Epoxy flooring cost dataset

Coverage, derived rather than quoted

A US gallon is 231 cubic inches. Divided by a thousandth of an inch and by the 144 square inches in a square foot, that is 1,604.17 square feet at one mil. Coverage is then 1,604.17 × solids ÷ mils, divided by 1.12 for what the concrete absorbs and what stays in the roller.

Three products sold under one word, differing by more than three to one in film. ⚠️ The kit does not go further because it is efficient: it goes further because about half of what is in the tin evaporates. The life column is our estimate rather than a sourced figure, and it carries the heaviest assumption in this dataset — that the slab was mechanically prepared. Over an acid etch none of those numbers means anything.

Preparation, and cost per year

⚠️ The right-hand table is printed here only because this page states its condition in the same breath: it assumes mechanical preparation, and the calculator refuses to draw it at all when acid etch is selected. Dividing a price by a life means something only if the life is knowable, and over an etch it is not — the same resin lasts twelve years on a ground slab and peels in two on a sealed one. Grinding concrete is also respirable crystalline silica work under OSHA 1926.1153, Respirable crystalline silica (read 2026-08-25): the vacuum is a legal duty, not an upsell. At national wage rates, shot blasting overtakes grinding at about 925 square feet — a threshold that moves with the local wage, because what the machine buys is hours.

Why the same floor costs more per foot when it is small

Three of the four PAA questions Google shows on this search are size conversions, so the table answers them directly rather than leaving the reader to do the arithmetic. ⚠️ The last column is the finding: $7 a square foot on a 12 × 12 room against $5 on 2,000 square feet, for identical work. A resin floor is three visits — prepare, base, topcoat — and the van, the plant and the masking arrive for each of them whatever the size. Booking two rooms together is the biggest saving available on this job.

Line items

44% of the reference total comes from estimated rather than official figures. The reference job is a 400 sq ft garage in 100% solids epoxy on a ground slab with vinyl flake broadcast and a UV topcoat: 2.8 gallons of resin, 1.24 of topcoat and 24.4 trade hours. Systems, preparations and finishes that are not selected sit at zero quantity, so the table below is every path rather than one job.

The reasoning behind each figure

Getting there and back: van, plant, masking and containmentestimated, ±46%

• ⚠️ The line that makes a small resin floor expensive per square foot. A resin floor is not one visit: the slab is prepared on one day, the base coat goes down on another and the topcoat on a third, and the plant, the plastic and the crew arrive for each of them.
• It is why a 12 × 12 room costs several times per square foot what a 1,000 sq ft floor costs, and why doing the garage and the basement on the same booking is worth asking about.
• Priced as equipment rather than material or labour, because that is what it is: the van and the plant, not the resin and not the hours.

Masking, moving out, protecting and cleaning up

• Four fixed trade hours plus 0.002 per square foot: taping the walls and the door track, sheeting what cannot move, setting out on each visit and clearing up after each one.
• ⚠️ Cured resin does not come off a wall, a door seal or a car. Masking on this job is not tidiness, it is the difference between a good floor and an argument.

Degreaser, etching acid and neutraliserestimated, ±42%

• What comes in the box with a kit: a degreaser, an acid, and something to neutralise it before the resin goes on.
• ⚠️ Cheap, and the reason most resin floors fail. Acid opens the surface unevenly, does nothing to a sealer or a soaked-in oil stain, and barely touches a power-trowelled slab. The failure does not show for a year or two and then it shows all at once.

Washing, etching, rinsing and drying the slab

• Modelled at 0.012 trade hours per square foot, which is the wash, the acid, the rinse and the wait.
• The waiting is the part people underestimate: an etched slab has to be dry through, and a garage floor in a humid week is not.

Grinder, HEPA vacuum and diamond toolingestimated, ±43%

• A walk-behind grinder, the vacuum that has to run with it, and the diamond segments it wears out.
• ⚠️ The vacuum is not an accessory. Grinding concrete is respirable crystalline silica work under OSHA 1926.1153, and the dust control is a legal requirement on the contractor rather than a line to negotiate away.

Grinding the slab to profile, and the edges by hand

• Modelled at 0.024 trade hours per square foot. The open floor is quick; the perimeter, the corners and around anything fixed are done with a hand grinder and are most of the time.
• ⚠️ This is the line a cheap quote removes, and removing it does not make the floor cheaper — it makes it temporary. A resin floor comes off at the bond, not in the film.

Shot blaster, shot and mobilisationestimated, ±38%

• A ride-on or walk-behind blaster that throws steel shot and recovers it, plus the shot it consumes and the cost of getting the machine to the house.
• It profiles faster than a grinder and contains its own dust, so it wins on floors big enough to absorb the mobilisation. On a two-car garage it usually does not.

