Installed cost
What this floor costs, built from real quantities
Every quantity on this page was derived from your slab. Every unit price was supplied by you. That split is the whole design: how many gallons, how many machine hours and how many rental days are questions with real answers, and what a gallon or an hour costs where you live is a question we have no honest source for and refuse to invent.
Estimated total for this floor
$1,919
$4 per square foot across 440 square feet
Planning range $1,574 to $2,591
The line items, with the quantity separated from the price
Read the fourth column. Anything marked "derived here" is a quantity this site worked out from your slab and can defend. Anything marked "your figure" is a local price we declined to guess at.
| Line | Quantity | Cost | Origin | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coating material | 4 kits (9.7 gal ordered) | $760 | derived here | Gallons derived from area, film build and volume solids; kit count derived from the kit size you entered. |
| Decorative flake | 18 lb | $79 | derived here | Broadcast weight derived from area at our assumed partial-broadcast rate. |
| Crack, joint and spall repair material | as measured | $85 | your figure | Volume is derived on the repair page; the price of that volume is yours. |
| Preparation machine rental | 1 day | $130 | derived here | Days derived from the derived preparation hours and your working day; the day rate is yours. |
| Diamond tooling or shot | as quoted | $110 | your figure | Almost always billed apart from the machine and almost always forgotten. |
| Preparation labour | 3.4 h | $187 | derived here | Hours derived from area, passes, edge band and access; the hourly rate is yours. |
| Mixing and application labour | 10.3 h | $568 | derived here | Hours derived from area, coat count, broadcast courses and perimeter; the hourly rate is yours. |
Why preparation is usually the larger half
At the settings above, preparation is 22% of the total and material is 48%. That ratio surprises people, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before reading a quote.
Material scales with area and thickness, both of which are fixed by the job. Preparation scales with area, thickness, AND what is on the slab — and that last term is unbounded. A sealer adds a pass. An old coating adds two. Adhesive residue loads the tooling and has to come off in shallow repeated cuts. Each of those multiplies the machine hours over the whole floor.
Which is why the cheapest quote is usually the one that has decided to prepare less, and why the quote check asks what profile they are taking the slab to. Two contractors quoting the same product at the same thickness can differ by a factor of two on the bill and both be describing real work.
The range, and why it is asymmetric
The planning range runs from $1,574 to $2,591. The upside is wider than the downside on purpose: the ways this job gets cheaper are limited and known, while the ways it gets more expensive are open-ended and are usually discovered after the machine is already on the floor.
The commonest overrun is not a price change at all. It is a scope discovery — a sealer nobody knew about, a crack that opens up when it is chased, or a moisture reading that arrives after the material is bought.
One caution about the per-square-foot figure, because that is the number people copy out of a page like this one and apply to a different floor. It is this total divided by this area, and preparation does not scale with area alone: edge work is charged by perimeter, obstructions are dealt with one at a time, and getting the machine onto the slab is charged once whatever the size. Halve the area and the figure per square foot goes up rather than down. It is a result of this job, not a rate you can carry to the next one.
Not in this figure
- Permits, inspections and any structural repair the preparation uncovers.
- Moving what is currently standing on the floor, and storing it somewhere for the duration.
- Heating or dehumidifying the space to bring the slab into the product temperature range.
- Making good on walls, thresholds and door bottoms once the floor is thicker than it was.
- The second attempt if the moisture test was skipped.
Biggest swing factor Material. The film build drives it directly, and film build is set by what the floor has to survive rather than by preference.