Polished Concrete Cost Calculator

Because there is almost no material cost to price — a polished floor is the concrete you already have, refined. The cost is labour: the hours your crew and machines spend grinding and polishing. And those hours are not one number per floor; each grit pass moves across the whole floor at its own speed. A 40-grit metal cut on a rough slab is slow; an 800-grit resin polish is fast. Adding the passes up (area ÷ rate for each) is the only honest way to get the hours, which is why this calculator is built around the pass sequence rather than a single "coverage rate".

The rates loaded when you pick a finish are a starting guide, not fixed numbers — polished-concrete production varies enormously with the machine (a large planetary covers far more per hour than a single-head), the slab hardness, the number of heads, and the operator. As a rough guide, initial metal-bond cuts run slower (the machine is doing the most work), and resin polishing grits climb faster as the surface refines. The honest way to get your real rates is to time your crew across a representative area on one job and divide area by hours for each pass. Edit every rate here to match what your machines actually do.

On the coarser grinding passes many contractors run the machine in one direction, then again at 90° to it, to make sure the whole surface is cut evenly and to remove the scratch pattern from the previous grit. That second direction roughly doubles the time for that pass. Switch a pass to "2 (cross-hatch)" here and the calculator doubles its hours. Finer resin polishing passes are usually run in a single direction, so leave those at one pass unless your process differs.

No — it makes it faster, not cheaper. Two grinders finish the floor in roughly half the days, but they burn the same total operator-hours (in fact slightly more, because you're paying two operators). That's why this calculator uses machines only to work out the schedule in days, while the labour cost stays tied to the total operator-hours. More machines help you hit a deadline or reduce mobilisation days, not shrink the labour bill.

The calculator gives you a direct cost: labour hours × your rate, plus any materials and consumables you enter as a lump sum (densifier, guard/sealer, diamond and resin pad wear). It deliberately leaves out mobilisation, overhead (insurance, vehicle, software, admin), and profit margin, because those vary too much between businesses to bake into a shared tool. The correct workflow is: use this to get a clean direct cost, add a fair share of your overhead, then apply your target margin — the Profit Margin Calculator handles that last step. The Pro polished concrete estimator does the whole roll-up (overhead, profit and tax) automatically and saves it as a client quote.

Grind & Seal is the fastest and cheapest — a few metal grinding passes, densifier, and a sealer, for a matte-to-low-sheen ground look. Honed/Satin adds resin polishing to around 400 grit for a smooth, low-reflection finish. Polished (around 800 grit) carries the resin ladder further for a semi-gloss, more reflective floor. High-Gloss runs the full resin ladder to 1500–3000 grit and often a burnish pass for a mirror finish. Each step up adds passes, so it adds hours and cost on the same floor — which is exactly what the pass sequence here shows you.

It's built for contractors pricing their own work, so the output is a direct cost, not a retail price. If you're a homeowner researching what a polished floor should cost, treat the direct cost here as roughly the labour-and-materials floor a contractor starts from — the quoted price you receive will add their overhead and margin on top, which is normal and correct. Published all-in polished-concrete prices vary widely by finish level, slab condition, and region, so use this to understand where the number comes from rather than as a quote.

As accurate as your production rates. The formula is exact (area × directions ÷ rate for each pass), so the hours are only as good as the rate you put in for each grit. A 20% error in a rate moves that pass's hours by 20%. The single best thing you can do is replace the seeded guide rates with numbers timed from your own crew on a real floor. The "override" field also lets you drop in a total hours figure from experience and cost from that instead of the passes.