How much concrete, steel and crushed rock does a Pakenham driveway need?
A typical Pakenham double driveway is about 60 square metres. At 100mm thick that is 6.6 cubic metres of concrete once you allow 10 per cent for an uneven base, 6 sheets of SL92 mesh, about 100 bar chairs, 13.2 tonnes of Class 3 crushed rock underneath and roughly 27 lineal metres of saw cutting. You dig 200mm down and cart away around 22 tonnes of clay. Supplied and laid in 2026 that is $5,700 to $7,500 in plain broom finish, or $7,100 to $9,400 in exposed aggregate.
Everything a 60 square metre Pakenham driveway consumes
This is the order list for the most common job in Pakenham, Officer and Cardinia Lakes: a double driveway roughly 5.5 metres wide by 11 metres long, 100mm of 32MPa concrete over 100mm of compacted Class 3 crushed rock. Every rule of thumb in the middle column is the one we use on our own take-offs.
| What you order | Rule of thumb | 60 m² double | Why it is that number here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Concrete, 100mm slab | Area × 0.1, then add 10 per cent | 6.6 m³ | A hand-trimmed clay base averages closer to 110mm than 100mm. The 10 per cent is not padding, it is the difference between the drawing and the ground. |
| Agitator loads | 6 m³ maximum per suburban load | 2 loads | 6.0 plus a 0.6 part load. The part load carries a short-load fee of about $80 to $180. Two trucks 20 minutes apart is normal and does not create a joint. |
| Reinforcing mesh, SL92 | 1 sheet per 11 m² of finished slab | 6 sheets | Sheets are 6.0 by 2.4 metres, 14.4 m² raw, but laps of roughly 425mm on SL92 pull the useful coverage back to about 11 m². |
| Bar chairs | 1 chair per 0.6 m², about 800mm centres | 100 chairs | Mesh dragged up with a hook after the pour is the most common reason a driveway cracks in year three. Chairs are $30 to $60 a bag and are not optional. |
| Class 3 crushed rock base | 0.22 tonnes per m² at 100mm | 13.2 t | Sold by weight. It loses about a quarter of its loose volume under a plate compactor, so ordering by cubic metre leaves you short. |
| Excavation and cart-away | 200mm deep, spoil bulks about 25 per cent | 22 t | 12 m³ in the ground becomes about 15 m³ loose, roughly three tipper loads. Cardinia clay is heavy and wet clay is heavier again. |
| Saw-cut control joints | Panels no larger than about 2.75 m square | 27 lineal m | At $18 to $32 per lineal metre that is $490 to $870. It is the cheapest crack insurance on the job and the first thing a bargain quote deletes. |
| Expansion joint filler | Full width at the garage and the crossover | 12 lineal m | 10mm compressible filler isolates the new slab from the house slab and the council crossover so they can move independently. |
| Curing compound | About 5 m² per litre | 12 L | Or hessian kept wet for seven days. A February pour in Pakenham that is not cured properly loses surface strength permanently. |
Quantities are for a flat, well-drained site with truck access. A slope steeper than about 1 in 8, a cut-and-fill batter or a wet winter subgrade all add base material. If you want the dollars rather than the quantities, the 2026 pricing guide and the cost calculator break the price down per square metre.
Size your driveway first, then see the price
Move the slider to your area and set the build. The quantity panel updates as you go, so you can check a supplier quote or a materials list before anyone pours anything.
- Assumes 32MPa concrete, SL92 mesh on chairs, saw-cut joints and a compacted Class 3 base.
- Excludes retaining walls, step-downs, drainage pits, turf reinstatement and landscaping.
- Excludes Cardinia Shire permit fees, which the council sets and reviews each year.
- Assumes a truck can get within about 20 metres of the pour. If it cannot, tick the pump.