Getting the shot blaster to the houseestimated, ±49%

• A blaster is a machine on a trailer, and it costs the same to bring to a two-car garage as to a warehouse.
• ⚠️ This is the whole trade-off between blasting and grinding, and it is a threshold rather than a preference: on a small floor the mobilisation swamps the speed and grinding wins; on a large one the speed swamps the mobilisation and blasting wins. The calculator prints the square footage where the two cross, which is a number nobody publishes because it depends on the local wage.

Blasting the open floor and grinding the edges

• Modelled at 0.014 trade hours per square foot — faster than grinding over the open floor, and the same hand work at the edges, which a blaster cannot reach.

Chasing and filling cracks with a rigid repair resinestimated, ±51%

• Cracks are cut open with a crack chaser, vacuumed and filled with a rigid resin that the coating can run over.
• ⚠️ A crack that is still moving will come back through the coating, and no resin fixes that. A hairline map crack is cosmetic; a crack with a step in it, or one that has opened since last year, is a structural question and belongs on our foundation repair page rather than under a floor coating.

Cutting out and filling the cracks

• Modelled at 0.06 trade hours per linear foot: chase, vacuum, fill, and grind flush once it has gone off.

Slab moisture test before anything is appliedestimated, ±52%

• ⚠️ The cheapest line on this page and the one that decides whether the rest of it is money well spent. A slab poured on grade without a vapour retarder under it pushes moisture upward for ever, and it will lift any coating off in sheets — not at the edges, in the middle.
• Probes are set into the slab and read after a wait, or a sealed dish is weighed. Either way it takes a return visit, which is why the number looks large next to the cost of a bucket of resin.
• Older houses and any slab you have seen a damp patch on are the cases. If it fails, the answer is a moisture-tolerant primer system or not coating at all, and both are better than finding out afterwards.

Water-based epoxy kit, the one on the shelf — resin, by the gallonestimated, ±38%

• ⚠️ Coverage is arithmetic, not marketing: a gallon spread one mil thick covers 1,604.17 square feet, because a gallon is 231 cubic inches. At 48% solids and 3 mils of film that is 229 square feet per gallon — and it is why a price per square foot with no film thickness attached does not describe a product.
• ⚠️ Sold in the same aisle and under the same word, and it is a different product: about half of what is in the tin evaporates, leaving roughly three mils of film. It goes on with a roller in an afternoon and it is what most "$2 a square foot" garage floors are. On a well-prepared slab in a garage nobody parks a wet car in, it is a reasonable buy. It is not what anybody means by a resin floor.
• The band is the delivered price of the resin and its hardener. What it does not include is the crew, the preparation or the topcoat, all of which are priced separately below.

Water-based epoxy kit, the one on the shelf — mixing and application

• Modelled at 9 trade hours per thousand square feet: masking, mixing in batches, cutting in, spreading and back-rolling.
• The fastest of the three because it is one thin coat off a roller, and the shortest-lived for the same reason.
• Wages are official BLS data for painters, construction and maintenance, adjusted to your metropolitan area. The hours are our estimate.

100% solids epoxy, two-part — resin, by the gallonestimated, ±35%

• ⚠️ Coverage is arithmetic, not marketing: a gallon spread one mil thick covers 1,604.17 square feet, because a gallon is 231 cubic inches. At 100% solids and 10 mils of film that is 143 square feet per gallon — and it is why a price per square foot with no film thickness attached does not describe a product.
• Nothing evaporates, so every mil you buy stays on the floor — about ten of them, three times the film of the kit. It is squeegeed and back-rolled, has a working time measured in tens of minutes once mixed, and it is the baseline of a professional resin floor. ⚠️ It ambers in sunlight, which is why a topcoat is usual anywhere daylight reaches.
• The band is the delivered price of the resin and its hardener. What it does not include is the crew, the preparation or the topcoat, all of which are priced separately below.

100% solids epoxy, two-part — mixing and application

• Modelled at 16 trade hours per thousand square feet: masking, mixing in batches, cutting in, spreading and back-rolling.
• Squeegee and back-roll, in batches sized to the working time. The film is thick enough that the trowel marks in the slab stop mattering, which is half of why it looks the way it does.
• Wages are official BLS data for painters, construction and maintenance, adjusted to your metropolitan area. The hours are our estimate.

