How much does concrete labor cost per square foot?

About $3–8 per square foot for forming, pouring and finishing a 4-inch residential slab; the concrete is extra. Local wages shift that range: scaled by each metro's BLS cement mason wage it becomes roughly $4.60–12.30 in Seattle and $2.50–6.80 in San Antonio.

What is the labor cost to pour a concrete slab per square foot?

Plan on $3–8 per square foot. A 20×20 slab (400 sq ft) carries $1,200–3,200 in labor. Against an installed price of $6–12 per square foot that is half to two-thirds of the bill. The 5.43 cubic yards of concrete in the same slab, with 10% waste, cost $896–1,214 including delivery.

How much is concrete labor per yard?

Labor is priced by area, so the per-yard figure depends on thickness. One cubic yard covers 81 sq ft at 4 inches, 64.8 sq ft at 5 inches and 54 sq ft at 6 inches. At $3–8 per square foot that is $243–648, $194–518 and $162–432 per yard.

What is the going rate for concrete flatwork labor?

Plain broom-finished flatwork such as patios, walks and pads carries $3–8 per square foot of labor nationally. Across the 30 metros in our cost data the wage-scaled range starts at $2.50–6.80 in San Antonio and tops out at $4.60–12.30 in Seattle.

What does place-and-finish labor include?

Place-and-finish is the pour-day part of the job: pulling concrete off the truck, screeding it level, floating, troweling or brooming the surface, edging and cutting control joints. Excavation, base, forms and reinforcement come before it and are often quoted separately. We know of no public per-square-foot benchmark for place-and-finish alone; it is one part of the $3–8 range, so check which earlier steps a place-and-finish price leaves to you.

Concrete Labor Cost: $3–8 Per Sq Ft (2026 Installation Rates)

Q: How much do concrete contractors charge per hour?

We know of no public dataset of billed crew rates. The wage side is public: cement masons and concrete finishers average $23.40 an hour in San Antonio and $42.25 in Seattle (BLS, May 2025), and an employer's billed rate sits above that to cover payroll taxes, insurance, equipment and profit. With an hourly quote, multiply crew size by expected hours and compare the result with $3–8 per square foot.

Say you have a 20×20 patio quote for $4,000 and one line reads "labor, $2,400". That is $6 a square foot. For the same slab, that sits near the top of the wage-scaled range in Houston and in the lower half in Chicago.

Labor Per Square Foot, by Slab Size

The $3–8 range is the national figure SlabCalc's calculator uses for forming, pouring and finishing a 4-inch slab, shown here for common sizes.

Slab size	Area (sq ft)	Labor at $3/sq ft	Labor at $8/sq ft
10×10 ft	100	$300	$800
12×12 ft	144	$432	$1,152
16×20 ft	320	$960	$2,560
20×20 ft	400	$1,200	$3,200
24×24 ft	576	$1,728	$4,608
30×30 ft	900	$2,700	$7,200

On small pads the per-foot math stops working, because a crew's drive, setup and cleanup take about as long for a 10×10 pad as for a 20×20 slab. If your quote for a small pad sits well above the table, ask whether it includes a minimum charge before you assume the rate is high.

Where Labor Sits Inside a Slab Quote

We split the 20×20 example from the opening into its parts. The slab needs 4.94 cubic yards at 4 inches, or 5.43 with the calculator's default 10% waste. Ready-mix at $165–205 per yard plus a $0–100 delivery fee (the calculator's national figures) puts the concrete at $896–1,214. In the table, low ends are paired with low ends and high ends with high ends.

Line	Low end	High end
Installed price ($6–12/sq ft)	$2,400	$4,800
Labor ($3–8/sq ft)	$1,200	$3,200
Concrete, 5.43 yd³ with delivery	$896	$1,214
Labor share of the installed price	50%	67%

What the ranges leave over for gravel base, reinforcement, excavation and overhead is thin at both ends ($304 and $386), which tells you real quotes rarely sit at the same end of every range. The $2,400 labor line on the $4,000 quote is 60% of the price, inside the range. Across the range the concrete moves by about $300 and labor by $2,000. In the highest-wage metros labor alone can reach the top of the national $6–12 installed range, which is why the next table matters more than this one. The concrete cost calculator shows the concrete and labor lines for your own size.

Labor Per Cubic Yard Depends on Thickness

Crews price flatwork by area, so a per-yard labor figure only makes sense once you fix the thickness. At the same $3–8 per square foot, one cubic yard spread at 4 inches covers 81 sq ft and carries $243–648 of labor. At 5 inches it covers 64.8 sq ft ($194–518), and at 6 inches 54 sq ft ($162–432). When two quotes give a per-yard labor price, check that they assume the same thickness: $432 a yard at 6 inches is the same $8 per square foot as $648 a yard at 4 inches.

How Much Do Concrete Contractors Charge Per Hour?

