the assumed ground stated and rock priced as a rate, the thickness and mesh specified, the joint spacing stated, the curing method named for a summer pour, the finish and its sealing itemised, and the exclusions written out in full. A quote with all of that in it is also a quote you can enforce. Be careful with the cheapest figure on anything involving fill or a coastal suburb. The lowest Perth concreting quote is commonly the one that assumed clean sand at the required level, and it converges on the others the moment the excavator finds caprock or the pad needs forty cubic metres of sand. Take the quote whose assumptions are written down, since nothing else can be held to afterwards. Get three, read the exclusions before any total, and ask the two cheaper contractors to account for whatever the dearest one allowed for.