Polyaspartic, base and topcoat — resin, by the gallonestimated, ±31%

• ⚠️ Coverage is arithmetic, not marketing: a gallon spread one mil thick covers 1,604.17 square feet, because a gallon is 231 cubic inches. At 90% solids and 8 mils of film that is 161 square feet per gallon — and it is why a price per square foot with no film thickness attached does not describe a product.
• Cures in hours rather than days, so the whole floor can be done between a Saturday morning and Sunday night, and it does not yellow. It costs about twice the epoxy per gallon. ⚠️ It is a polyurea chemistry with isocyanates and a pot life short enough that a two-person crew works in strips — it is the one system on this page that is genuinely not a DIY job.
• The band is the delivered price of the resin and its hardener. What it does not include is the crew, the preparation or the topcoat, all of which are priced separately below.

Polyaspartic, base and topcoat — mixing and application

• Modelled at 19 trade hours per thousand square feet: masking, mixing in batches, cutting in, spreading and back-rolling.
• ⚠️ The slowest per square foot, and not because it is difficult: the pot life is short enough that the floor is worked in strips by two people, and a batch that sets in the bucket is a batch thrown away. And a caveat on the total: polyaspartic is often sold at a premium over what its materials and hours come to, because what the customer is buying is a garage back in twenty-four hours. That premium is real in the market and it is not modelled here, so a quote above this figure is not necessarily a bad one.
• Wages are official BLS data for painters, construction and maintenance, adjusted to your metropolitan area. The hours are our estimate.

Vinyl flake, broadcast to refusalestimated, ±44%

• Thrown into the wet base until the floor will not take any more, then swept and scraped back before the topcoat.
• Broadcasting to refusal uses far more flake than ends up on the floor. The excess is recovered, and the difference between a floor that looks even and one that looks patchy is whether the installer was willing to throw enough.

Broadcasting, scraping and vacuuming the flake

• Modelled at 0.004 trade hours per square foot for the broadcast, and the scrape and vacuum the next day before the topcoat goes on.

Coloured quartz, broadcast to refusalestimated, ±38%

• Graded quartz sand rather than vinyl chip: several times the material by weight and by price, and it builds a genuinely thicker floor rather than a decorated one.
• It is what goes in a commercial kitchen or a wash bay, where the texture is the point. In a domestic garage it is usually more floor than the use justifies.

Broadcasting and grinding back the quartz

• Modelled at 0.011 trade hours per square foot. Quartz has to be knocked back flat before it is grouted and sealed, which is the step flake does not need.

UV-stable polyaspartic topcoat, by the gallonestimated, ±31%

• At 4 mils and 90% solids a gallon covers 322 square feet, from the same arithmetic as the base coat — thinner film, more coverage, dearer resin.
• ⚠️ Not decoration. Epoxy ambers wherever daylight reaches it, and the topcoat is what takes the abrasion so the colour coat does not. On a floor with flake or quartz in it, it is also the layer that locks the broadcast down and makes the surface cleanable.

Applying the topcoat

• Modelled at 0.005 trade hours per square foot: a fast, thin, unforgiving coat that has to be kept wet edge to edge.
• ⚠️ Polyaspartic is a polyurea chemistry and contains isocyanates, which OSHA associates with occupational asthma and respiratory irritation. It is applied with the door open and the right respirator, and it is the part of this job that is not a weekend project.

Not included in this dataset

Emptying the garage, and not using it for a week

⚠️ Everything comes out, and on a full epoxy system the floor is unusable for foot traffic for a day or two and for a car for about a week, because the resin keeps hardening long after it feels dry. Driving on a floor that has not fully cured leaves tyre marks that do not come out. Polyaspartic is the system that shortens this, and shortening it is most of what the extra money buys.

A slab that is moving

A resin floor is a coating, not a repair. A crack with a step in it, one that has opened in the last year, or a slab that has settled is a structural question, and it belongs on our foundation repair page. Coating over it hides the evidence and changes nothing.

Making a wet slab dry

⚠️ If the moisture test fails, the honest answers are a moisture-tolerant primer system — which is a different and dearer specification not priced here — or not coating the floor at all. There is no version of this job that seals moisture in from above and lasts.

Stripping a coating that is already there

Taking off a failed or peeling coating is grinding work in its own right and it can cost as much as the new floor. It is not in these figures because how much comes off with a scraper and how much has to be ground is not knowable until somebody starts.

⚠️ Two health notes that belong beside the price rather than under it. Polyaspartic is a polyurea chemistry containing isocyanates, which OSHA, Isocyanates (read 2026-08-25) associates with occupational asthma and respiratory irritation. And an attached garage shares air with the house, so what is applied in there is an indoor question — EPA, Volatile Organic Compounds’ Impact on Indoor Air Quality (read 2026-08-25). The 100% solids systems are the low-solvent ones for the same reason they cover less ground: nothing in them evaporates.