Calculator
Block paving cost per m², built up properly
The record
- Checked by
- Carl Winson
- Built from
- CIJC Working Rule Agreement
- Wage date
- 20 July 2026
- Grades
- craft rate and general operative
The working
- 1 × tradesperson at £16.40
- £16.40
- 1 × labourer at £13.18
- £13.18
- Gang wage, per hour
- £29.58
- + 35% on top of wages
- £39.93
- × 8 hours on the tools
- £319.46 a day
- Lay on a prepared basescreeded sand, laid, cut and compacted£319.46 ÷ 15 m² × 1.20 = £25.56/m²
Benchmark
£25.56/m² labour
CIJC rates · tradesperson £16.40/hr + labourer £13.18/hr · gang of 1+1 · 35% on top · overheads and profit 20%
Materials, scaffold and supervision are not included in this rate.
What’s in this?
- Employer's National Insurance - 15% above £5,000 a year
- Holiday pay - 12.07%
- Pension, auto-enrolment minimum - 3%
- CITB levy - 0.35% of payroll
- Sick pay, training and employer's liability insurance - the remainder
- At 0% this is a CIS subcontractor's labour price - National Insurance, holiday and pension are then theirs to carry, not the job's.
The location range is authored, not measured - our tender data says what was bought where, not what labour costs there.
Price a whole job with this ratePut in the job size and your lump sums - scaffold, plant, skip, and get the job total.
The minimum starts at a day of the gang, priced - £383.36 - because travel, unloading and setting up make a day the honest floor. Type your own, or 0 for none.
Put a job size in and the total appears here.
This rate lays blocks on a base that already exists
Read the operation carefully, because it is the thing most block paving quotes get wrong: this is laying on a prepared base - screeded sand, blocks laid, cut, and compacted in. The dig, the muck away, the sub-base and the compaction underneath are not in it.
On a real driveway that groundwork is often more than half the job. Price it on the excavation and sub-base calculators and add it, or you have priced the last two days of a five-day job and quoted for the lot.
Cutting is where a paving day disappears
15 m² a day for two people assumes a reasonable amount of straight laying. Every cut is a block carried to the saw, marked, cut, and walked back, and the shapes that need them cluster exactly where you cannot avoid them:
- Curves and radii. A curved edge is a cut on every single block along it.
- Herringbone against a boundary. The pattern that looks best and locks best also cuts a triangle at every edge - 45° herringbone against a long wall is a lot of saw time.
- Manholes, gullies and thresholds. Each one is hand-fitted, and there is no faster way to do it.
- Small and awkward areas. A narrow path is almost all edge, so it prices far worse per square metre than an open driveway of the same area.
A drive with a curved edge and a herringbone pattern is a different job from a rectangular drive in stretcher bond. Drag the output to 10 or 12 and the rate tells you by how much.
Falls, edges and the things that come back to bite
Paving has to shed water away from the building and into something. Getting falls right is setting-out time before any block is laid, and getting it wrong is the callback that costs more than the job earned.
Edge restraints are the other one. Blocks without a proper haunched edge migrate - slowly, then obviously, and re-laying a spread edge two years later is not a warranty job anyone enjoys. Both are hours inside that 15 m² a day, which is part of why it is 15 and not 25.
Pricing a driveway end to end
Put the area in the job section, add the plant as a lump sum - a whacker plate, a disc cutter, usually a dumper, and the skips for the dig if you are carrying the groundwork. The minimum charge holds the floor on the small ones: a path or a bin store is well under a day of laying but a full day of a two-person crew.
Blocks, sand, sub-base and kiln-dried sand are materials and sit outside every figure here.
Questions people ask
How much block paving can two people lay in a day?
Around 15 m² a day for a two-person crew laying on a prepared base, including cutting and compacting in. Curved edges, herringbone against boundaries, manholes and narrow areas all pull it down; long straight runs in stretcher bond push it up.
Does a block paving rate include the sub-base?
Not this one. This rate covers laying on a base that is already prepared - screeding the sand, laying, cutting and compacting. Excavation, muck away, sub-base and compaction are separate work, often more than half the job on a driveway, and belong on the excavation and sub-base calculators.
Why does a small paved path cost more per square metre than a driveway?
Because a path is nearly all edge. The cutting, edge restraint and setting out do not scale down with the area, and a crew still spends a full day on site for a fraction of the square metres. The minimum charge on this calculator exists for exactly that.
How much does the laying pattern change the price?
Materially. A 45° herringbone against a straight boundary needs a cut triangle at every edge block, and any curved edge is a cut on every block along it. Compared with stretcher bond on a rectangle, expect output to fall by a third or more - set it on the output slider and the rate follows.
What causes block paving to sink or spread?
Almost always the base or the edges rather than the blocks. An under-compacted or too-thin sub-base settles under wheel loads, and paving without a properly haunched edge restraint migrates sideways over a couple of years. Both are groundwork failures, which is why the base is priced as its own job rather than folded into a laying rate.
Where these figures come from
The wages are the national minimums agreed between employers and unions, republished each July. The costs on top of them are the statutory ones every employer actually pays. The outputs - how much a gang gets through in a day - are blended from published estimating guidance, and they are the part worth arguing with, which is why every one is a control you can move.
Other trades
- Bricklaying£35.68/m²
- Blockwork£23.84/m²
- Plastering£8.50/m²
- Rendering£38.34/m²
- Floor screed£2.83/m²
- Concreting£7.92/m²
- Tiling£17.71/m²
- Roofing£32.80/m²
- Tarmac driveways£15.34/m²
- Resin driveways£16.61/m²
- Painting£14.17/m²
- Stud walls£17.71/m²
- Patios£31.95/m²
- Repointing£26.57/m²
- Plasterboarding£12.39/m²
- Decking£31.88/m²
- Fencing£25.56/m²
- Turfing£3.42/m²
- Coving£7.08/m²
- Loft insulation£4.27/m²
- External wall insulation£38.34/m²
- Soft strip£8.54/m²
- Hand excavation£85.41/m²
- Shuttering£8.50/m²
- Mesh and rebar£2.56/m²
Pricing a job like these?
HubTrack is where small construction firms keep their compliance documents, their jobs and their evidence trail in one place - method statements and risk assessments prepared for you to check and sign off, and a record of who signed what and when. The same engine that reads the contract documents behind this page reads yours inside HubTrack.