Decide

Repair or Replace: What Each One Actually Buys You

There are no prices on this page. There is something more useful: what each of the four options gets you in years, on the driveway you actually have, and how to work out which number applies to yours.

Updated September 2026 · Libertyville Concrete

The usual way to frame this is as a cost comparison, which quietly assumes the options are interchangeable and differ only in price. They are not. Each one buys a different amount of time, and how much it buys depends far more on your driveway than on your budget.

So the useful question is not "what is the cheapest thing I can do". It is how many years does each option buy me, here, and what is a year worth to me right now. A household selling in eighteen months and a household staying for twenty get different correct answers from identical concrete.

Everything turns on one diagnosis, so do it first

Before any option can be priced in years, you need to know which of two problems you have, and it takes about five minutes.

The concrete is worn. Rough, pale, pitted. Flaking where salt has sat. The surface has suffered and the slab has not moved. Put a straight edge across any crack and both sides are at the same height.

The ground has moved. A panel sits low. A joint has stepped enough to catch a shoe. A crack is open at one end and tight at the other. Something shifts under a car. Water collects where it never used to.

Everything below reads differently depending on which of those you have, because the first is a problem with the surface and the second is a problem underneath it, and no amount of work on the top addresses the bottom.

What a patch buys

On a sound slab: a great many years, for very little. A single cracked panel cut out and replaced, or a spalled area made good, on a driveway whose base is doing its job, is simply good housekeeping. There is nothing working against the repair, so it lasts.

On moving ground: one or two winters, and then the same conversation. The repair is fine, the ground is not, and the fault reappears next to your new work.

The other cost, which is not money. A patch is visible and stays visible. Fresh concrete cures lighter and takes a couple of years to settle toward its neighbours. Most people accept that willingly. Some genuinely do not, and it is better to find that out now.

What an overlay buys

On a sound slab with a tired surface: most of the appearance of a new driveway, and a solid stretch of years, for a fraction of a rebuild. This is the option that gets dismissed too quickly, often by people who would rather pour a new one.

On a slab cracked through its depth, or on ground that is moving: close to nothing. A bonded layer follows what is beneath it. The faults come through, usually inside two seasons, and you have then paid for the overlay and the replacement.

The question to ask a contractor is direct: is my slab a bonding candidate, and what are you basing that on. An answer that describes the condition of the existing concrete is a real answer. An answer about the product is not.

What a rebuild buys

Decades, and it is the only option that reaches the ground. That is the whole justification for the cost. The old slab leaves, whatever failed underneath is corrected while it can be seen, and the new concrete goes onto ground that has been put right.

It is also the only moment in the driveway's life when the base is visible. Everything below the surface is decided in a window of a day or two, and then buried for twenty years.

Which is why the years a rebuild buys vary so widely between quotes. Two driveways poured from the same truck, one onto corrected and consolidated ground and one onto whatever was there, are not the same purchase, and the difference does not show up for years.

The option that often buys the most, and is not ours

If your slab is unbroken and has simply dropped, the years available to you are cheapest by a wide margin from lifting it back to grade and filling the void underneath. Hours rather than weeks, a fraction of the cost, and you keep a driveway that had plenty of life left.

We pour concrete. Lifting is a different trade with different equipment and we do not do it, which is exactly why this recommendation costs you nothing to trust. If that describes your driveway, you do not need us yet.

The limit is straightforward. Lifting works while the concrete is still one piece. Once it has broken up, raising it gets you broken concrete at the right height.

Doing the arithmetic on your own driveway

Put the two halves together and the decision usually makes itself.

• Surface worn, base sound, staying a long time. Overlay or patch, and expect it to hold.
• Surface worn, base sound, moving soon. Patch. Buy the cheap years.
• Ground moving, slab intact. Lifting, and it is not us.
• Ground moving, slab broken up. Rebuild, and spend the argument on what goes underneath rather than on the finish.
• More than about a third of the panels involved. Rebuild, whatever the diagnosis, because you are paying for setup, haulage and a crew day repeatedly.

Age belongs in the arithmetic as context rather than as a rule. A driveway showing several of these at twelve years old has failed early, and early failure is almost always a message from below.

If the answer is a rebuild, two local things follow

Out at the road, the Village writes the specification rather than you, and that section is deliberately left without the reinforcement the rest of your driveway might carry. And the permit that covers work in the right-of-way has a trigger people routinely miss.

Both are set out in the Village apron rules. What the work costs, and why drainage decides more of it than anything else here, is in replacing a driveway: the drainage question. When reading has taken you as far as it can and you want somebody to measure, our concrete driveway page sets out what we lay.