How to measure your driveway properly with a tape and a phone
You do not need a laser or a surveyor. You need an 8 metre tape, someone to hold the other end, and about fifteen minutes. Do it before you ring anyone, because a quote given over the phone on a guessed area is the quote that changes when we turn up.
- Start at the garage door, not the street. Measure the full width of the opening including the frame, then measure the concrete apron you want in front of it. On most Cardinia Lakes and Lakeside houses the apron is the widest part of the driveway and the part people forget.
- Break the shape into rectangles. Almost no driveway here is a plain rectangle. Split it into two or three: the apron at the garage, the straight run, and the splayed section where it meets the crossover. Measure each one separately, multiply length by width, and add them up. That is your area in square metres.
- Measure the splay properly. The flared section at the street is usually a trapezoid. Take the width at the top, the width at the bottom, add them, divide by two, and multiply by the length. On a typical double that section alone is 6 to 9 square metres.
- Photograph the tape. Take a photo with the tape lying in place at each measurement, plus one wide shot from the street and one from the garage looking out. Those five photos let us sanity check your numbers and spot the things you would not think to mention: the step at the front door, the meter box, the drain grate, the neighbour’s fence line.
- Check the fall. Rest a straight length of timber on the driveway with a spirit level on top. If water currently sits anywhere, mark it with chalk while it is wet and photograph that too. Fall matters because it decides whether we can keep your existing levels or have to rebuild them, and standing water is a drainage problem that a new slab on the same levels will not fix.
- Note where the crossover starts. The concrete between your property boundary and the road is council asset, not yours. Measure your side up to the boundary and treat the crossover as a separate item, because it is built to Cardinia Shire’s standard drawing and needs a vehicle crossing permit.
Round your total up to the nearest square metre, not down. Nobody has ever been annoyed that their driveway came out slightly bigger than they measured, and every allowance in the next section assumes your starting area is honest.
The allowances to add, and why each one exists
Concrete: add 10 per cent, not 5
Textbooks say 5 per cent wastage. That is right for a slab poured onto formed and screeded sand inside a shed. On a driveway dug into Cardinia clay by a bobcat and trimmed by hand, the average depth over the whole slab is almost always 105mm to 115mm rather than a perfect 100mm, and the ground soaks up a little at the edges. Ten per cent covers it. On a 60 square metre job that is 0.6 of a cubic metre, roughly $175 to $220 of concrete, and it buys you the certainty of not stopping the pour.
Mesh: laps take about a quarter of the sheet
Sheets are 6.0 by 2.4 metres. Where two sheets meet, the lap has to be long enough to transfer load between them, which on SL92 with its 200mm wire spacing means roughly 425mm of overlap. Once you lose that on the joining edges, a 14.4 square metre sheet covers about 11 square metres of finished slab. Divide your area by 11 and round up. You also need chairs, and the honest rule is one per 0.6 square metres, which is about 100 on a double driveway. Mesh lying on the clay does nothing at all: it has to sit roughly 40mm below the finished surface, which on a 100mm slab means a 50mm to 65mm chair.
Crushed rock: order by weight and expect it to shrink
Twenty millimetre Class 3 crushed rock is the standard base material in this corridor because it compacts hard and still drains. Loose out of the truck it runs around 1.6 to 1.8 tonnes per cubic metre; once it is plate compacted to the density the slab needs it is closer to 2.2 tonnes per cubic metre in place. The practical rule is 0.22 tonnes per square metre for every 100mm of finished base depth. If the yard quotes you cubic metres, ask them to convert, and always order a tonne more than the calculation says, because the last barrow is the one you never have.
Spoil: it gets bigger when you dig it
Excavated clay bulks up by 20 to 30 per cent, so 12 cubic metres in the ground fills about 15 cubic metres of tipper. Weight is what you pay for at the transfer station, and around 22 tonnes for a double driveway is normal. Wet clay after a Pakenham winter can be 10 per cent heavier again, which is one of the quiet reasons winter jobs cost more. Our guide to the best time of year to do a driveway here works through the seasonal trade-offs.
