Concrete Driveway Replacement and Flatwork in Fort Worth, TX

The first question on an older Fort Worth driveway is whether it wants a repair or a replacement, and it is worth answering honestly, because the wrong call costs twice. Hairline cracks that stay flat are cosmetic. A crack wide enough to drop a coin into, or one where one side sits higher than the other, means the subgrade under it moved and the two pieces are no longer carried the same way.

If one or two panels are broken and the rest is sound, we saw-cut at the existing joints, dig out and re-compact the base, dowel the new panel into its neighbors and match the thickness and finish. That is usually the best value on the list. If more than about a third of the panels are cracked or offset, the ground under the whole slab has failed and you would be chasing it panel by panel for years. Older drives are also often thin — under about 3.5 inches — with no steel in them at all, and a thin slab keeps breaking no matter how good the patch is.

Tree roots are the other thing we find here that we rarely find on a new street. Fifty-year-old shade over a fifty-year-old walk lifts panels an inch at a time. Cutting a root without a plan can take the tree with it, so we look at what is under the slab before anyone promises a flat sidewalk. More on reading the damage on the concrete repair page.

Breaking out and hauling away old concrete runs about $2.50 to $4.50 per square foot on top of the new pour, and where you land in that band is mostly about what is under the slab. A 4-inch drive with clean edges and a truck that can back to it is at the low end. A thick old slab, a layer of asphalt underneath it, wire mesh through the middle, or a job where every piece has to be wheeled out to the street sits at the top.

On a 600-square-foot driveway that is another $1,500 to $2,700 on top of the $4,800 to $8,400 the new 4-inch broom-finish pour costs, so a full replacement lands roughly between $6,300 and $11,100. The driveway cost page breaks the same math down line by line.

One thing worth deciding before demolition starts: if the old concrete is coming out anyway, this is the cheapest moment to change the shape. Widening by four feet, squaring off a turnaround or adding a walk to the side door costs a fraction of what it costs as its own job later, because the crew, the forms and the truck are already on site.

Plenty of Fort Worth houses park off an alley, and an alley approach is its own kind of pour: narrow, shared, and often with utility meters, poles or a fence line within a few feet of the forms. We measure the access before we quote, because whether a ready-mix truck can reach the forms or the concrete has to be wheeled or pumped changes the price and the crew size more than the square footage does.

Hand-hauling is normal on these jobs and it is not free — it is the difference between a truck emptying in twenty minutes and a crew moving nine yards a wheelbarrow at a time. When the access is bad enough, a pump is cheaper than the labor, and we will say which one your job needs when we walk it.

Anything in the public right-of-way — the sidewalk out by the curb, the approach where your drive meets the street — is the city’s, not yours. Permits, inspections and right-of-way rules are set by each city and they change, so call the City of Fort Worth before anyone cuts. Our permit page walks through what the process generally looks like on this kind of work, using Arlington as the example.