Getting a number
How much does a garage floor coating cost?
A garage floor coating is priced by the square foot of floor, and what moves a quote is the condition of the slab and how much has to come off it first.
The short version
- Clear View Surface Solutions publishes $1,800 to $9,000 or more for a two-car garage, depending on the system tier and the condition of the slab.
- The floor is measured, not the garage. A stall count is a guess at a square footage.
- Prep is the line that moves most. A clean slab and a slab with an old coating on it are two different jobs.
- Crack and spall repair is quoted on what is there, because it is measured in feet of crack and square inches of patch.
- A written quote after somebody has stood on the floor is the only number worth comparing.
What the price is measured in
Square footage sets the base of it. Length times width of the actual slab, including under where the cars sit and out to the door, plus any apron or step that gets coated with it. A three-stall garage is not automatically half again a two-stall, because stalls vary in depth by several feet and the depth is where the footage hides.
Clear View Surface Solutions publishes $1,800 to $9,000 or more for a two-car garage, depending on the system tier and the condition of the slab so you can tell whether this is in your range before anybody drives out.
What moves a quote inside the range
Prep moves it most. A bare slab in decent shape grinds and gets coated. A slab with an old coating, a paint, a sealer or a mastic on it has to have that removed first, and removal is slower than grinding clean concrete and takes more consumables. Nobody can price that off a photograph, which is why the question gets asked on the floor.
Repairs are their own line. Cracks get chased and filled, spalled edges and pop outs get rebuilt, and a floor with a lot of them takes a day of work before the coating starts. So does a pit at a floor drain or a trench where a plumber cut in.
The system moves it too. A solid color over a sound slab and a full flake broadcast with a heavier topcoat are different amounts of material and different amounts of labor.
How to get a real number
Measure the floor and count the doors. Photograph anything that is not flat concrete: a crack you can get a fingernail into, an area that has flaked, a patch somebody has already put in, and whatever is on the floor now if anything is.
Then get it in writing, with the prep described rather than assumed. Two quotes that both say the floor gets coated are not comparable if one of them plans to grind and the other does not, and the difference between them is the whole reason one floor is still down in ten winters and the other is not.