How Much Does It Cost to Install an Asphalt Driveway in Texas?

National cost guides put a new asphalt driveway at $7 to $15 per square foot installed. The Texas city pages of those same guides run lower, at roughly $3 to $8 per square foot: $3 to $7 in Houston, $3 to $6 in Dallas and $4.50 to about $8 in Austin. A 600 square foot two car driveway comes to about $2,500 to $5,400 at the Texas end, and published national averages land between about $4,700 and $5,800.

Those are market numbers, not our price list. The spread is wide because most of a driveway price is ground work, haul and access, not the asphalt itself. Below is what the published ranges say about asphalt driveway paving and what moves them here in the Brazos Valley.

What do the published cost ranges say?

National cost guides break the job into parts. These are their numbers, not ours.

The guides disagree. One puts the low end at $3.92 per square foot, another says most homeowners pay $6 to $9, so read any single figure as one guide’s opinion. One ton of hot mix covers about 80 square feet at 2 inches and about 40 at 4 inches, and an average driveway takes 7 to 15 tons.

Why does the price per square foot swing so much?

Because a small job carries the same setup as a big one. The paver, the rollers, the dump trucks and the crew have to reach the site whether the job is 400 square feet or 4,000.

TxDOT has that priced into its own bid tables. It keeps a separate small quantity bid item for the same dense graded hot mix it uses on highways, and on its published statewide averages the small quantity version of an identical mix bids about twice the normal quantity price. That is state highway work, not driveways, but the shape holds.

So a short pad prices high per square foot, a long ranch drive prices low, and a new asphalt driveway cannot be priced by the square foot before anyone has stood on the site.

What drives asphalt driveway cost in Texas?

The ground under it. Most of the Brazos Valley sits on shrink swell clay. The Zulch soil series, first described in Brazos County, cracks half an inch to an inch and a half wide in a dry summer, and those cracks reach 40 inches down. Driveway guidance published by the Asphalt Institute calls for 6 to 8 inches of crushed aggregate base under a residential driveway, with weak spots undercut and replaced. That base is a real line item here, and thinning it is what turns a new drive into a repair bill.

How far the hot mix has to travel. Hot mix asphalt is mixed hot at a plant and has to reach the site hot enough to roll and compact. Asphalt plants on record in this area sit in Bryan, Madisonville, Navasota and Centerville. A place well past the nearest one pays for that truck time in every load.

Length and width. A two car driveway is about 600 square feet. A 12 foot wide drive running 500 feet to a house on acreage is 6,000 square feet, ten times the pavement.

Where the drive meets the road. In Madison County a driveway access permit is required to change a dirt driveway to concrete or asphalt, to install a culvert or to widen a drive. The minimum culvert is 24 feet long and 15 inches across, and the county lists the application fee as None at this time. A drive tying into a state highway, a US route or an FM road is state right of way, permitted by TxDOT on its own form. The pipe and the approach are part of the price.

Heat and season. Madisonville averages about 100 days a year at or above 90 degrees, so the paving season here is long and cold is mostly a morning and rain problem. Fresh hot mix still wants a few days before heavy loads roll on it.

What does your driveway size work out to?

Measure the length and width, multiply, then use the Texas range.

Read the long rows as a range to think in, not a quote. The rate per square foot falls as a job gets bigger and climbs on the small ones.

Does resurfacing cost less than a new driveway?

Usually, when the driveway has earned one. Cost guides put an overlay at $3 to $7 per square foot, new pavement in Texas at $3 to $8, and a full replacement including hauling the old pavement off at $8 to $15. The saving on an overlay comes from leaving a sound base in place. Driveway guidance published by the Asphalt Institute puts a surface overlay at 1.5 to 2 inches, with weak spots and large cracks cut out and patched first.

An overlay is the wrong buy when the base has failed. TxDOT’s maintenance manual says load associated cracking, the alligator pattern, points to base problems, and that a thick overlay or reconstruction is normally what corrects them. If your drive is cracked in a web, sinking in the wheel paths or pumping mud after rain, price a rebuild rather than an asphalt overlay.

Is chip seal or millings a better buy on a long drive?

On acreage it is worth asking before you price hot mix. Chip seal is asphalt emulsion sprayed on a prepared base with rock spread and rolled into it, and TxDOT calls a surface treatment on a crushed stone base the least expensive permanent type of bituminous surface. Asphalt millings are recycled pavement spread, graded and rolled over that same base.

Both cost less per square foot than hot mix. The numbers for each live in their own posts: chip seal against hot mix asphalt and what a millings driveway costs. Whichever surface you pick, the base under it does the work.

What does an asphalt driveway cost to keep up?

Driveway guidance published by the Asphalt Institute says a well designed driveway gives trouble free service for up to 20 years, and that a sealer every two to five years adds to that life. Cost guides put professional sealcoating at $0.17 to $0.30 per square foot, so a 600 square foot drive runs about $100 to $180 a round.

That guidance also says to leave new asphalt alone for several months before the first sealer. Filling cracks between seals keeps water out of the base, and in clay country the base is where driveways die.

How do you get a real number for your driveway?

We come out, look at the site, measure it and give you a free estimate, and the estimate spells out the thickness, the base work and the square footage for your job. It also spells out a 3-year written warranty on new asphalt we install.

Call or text (979) 595-5944 to set a time, or read how we build asphalt driveways from the ground up.