Tarmac Cost Per Tonne

The Short Answer

By Gary Hodson · Ex-Army. I do the sums so you buy the right amount. · Bag prices re-read on the suppliers' own pages, and coverage and cost-guide figures checked against the sources below, on 1 October 2026 · Last reviewed 1 October 2026

There are two completely different answers and mixing them up is how people overspend. Hot mix tarmac runs about £40 to £80 a tonne according to UK cost guides, and that is a supply-only rate: it does not include delivery, laying or compaction. Bagged cold lay macadam from a merchant works out at roughly £475 a tonne, because you are paying for 25kg at a time.

Bags are for potholes and patches. If you are surfacing anything the size of a drive, you want a load, not a pallet.

Bagged Cold Lay: What It Costs

Five published prices, each first read off the supplier's own product page on 18 August 2026, re-checked on 1 October 2026 (unchanged), and linked in the first column so you can check it. Jewson stocks the same class of product but puts the price behind a branch selection, so there is no figure to quote. The per tonne column is the bag price times forty. The three cheap rows are the same standard cold lay macadam. The Screwfix and Toolstation rows are premium permanent-repair products, which is a different job and a different chemistry, not a rip-off.

Hot Mix: What the Guides Say, and Why There Is No Price List

Here is something worth knowing before you trust a per tonne figure: the three big producers we checked do not publish one. Tarmac, Holcim UK and Heidelberg Materials all put asphalt behind a quote request on 18 August 2026. We did not check every plant in the country, so we are not going to claim none of them publishes a price. What we can say is that the figures below come from cost guides rather than a producer price list, and they should be read that way.

The three cited guides agree on the shape, and the older Squote page (uncited, headed 2024) points the same way: base material in the forties to eighties, a finished wearing course dearer. Comparing at the same depth is the fair test, and the coverage figures themselves disagree. MyBuilder quotes 8 square metres a tonne at 40mm.³ Our own tarmac calculator works on a compacted density of 2,400 kg per cubic metre, which gives about 10.4 square metres a tonne at the same depth. Take both and hot mix comes out at roughly £4 to £10 a square metre in material. A 25kg bag covers 0.4 square metres at 30mm,¹ so at 40mm it covers about 0.3, which is over three bags and roughly £40 a square metre. Bagged material lands somewhere around four to ten times the price of hot mix for the same layer.

One producer does publish a coverage figure. Heidelberg Materials, one of the three above, says on its asphalt calculator page that at an average thickness of 25mm one tonne of asphalt covers between 14 and 18 square metres.² Scaling that to 40mm is our own arithmetic and gives roughly 9 to 11 square metres a tonne, which brackets the calculator's 10.4; MyBuilder's 8 sits just below it. The same page gives a UK average of £50 to £80 a square metre for asphalt, depending on layer thickness, but no price per tonne.

What a Tarmac Drive Costs Fully Laid

Material is the small part. The trade directories put a finished drive at:

• Checkatrade, 2026 guide: about £50 a square metre materials only, about £90 a square metre fully installed, and about £4,500 for a 50 square metre drive.⁶
• MyBuilder, 2026 guide: £45 to £80 a square metre fully installed.⁷

Both are guide figures published by directories that sell leads to tradespeople, not quotes, and they do not always agree with themselves. Treat them as a sanity check on the three real quotes you should be getting, not as a price.

Do not forget what goes underneath either. A drive needs a compacted sub-base before any tarmac goes down, and that is a separate material and a separate cost. The sub-base calculator works out the MOT Type 1 you need.

Bags or a Load? The Honest Rule

• Under about 2 square metres: bags. Even one tonne of hot mix covers around 8 square metres at 40mm on the guides above,³ several times what a patch needs, and you cannot lay hot material quickly enough on your own anyway.
• A pothole or a patch: bags, and consider the premium permanent-repair products. They cost three or four times the standard cold lay and last accordingly.
• Anything drive-sized: a load, laid by someone with a roller. Hot material has to be spread and compacted before it cools, which is not a one-person afternoon.
• Check what is quoted: supply only, supply and lay, and supply and lay including excavation and sub-base are three very different numbers.

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