BLS publishes what cement masons and concrete finishers earn. Employers' billed rates are a separate number. In May 2025 the mean wage ran from $23.40 an hour in San Antonio to $42.25 in Seattle across the 30 metros below. The billed rate is higher because it also pays for payroll taxes, workers' comp, liability insurance, trucks, screeds and power trowels, plus profit. If a contractor quotes by the hour, ask for the crew size and the hours they expect, multiply it out, and compare the total with the per-square-foot table.

Concrete Labor Cost by Metro

Our own reading of the wage data: look at the metro before arguing about the finish. A finisher in Seattle earns 1.81 times what one in San Antonio earns, and that gap flows straight into the labor line.

SlabCalc's metro cost data takes the BLS mean hourly wage for cement masons and concrete finishers (SOC 47-2051, May 2025) in each metro and divides it by $27.59, the median of all US metro-area means. The result is a labor index. The last column multiplies the national $3–8 range by that index; it is our arithmetic, and a contractor's quote can land anywhere around it. These 30 are large metros, and 19 of them sit above the $27.59 median.

Metro	Cement mason wage	Labor index	Est. labor per sq ft
Seattle, WA	$42.25	1.53	$4.60–12.30
San Francisco, CA	$40.42	1.47	$4.40–11.70
Chicago, IL	$39.19	1.42	$4.30–11.40
Portland, OR	$36.05	1.31	$3.90–10.50
San Diego, CA	$35.73	1.29	$3.90–10.40
Minneapolis, MN	$35.56	1.29	$3.90–10.30
New York, NY	$35.55	1.29	$3.90–10.30
Boston, MA	$35.25	1.28	$3.80–10.20
Los Angeles, CA	$33.67	1.22	$3.70–9.80
St. Louis, MO	$33.35	1.21	$3.60–9.70
Sacramento, CA	$32.32	1.17	$3.50–9.40
Riverside, CA	$32.22	1.17	$3.50–9.30
Columbus, OH	$31.75	1.15	$3.50–9.20
Philadelphia, PA	$31.66	1.15	$3.40–9.20
Kansas City, MO	$31.33	1.14	$3.40–9.10
Las Vegas, NV	$30.89	1.12	$3.40–9.00
Detroit, MI	$29.92	1.08	$3.30–8.70
Denver, CO	$29.56	1.07	$3.20–8.60
Phoenix, AZ	$29.25	1.06	$3.20–8.50
Tampa, FL	$26.95	0.98	$2.90–7.80
Miami, FL	$26.13	0.95	$2.80–7.60
Austin, TX	$24.89	0.90	$2.70–7.20
Atlanta, GA	$24.61	0.89	$2.70–7.10
Nashville, TN	$24.48	0.89	$2.70–7.10
Orlando, FL	$24.35	0.88	$2.60–7.10
Dallas, TX	$24.22	0.88	$2.60–7.00
Charlotte, NC	$24.12	0.87	$2.60–7.00
Raleigh, NC	$23.83	0.86	$2.60–6.90
Houston, TX	$23.72	0.86	$2.60–6.90
San Antonio, TX	$23.40	0.85	$2.50–6.80

SlabCalc's city cost pages show a second, wider number. They take the installed price from public contract bids in each market (modelled where a market has too few bids) and subtract the concrete. What is left, the line labelled labor, base, forms and overhead, also pays for the gravel base, reinforcement and the contractor's overhead, so it can sit well above or below this table. Each city page prints its crew-labor estimate from this table next to it. For a patio, Philadelphia's line, built on 50 bids, comes to about $9–23 per square foot; Atlanta's, on 12 bids, to about $2, less than the wage-scaled crew labor alone. The bid data behind those pages is published in the SlabCalc concrete cost index.

What the Labor Line Covers, and What Gets Added

The national $3–8 range covers forming, pouring and finishing. A contractor's labor line may also take in excavation to grade, compacting the gravel base and placing rebar or mesh, or those can come as separate lines. Place-and-finish is the narrowest version: the pour-day work alone, with everything before it left to you or priced on its own.

The items that tend to appear later are removing an old slab, a pump truck when the chute cannot reach the forms, wheelbarrow work when the truck cannot get close, and decorative finishes such as stamping. These are normal add-ons, and they cause trouble mainly when they first appear on the final bill. In our Contractor Quote Fairness Study of 291 Reddit discussions (September 2016 to March 2026), 43% used quote-fairness language, and the advice repeated most often was to get at least three written, itemized quotes. With itemized quotes you can hold each labor line against the size and metro tables above.

Lowering the Labor Bill

Doing the excavation, base and forms yourself and hiring a crew only for place-and-finish removes the earlier steps from their bill, though the finish is the part that is hardest to redo if it goes wrong. A broom finish takes less crew time than stamping. Pouring a walk and a pad on the same day puts two jobs under one setup and one truck. Clear access for the truck saves the pump or the wheelbarrows. The DIY vs. contractor concrete cost guide and the DIY vs. pro finishing tool compare the paths in dollars, and how to hire a concrete contractor covers what to check before you sign with a local crew.

Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: 47-2051 Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers.

Concrete Labor Cost: What You Pay to Pour and Finish