Driveway Sealing Cost Calculator
Sealing an 800 square foot asphalt driveway runs about $535 in Atlanta — $387 to $684, or $0.67 per square foot — for 5 pails over two coats, with the edges cut in and 40 feet of cracks filled. The number that actually decides anything is the one per year: $535 resealing annually against $178 every three years, for the same work.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost of sealing the driveway
$561
typical · range $411 to $711 · 800 sq ft · 5 pails (25 gallons) · 2 coats · 3.7 trade hours · $0.70 per sq ft
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 62% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from bls.gov Aug 2026how every line is sourced
The one input that changes the answer for you.
The usual state of a drive a few years old. Blowing, edge trimming where grass has crept in, scrubbing the worst of the dirt, and letting it dry before anything goes on. ⚠️ Sealer applied over a damp or dirty surface peels within a season, which is the commonest way a cheap job fails.
Comes in a bottle, goes on cold, and is what most sealing quotes mean when they say cracks are included. Reasonable on narrow cracks, and it shrinks as it cures, so wide ones need a second pass.
Pulled across the surface with a rubber blade. Puts down the thickest, most durable film and works the sealer into the surface texture, which is what makes it stick. Slower, and it is what most people mean by a proper job.
Two to four years suits most drives. Every year is what the trade tends to recommend and it is rarely what the asphalt needs — the film builds up and starts flaking. Every five is fine in a mild climate on a drive that gets shade. The honest test is to look at it: grey and rough means it is due; still dark means it is not.
What the other two choices are worth
| Good | $538 |
|---|---|
| Normal | $561 |
| Poor | $625 |
| Squeegee applied | $561 |
|---|---|
| Sprayed | $530 |
| Sprayed and back-brushed | $577 |
⚠️ Notice how little separates the three application methods — $46 between the fastest and the most thorough on this drive. That is worth knowing before choosing on price: the difference in what you get is far larger than the difference in what you pay, and a sprayed coat that has not been worked into the surface is the one that wears through first.
1 / 5
The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
The one number you can check afterwards
This drive takes about 5 five-gallon pails — 800 square feet at 2 coats, and a pail covers 250 to 400 square feet per coat depending on how thirsty the asphalt is. This model works at 320. ⚠️ Everything else on a sealing quote is hours, and hours are an opinion until the job is done. The pails are not: count the empties before the van leaves. If they come to fewer than 5, the drive did not get the 2 coats it was priced for — and a coat spread thinner than it should be is exactly what wears through by the following summer.
How often, and what that costs a year
| Sealed every | Cost each time | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | $561 | $561 |
| 2 years | $561 | $281 |
| 3 years | $561 | $187 |
| 4 years | $561 | $140 |
| 5 years | $561 | $112 |
Sealing every year instead of every three costs $374 a year more and does not buy three times the protection. ⚠️ It can buy less: a new coat over one that has not weathered yet builds up thickness, and accumulated sealer cracks on its own, in flakes, which then have to be scraped off before the next coat will stick. What sets the right interval is how much sun and how much de-icing salt the drive sees, not the label on the pail. A drive that still looks black does not need sealing, whatever anybody knocking on the door says.
Sealer does not fill anything
| What is included | Trade hours | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| No crack filling | 3.1 | $475 |
| Cold-pour crack filler | 3.7 | $561 |
| Hot-pour rubberised crack filler | 4.2 | $641 |
Crack filling is 26% of the dearest version of this job and it is the only part of it that changes how long the driveway lasts. Sealer is a surface coating: it bridges a hairline crack for one season and it fills nothing. ⚠️ An open crack keeps taking water down to the base, and water in the base through a freeze is what breaks a driveway up from underneath. So when two quotes for the same drive differ by half, this is usually the difference — ask explicitly how many linear feet of crack are included and with what.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Call-out and setting up1 per visit | 1each | $70–$160 | estimated±39% |
| Sealerceil(area × coats ÷ coverage per pail) | 55-gallon pail | $90–$210 | estimated±40% |
| Cleaning and drying the surfacearea × hours per sq ft for its condition | 1.2hour | $53–$57 | sourced |
| Cutting back grass at the edgesperimeter × 0.85, when the edges are cut back | 120linear ft | $32–$34 | sourced |
| Oil spot primeroil spots primed | 2each | $12–$36 | estimated±50% |
| Cold-pour crack filler — materiallinear feet of crack, when this filler is chosen | 40linear ft | $34–$84 | estimated±42% |
| Routing, blowing out and filling crackscrack feet × hours per foot for the filler chosen | 0.6hour | $26–$28 | sourced |
| Applying the sealerarea × 0.0012 hours × coats × method factor | 1.9hour | $95–$102 | sourced |
| Total | $411–$711 | ±27% |
Where these numbers come from
- Priced by the pail, because a pail is something you can count
- Everybody else quotes this job per square foot, and a homeowner cannot verify a square foot. A 5-gallon pail covers 250 to 400 square feet per coat, this model works with 320, and at $18 to $42 a pail delivered your 800 square foot drive needs 5 of them for two coats. That is checkable at the end of the day — count the empties against what the invoice says was applied. ⚠️ A crew that turns up with a tank rather than pails is not doing anything wrong, but you have lost the ability to check, so agree the gallons in writing beforehand. The arithmetic is also cross-checked against our own asphalt driveway cost calculator, which prices sealcoating per square foot as part of a bigger job: 2 coats here works out at $0.188 of material per square foot against $0.220 there, a ratio of 1.17. Two units for the same thing, and they agree.
