How to Start a Concreting Business

Decide what you pour

Concreting covers work with very different crew sizes, approvals and risk. What you choose determines whether you can start solo or need a gang from day one.

• Driveways, paths and patios — the classic residential starting point. Manageable pours, direct homeowner clients, decent margins.
• House slabs and footings — structural work with engineering, inspections and a builder as your client. Bigger volume, tighter programmes, and licensing implications.
• Decorative concrete — exposed aggregate, polished, stencilled, coloured. Higher rates, more skill, less price competition.
• Commercial and industrial — warehouse floors, tilt panels, civil works. Different plant entirely and a different business.
• Repairs and resurfacing — cutting, grinding, overlays. Lower volume, good filler work between pours.

Most new concreting businesses start on residential flatwork and add structural work as they build a crew and the licensing to go with it. Trying to start on slabs without a reliable gang is how first-year concreters end up doing three people's work on a hot day.

Licensing, engineering and approvals

Plain flatwork often sits outside licensed building work; structural concrete generally doesn't. The line depends on your state and on what the concrete is holding up.

• Structural work — slabs, footings and anything a building sits on is building work in most states, with licensing and contract value thresholds attached. Confirm what applies with your state building authority.
• Engineering and inspections — structural pours usually need an engineer's design and an inspection of steel and formwork before the pour. Book the inspection when you book the concrete, not on the morning.
• Council approvals — driveways and crossovers over a footpath or verge typically need council approval and sometimes a bond. That's the client's job in theory and your problem in practice.
• Silica dust — since 1 September 2024 the model WHS rules have specifically regulated the processing of crystalline silica substances, meaning any material at least 1% crystalline silica by weight. Concrete qualifies. Using power tools or plant to cut, grind, drill, trim, sand or polish it is "processing", and it has to be controlled processing — water suppression or on-tool extraction, plus respiratory protection.
• Traffic management — pouring from a truck parked on a road or blocking a footpath brings its own permits and control requirements.

What you'll be spending money on

Concreting is plant-heavy relative to the hand tools, and the vehicle needs to actually carry it. Price these categories for your own situation.

Concrete supply is your largest single cost and it usually has to be paid on terms shorter than your clients pay you. Get a batching plant account open early, understand their minimum load, waiting-time and cancellation charges, and take a deposit that covers materials before you book a truck.

Building the business around pour day

Everything expensive in concreting happens in a four-hour window. The businesses that make money are the ones that treat pour day as an operation with a plan, not as a day that starts when the truck arrives.

1. Confirm the crew two days out. Not the night before. A gang that's a person short on the morning of a pour is a finish that suffers and a job that costs you.
2. Book plant and confirm access. Pump, line, truck size and where they'll stand. Confirm the truck can physically get in — a driveway that won't take the weight or a low branch is a problem you find at 6am otherwise.
3. Watch the weather with a plan, not hope. Know your cancellation window and the plant's charge for using it. A cancellation fee is always cheaper than a rained-out pour.
4. Have the pre-pour inspection signed off. Steel, mesh, chairs, membrane, formwork. On structural work an inspection that hasn't happened means a pour that can't.
5. Photograph the prep before it disappears. Once the concrete's in, the reo and the membrane are gone forever. Your photos are the only evidence they were right.
6. Order the right volume, and know your tolerance. Running short mid-pour is far worse than a bit of waste. Work out your ordering allowance and apply it every time.

Pricing a job you can't redo

Concreting quotes fail on the things that happen before the truck arrives — the excavation, the fill, the removal of the spoil, and the access that makes all of it slower than expected.

• Build your charge-out rate from real overheads and genuinely billable days, then price jobs from it — plant that sits in the yard still costs you money.
• Quote excavation, fill, compaction and spoil removal as their own lines. On a sloping block these can exceed the concrete cost.
• Price access honestly. Barrowing concrete to a back yard is a completely different job to a truck chuting straight into the form.
• Include pump or line hire as a visible item rather than absorbing it.
• State the finish precisely — broom, exposed, polished, stencil, colour, sealer. "Nice finish" is not a specification.
• Add a latent conditions clause for rock, soft fill, buried debris and unmarked services.
• Set payment terms with a deposit that covers your material order. You should not be funding someone else's slab.

Our guides to quoting a concrete slab and quoting a concrete driveway go through the itemisation, and working out your charge-out rate covers the number behind it.

Frequently asked questions