Cost

Concrete Patio Cost, Ranked by Upkeep

Every guide sorts patio finishes by price. Sorting them by what they will ask of you in ten years produces a different order, and a more useful one.

Updated August 2026 · Libertyville Concrete

The published prices below are worth knowing, but they describe one day: the day the work is done. What separates these finishes over the following fifteen years is not really cost. It is how much of your attention each one expects.

So here they are twice. First as the money, then in the order that actually matters.

The published prices, by finish

HomeGuide prices patio finishes per square foot installed:

• Plain or smooth trowel: $4 to $12 a square foot
• Broom: $6 to $13
• Aggregate exposed: $7 to $18
• Coated in epoxy: $7 to $22
• Stain applied: $8 to $25
• Pattern stamped: $9 to $30

For a total, they put a patio between a 10 by 20 and a 20 by 20 at roughly $1,000 to $6,000 in plain concrete. National figures, and useful mainly as a sanity check on the quotes in front of you.

Now the same list, ordered by what it asks of you

Asks nothing: broom finish

The texture is in the concrete itself. Nothing is applied, so nothing wears off. A broom-finished patio left entirely alone for a decade looks like a ten-year-old patio rather than a failing one, which is a distinction worth understanding.

It is also grippy underfoot when wet, which matters more than people expect on a surface that spends half the year damp. This is what most of our patios are, and it sits second-cheapest on the price list. The two facts are not a coincidence: it is the default because it works.

Asks nothing, costs a little more: exposed aggregate

Rinsing the top layer away uncovers the stone that was in the mix all along. What you buy is a technique rather than a material applied over the slab, so once more there is no pigment to fade and no coating to wear away.

If you want the patio to look considered without signing up for a maintenance cycle, this is the pick, and it is the one we would nudge people toward when broom finish feels too plain.

Asks something occasionally: plain trowelled

Cheapest on the list, and slightly higher maintenance than a broom finish despite being simpler, because a smooth surface shows marks and gets slippery when wet. Plenty of people seal it for that reason, and once you seal anything you have joined a cycle.

Asks something regularly: stained

Colour that penetrates rather than sits on top, which is genuinely more durable than paint, but it is protected by a sealer and the sealer is consumable. Expect to be thinking about it every few years.

Asks the most: stamped, and epoxy coatings

Both look superb and both depend entirely on a film that wears. Stamped concrete holds its pattern indefinitely - that is pressed into the slab - but the colour and the sheen that make it convincing live in the sealer. Let that go and you are left with a patterned grey patio.

Epoxy and similar coatings on an outdoor patio have a harder life again, because ultraviolet light and freeze-thaw both work on the film.

None of this is an argument against them. A stamped patio is the right buy when the patio is the thing you look at from the kitchen window and you want it to be beautiful. It is the wrong buy if nobody in the household intends to reseal anything, and that is worth being honest about with yourself before the concrete is ordered rather than after.

The part of the quote no finish can rescue

Whichever row you pick, the finish is the top few millimetres. Everything underneath it decides whether the patio is flat in fifteen years, and around Lake County that means the freeze cycle working on whatever was left below the slab.

Digging to depth, granular fill consolidated in stages rather than dumped and raked level, air purposely entrained so that freezing water has somewhere to expand, and a joint layout agreed on paper ahead of delivery day. Stamped concrete over unprepared ground is a costly route to a cracked patio.

If the budget will not stretch to both, buy the base and take the plain finish. Sound concrete accepts a decorative treatment years later; nothing accepts a new sub-base.

Footings are a separate subject

Frost depth rules exist for footings and foundations holding a structure up. Your patio holds up garden furniture. It sits on grade, moves imperceptibly with the ground, and is designed to. Deep piers in a plain patio quote are worth a direct question about what load they carry.

Whichever one you choose

Regardless of finish, concrete in its opening year needs handling differently, and the winter products people instinctively reach for are the wrong ones. Our driveway cost page sets that out in full and it reads across to patios unchanged.

With the cost drivers understood, our concrete patio page takes the build itself in order, from pegging out the shape to the surface you finish with.