What Does Concrete Cutting Cost?

We are not going to print a rate card, and you should be wary of anyone who does. A linear metre of concrete cutting can differ by a factor of five depending on things that have nothing to do with the concrete. What follows is what actually moves the number, so you can read a quote properly and compare two of them fairly.

Cutting cost is not linear with depth. A saw cuts to roughly half its blade diameter, so a slab that can be done in one pass from one face is cheap per metre. The moment it needs cutting from both faces, or a bigger machine, or a change of technique to wire sawing, the rate steps rather than climbs.

Rebar slows the cut and consumes blade. Heavy reinforcement, or a mesh layout nobody has located, is the most common reason a job takes longer than quoted. Steel fibre reinforced slabs, common in distribution warehouses, are harder again. This is why a core taken beforehand to establish thickness and reinforcement so often pays for itself: it turns an estimate into a price.

Whether the machine can be driven to the cut or carried down three flights changes the crew size and the day. Whether the site has water and three-phase power, or we bring our own, changes the plant. Both routinely cost more than the cutting.

This is the biggest single multiplier and the one most often left out of a comparison. Cutting inside a night closure, an airside window, a weekend possession or a shift change costs more than cutting on a Tuesday morning, because the crew is paid for the shift and only part of it is productive. If one quote is much lower than another, check whether it has assumed daytime working on a site that cannot give it.

Cutting is rarely the whole scope. Slurry has to be contained and removed, arisings taken off site, the opening made safe, and often the joint sealed or the surface reinstated. A quote that stops at the cut is not cheaper, it is incomplete, and the difference lands on someone else's account.

Tell us the diameter or the line and the depth, the substrate and what reinforcement you think is in it, whether the site is live and what hours you can offer, whether there is water and power, and what has to happen to the opening afterwards. With those six answers a price is a price. Without them it is a guess, and guesses get revised.

We are based at Little Westerhill Farm near Maidstone in Kent. Kent, London, Sussex, Essex and the wider South East are covered from our own yard, and longer programmes are mobilised UK wide. For the service see concrete cutting.

Work booked at short notice or outside normal hours prices differently again: see emergency and out of hours cutting.