- The cracks are the job, and the sealer is the finish
- Sealer is a coating. It does not fill, it does not bridge and it does not bond the two sides of a crack together — poured over one, it sinks in and leaves a dark line that opens again within the year. Filling comes first, and it is 26% of the price of the complete job on this drive: $452 with no crack work, $535 with cold-pour filler and $613 with hot-pour rubberised. Hot-pour is what highway crews use and it stays flexible through a winter; cold-pour comes out of a bottle and is honest work on a narrow crack. ⚠️ What matters more than which one is whether either is in the quote. This is where two prices for the same driveway separate, and the cheaper one is usually cheaper because the cracks are simply not in it. The state of the surface moves the rest: $515 on a drive in good condition against $592 on a porous one, because a bleached, open surface needs longer to clean and drinks more.
- How often, and why more often is not better
- The same work costs $535, $268, $178, $134 or $107 a year depending only on whether you do it every year or every five. ⚠️ And annual sealing is not the safe end of that range, it is the wasteful one: coats accumulate, and accumulated sealer cracks and flakes on its own, peeling in sheets that look exactly like the surface failure it was bought to prevent. Two to four years suits most drives, and what moves it is sun and de-icing salt rather than the calendar. Application method barely moves the price and does move the result: $535 squeegeed, $509 sprayed and $549 brushed at the edges and sprayed in the middle. Squeegeeing works the sealer into the surface rather than laying it on top, which is why it takes longer for the same money.
- What the official sources say, and what they do not
- Wages come from BLS OEWS, May 2025, for paving equipment operators and construction labourers, retrieved 2026-08-20, benefit-loaded from BLS ECEC. On the material, OSHA, Asphalt Fumes (retrieved 2026-08-24) covers what asphalt products give off and why a crew keeps upwind of a hot-pour kettle — worth reading before deciding to do this yourself on a hot day. ⚠️ Two things worth knowing that no sealer datasheet mentions: a sealed drive is a darker drive, and EPA, Using Cool Pavements to Reduce Heat Islands (retrieved 2026-08-24) sets out what dark paving does to the temperature around it; and if the reason you are looking at this is water pooling or running off towards the house, EPA, Soak Up the Rain: Permeable Pavement (retrieved 2026-08-24) describes surfaces built to let it through, which sealing a drive does the opposite of. Where the water ends up is priced on our french drain installation cost calculator.
- Material prices
- Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.
Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-24.
What this figure does not include
- Repairing a drive that is breaking up
- ⚠️ Sealer is cosmetic and protective, not structural. Alligator cracking — the crazed pattern that looks like scales — means the base underneath has failed, and sealing over it hides the problem for one season at full price. That is a patch or a resurfacing job, priced on our asphalt driveway page.
- Sealing a brand new driveway
- New asphalt needs months to release its volatiles before it is sealed, and sealing it early traps them and softens the surface. Anybody offering to seal a drive laid this season is selling you a problem.
- Concrete driveways
- A concrete drive can be sealed too, with a completely different product and a different reason — concrete sealer is about water and de-icing salt rather than about ultraviolet. None of the rates here apply to it.
- Potholes and sunken areas
- A hole is a base problem. Filling it with sealer is not a repair and filling it with cold patch is a different line item that this page does not price.
- Line marking and stencils
- Parking bays, numbers and edge lines are their own job, usually the same day, and priced separately.
- Somewhere to leave the car
- A sealed drive is out of use for a day, sometimes two in cool or humid weather, and driving on it early prints the tyre tracks in permanently. It is a real cost of this job and one nobody quotes.
Questions people actually ask
How much does 5 gallons of driveway sealer cover?
Between 250 and 400 square feet, for one coat, and this model works with 320. ⚠️ Two things make the number on the pail optimistic in practice. It is quoted for one coat on smooth asphalt, and most drives get two — so halve it before you plan. And a porous, sun-bleached surface drinks the first coat, which is why an old drive lands at the bottom of that band rather than the middle. On the 800 square foot drive this page defaults to, two coats is 5 pails and 25 gallons, and that is a figure you can check at the end of the day by counting empty pails against what you were charged for.
How much should I pay to have my driveway sealed?
On this model, $535 for 800 square feet in Atlanta — $387 to $684, or $0.67 per square foot — with two coats, the edges cut in by hand, two oil spots primed and 40 feet of crack filling. Strip the crack filling out and the same drive is $452. ⚠️ That is the single biggest reason two quotes for the same driveway differ, and it is not margin: sealer is a surface coating and does not fill anything, so a price that looks low is often a price with no crack work in it. Ask which of these lines a quote includes rather than comparing the totals.
Is it worth it to seal a driveway?
It depends almost entirely on how often, which is why this page reports a cost per year. The same $535 job is $535 a year done annually, $178 at three years and $107 at five. ⚠️ And sealing more often does not protect more — coats build up, and accumulated sealer cracks and flakes off on its own, which looks exactly like the wear it was bought to prevent. What decides the interval is sun and de-icing salt, not a schedule. The other half of the answer is what it cannot do: it will not fix a drive that is breaking up, and sealing over crazed, scaly cracking buys one good-looking season at full price.
How much does a 20x20 asphalt driveway cost?
That is a different job from this page — laying one rather than sealing one — and on our asphalt driveway model a 20 by 20 drive is $3,854 in Atlanta, taken out and rebuilt full depth. Sealing that same 400 square feet is $348 here, 3 pails of it. The reason to put the two side by side is that they answer the same underlying worry from opposite ends: sealing is the cheap thing you do to a sound drive to postpone the expensive thing, and it does nothing at all for a drive that has already failed. If the surface is crazed into scales, the sealing figure is the wrong figure and the rebuilding one is the right one.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 2026-08-24, not invented.
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The formula, the sources, and an honest account of which parts of the model are weak.