A typical suburban Dayton driveway is a few hundred dollars of work, not a few thousand. That is as close to a number as anyone can honestly get you before they have seen the asphalt, and this page explains why, what moves the figure up and down, and how to measure your own driveway so you can check any quote you are given, including ours.
Sealcoating is sold by area, and the material goes on at a rate that depends on what the asphalt is like. Two driveways of identical size do not take the same amount of sealer. Asphalt that has gone gray and porous drinks it. Asphalt that is still tight and reasonably black takes far less. A contractor who quotes you off a phone call is guessing at both numbers, and a guess only ever moves one direction once the truck is in your driveway.
The version of this that costs homeowners money is the quote that arrives low and then grows. You agreed to a figure, the crew turns up, and there is a conversation about extra material, or edging, or the cracks nobody counted. The alternative is to measure first and quote once. That is slower and it is the reason we ask for an address before a price.
It also means the number you get from us is the number you pay. If the measurement is wrong, that is our problem, not a change order.
Area is the biggest single input by a distance. Everything else on this list adjusts around it. This is also the one number you can work out yourself in a few minutes, and it is worth doing before you talk to anybody.
Old, oxidised, porous asphalt absorbs noticeably more material than a surface that has been maintained. A driveway that has not been touched in twelve years is not the same job as one sealed three years ago, even at the same size. This is the input that makes a sight-unseen quote unreliable.
Cracks are filled before anything else goes down, and they are measured and quoted by the linear foot, separately from the sealing. Sealer is not a filler. It is roughly the thickness of a coat of paint and it will sink into an open crack and reappear as a line within weeks. A driveway with thirty feet of cracking and one with three hundred are different jobs.
A clean rectangle with grass either side is quick. A drive that runs tight to a garage slab, a retaining wall, a flower bed and a brick apron has a lot of cut-in work that cannot be rushed, and that is time rather than material. Narrow access, steep slope and gates all pull the same direction.
Oil and transmission fluid have to be treated before sealer will bond over them, or the sealer lifts off in exactly that shape by the following spring. Heavy moss, built-up dirt at the edges and a driveway that has never been cleaned all add prep. Most driveways need very little of this. Some need a lot.
You need a tape measure, or a phone with a measuring app, or just a normal walking stride if you are happy with a rough figure. Most adult strides land close to two and a half feet, so pace it and multiply.
Length times width equals square feet. That is the whole calculation. If your driveway is not a rectangle, break it into rectangles, work each one out, and add them together. The apron at the road and the parking pad by the garage are part of the job, so measure them too.
For reference while you are out there:
Then pace off your cracks. You are counting total linear feet of crack wide enough to slide a nickel into, not hairlines. Add up the lengths. That second number is the one most homeowners have never thought about and it is the one that surprises people on the invoice when a contractor has not mentioned it up front.
Now you have the two figures that drive every honest quote you will be given, and you can tell within about ten seconds whether the person quoting you has actually looked at your driveway.
Sealer is mixed with water to the manufacturer's specification before it goes down. That ratio is not a suggestion, it is what the product was formulated around. Adding more water past that point makes the drum go further, makes the driveway look black on the day, and takes the life of the coat down with it. You cannot see the difference in the first week. You can see it clearly by the second spring.
The same money can be saved by spraying a thin coat instead of squeegeeing it on, or by skipping the crack work, or by sealing straight over dirt and oil. All four produce a driveway that looks correct on the afternoon it is done. None of them survive an Ohio winter, and the second visit costs more than doing it once.
So if a two-car driveway is quoted at well under a hundred dollars, the money has to come out of the material or the labour somewhere, because those are the only two places it can come from. That does not make every cheap quote dishonest. It does mean it is worth asking what the dilution ratio is and whether the crack filling is included, and listening to how quickly the answer comes.
Crack filling is hot-applied before the seal goes on and is quoted by the linear foot. Patching and pothole repair is a different trade of work again, and if a driveway needs it, sealing over the top is a waste of your money until it is done. Concrete we do not do at all, it takes a different product and a different process.
If your driveway has areas that have broken into a pattern of interconnected cracks, that is the base underneath failing rather than the surface wearing out, and no amount of sealer fixes it. We will tell you that rather than take the job. Working out whether your driveway needs sealing at all goes through how to spot it.
Send the address through the form. We measure the asphalt, look at what condition it is in and count the cracking, and you get one exact figure back with the sealing and the crack work shown separately so you can see what you are paying for. There is no charge for that and no visit you have to be home for.
If the answer is that your driveway does not need doing this year, that is what you will be told. There is no version of this business that works by selling somebody a coat of sealer they did not need, because the next three neighbours hear about it.
Timing matters too, and the window in Ohio is shorter than most people expect. When to sealcoat a driveway in Ohio covers the temperature rule and how late in the year you can still get it done.