Saw cuts: panels stay under about 2.75 metres
Concrete shrinks as it cures and it will crack somewhere. Control joints decide where. On a 100mm slab we keep panels to about 2.75 metres in each direction and keep them roughly square, never longer than about one and a half times their width. Cuts go in within 12 to 24 hours of the pour, to about a quarter of the slab depth. On a 5.5 by 11 metre driveway that works out at three cross cuts and one down the middle, which is 27 lineal metres. A quote that does not mention joints is a quote that has not priced them.
What you do not need to buy
You do not need plastic sheeting under a driveway. A vapour barrier is a house-slab item that stops moisture rising into flooring, and under an external slab it traps water against the underside and makes bleed water worse. You also do not need fibres as well as mesh on a domestic driveway: fibres control plastic shrinkage in the first few hours, steel controls movement for the next thirty years, and the steel is the one that matters on reactive clay.
Not sure whether your numbers are right?
Send us your measurements and photos and we will check them against a free site visit, before anything is ordered.
The sizing mistakes that cost the most in Cardinia
Ordering the concrete short
This is the expensive one. If you order 6.0 cubic metres for a slab that needs 6.5, the pour stops. A replacement load takes 45 to 90 minutes to batch and drive from the nearest plant, by which time the first pour has stiffened and you have a cold joint running across the driveway. That joint is a permanent line of weakness and it will open. The half cubic metre you saved was worth about $160. The joint devalues the slab for its whole life and is not a warranty claim, because nothing failed: it was built that way. The warranty page sets out exactly where that line sits in Victoria.
Giving a double garage a single driveway
We see this constantly in the newer Officer and Pakenham East estates, usually because the builder’s handover driveway was a 3.0 metre strip and the owner matched it. Two cars cannot use a 3.0 metre driveway without one of them running a wheel off the edge. Within two summers the lawn edge is rutted, the slab edge has spalled, and the fix is a widening pour tied in with starter bars at full per square metre rates. Widening by 1 metre along an 11 metre driveway is 11 square metres, so $1,200 to $1,700, plus a mobilisation you already paid for once.
Forgetting the crossover is a different animal
The section between your boundary and the kerb is a council asset built to Cardinia Shire’s standard drawing. It is often thicker than your driveway, sometimes reinforced differently, and it needs a permit before anyone touches it. Budget it separately, because a quote that folds the crossover into a flat per square metre rate is either loading your rate or is about to discover it cannot do the work. Confirm the current standard drawing and the permit fee with the council rather than trusting a number on any website, including ours: those fees are reset in the council’s annual schedule.
Thickening the slab instead of fixing the base
Going from 100mm to 150mm across a whole driveway adds 3 cubic metres of concrete to a 60 square metre job, around $900 to $1,100 in supply alone. Very often that money is better spent on 50mm more crushed rock and proper compaction, which is about $150 of material plus an hour of plate time. A thick slab on a soft base still moves. A normal slab on a hard base does not. If your existing driveway is already cracking or sinking, the base is almost always the culprit rather than the thickness, and pouring a thicker slab on the same ground repeats the fault.
A Cardinia Lakes double driveway, with the numbers added up
Two storey house on a standard estate block, double garage, straight run to the street, slight fall towards the kerb, Class M reactive clay. The owner wants exposed aggregate to satisfy the estate covenant. Here is the whole take-off.
- Measure. Apron at the garage 5.8 m wide by 2.5 m deep is 14.5 m². Straight run 5.2 m by 7.5 m is 39.0 m². The splay at the street goes 5.2 m down to 3.6 m over 1.6 m, so 5.2 plus 3.6, divided by 2, times 1.6, is 7.0 m². Total 60.5 m², called 61 m².
- Excavate. 200mm below finished level, so 61 times 0.2 is 12.2 m³ in the ground, about 15.3 m³ loose and 22 tonnes on the weighbridge. Three tipper loads.
- Base. 61 times 0.22 is 13.4 tonnes of 20mm Class 3, ordered as 14 tonnes, plate compacted in two passes rather than one deep lift.
- Steel. 61 divided by 11 is 5.5, so 6 sheets of SL92, plus 110 bar chairs at 800mm centres, plus starter bars drilled into the garage slab edge.
- Concrete. 61 times 0.1 is 6.1 m³ neat, plus 10 per cent is 6.7 m³, ordered as 6.8. Two loads, 6.0 and 0.8. Mix is 32MPa with 20mm aggregate in an exposed aggregate blend.
- Joints. Three cross cuts at 5.2 m plus one longitudinal at 11.6 m is 27.2 lineal metres of saw cutting, plus 11 lineal metres of 10mm expansion filler at the garage and the crossover.
- Finish. Surface retarder on the day, washed off the following morning, then a penetrating sealer at about 5 m² per litre, so 13 litres, applied once the slab has dried right out.
Supplied and laid, that job sits at $7,200 to $9,500 in 2026 for the exposed aggregate finish, or $5,800 to $7,600 if the same build were finished plain. Breaking out an existing concrete driveway of the same size and carting it away adds $2,500 to $5,200 on top. If the crossover also has to be replaced, add $1,400 to $3,200 plus council fees. That is the full picture, and it is the same picture we put in a written quote: the quote comparison guide shows what to check line by line, and the budget tiers page shows what genuinely comes out of the job at each price level.
When you need far less material than you think
A lot of people who land on this page are about to spend more than they need to. Three honest cases where every quantity above is the wrong answer.
- The slab is sound and only the surface is tired. If your concrete has no structural cracks, no rocking panels and no ponding, you do not need 6.6 cubic metres of anything. A resurface puts 3 to 6mm of overlay on top and uses a fraction of the material at a fraction of the price. Work through resurfacing versus replacement before ordering a single tonne, and the resurfacing service page covers what the process actually involves.
- Only the crossover or the apron has failed. Replacing a 7 square metre splay is a half day, about 0.8 of a cubic metre of concrete and one small load. There is no rule that a driveway has to be replaced in one piece, and tying new work into sound old work with starter bars and a clean saw-cut joint is completely normal.
- You are selling, not staying. Presentation work is cheaper than replacement and usually returns more at auction. Cleaning, joint refilling and a reseal on a structurally sound driveway is a few hundred dollars of material against five figures of new slab.
What we will not do. We do not sell supply-only material packs for owner-builder pours over about 20 square metres. That is not precious about the work: the finishing window on a 32 degree Pakenham day is 30 to 45 minutes, and a slab that goes off before it is floated cannot be rescued afterwards. We also will not lay a decorative overlay on a slab that is cracked or still moving, because the overlay copies the crack within a season. If that is your situation we will say so on the phone and save you the site visit. If you want to size up how anyone quotes, including us, the guide to choosing a concreter in Pakenham lists the questions worth asking, and the surface specification guide explains what the MPa and mesh codes on a quote mean. If you would rather know what the days on site look like once the numbers are settled, the day by day installation page walks through it.
Quantity questions we get asked
How much concrete does a 60 square metre driveway need?
How many mesh sheets do I need for a concrete driveway?
How much crushed rock goes under a Pakenham driveway?
How deep do you dig for a concrete driveway in Pakenham?
How wide should a driveway be in Pakenham or Officer?
What do all those quantities add up to in dollars?
Send your measurements and we will check the quantities for free
Send the numbers you took with the tape and we will come back within one business day with the concrete, base and steel quantities checked, plus a fixed price for the finished job.
Five minutes on the phone beats an hour with a spreadsheet
Tell us the rough size and we will tell you the quantities, the likely price, and whether you even need a full replacement. Pakenham, Officer, Cardinia Lakes and the wider Cardinia Shire.