Sealing an asphalt driveway around Raleigh is priced per square foot, and that one rate already includes the crack filling, small patches and edge work. Paving is different and gets priced per job. This page explains what pushes a sealing price up or down, how to measure your own drive before you call anybody, and why the cheapest number on a flyer stuck in your door is rarely the cheapest job.
A lot of people around the Triangle ask what sealcoating their driveway costs and then find out their driveway is concrete. In most subdivisions built in the last couple of decades the drive is a pale gray slab cut into squares, and a concrete slab does not need sealcoating at all. The answer for that driveway is zero, and it is worth knowing before you collect three quotes for a job you do not need.
Asphalt is the black, or sun-bleached gray, surface with no joints. Around here it is on older homes, farm and rural drives, and nearly every church, daycare and shop lot. If that is what you have, read on.
Your quote comes back as the measured area times one rate. Inside that rate:
A drive with heavy cracking or a lot of patching gets a higher rate rather than a list of extras added at the end. You see one number, you know what it covers, and it does not grow once somebody is standing on your drive with a bucket.
Walk the length of the drive from the garage to where it meets the street or the road, then measure the width in two or three places and take the average. Length times average width gives square feet. Add the parking pad, the turnaround and any apron you want done as separate rectangles.
On a long country drive, a wheel or a phone mapping app does the job well enough for a first number. Our quote is measured properly anyway, but knowing your rough size tells you whether a price you have been handed is in the right world.
If the drive meets a city street, the apron between your property line and the road belongs to the city. Sealing it is normally part of the job; rebuilding it can need a permit. In Raleigh, replacing a driveway, even like for like, needs a city permit before work starts, which matters for a paving quote and not for sealing.
Every spring and summer somebody knocks on doors with leftover material and a price that sounds too good. Sometimes it is fine. Often one of these is missing:
Ask what is included in writing. If the answer is vague, so is the job.
Some drives are past a coat. Large areas of alligator cracking, a surface that has sunk where the clay underneath went soft, or asphalt so old it crumbles at the edge are repair or paving jobs. Those are priced per job after a look, because the base, the drainage and how much has to come out decide the number, and none of that shows in a square foot rate.
Gravel to asphalt is the same. The price depends on how much stone is already there, how far it runs, and whether the water needs a new path off it. The asphalt paving and driveway repair pages go through both.
A good coat on a house drive here lasts about two to three years. Sealing every year does not protect it more, it just builds up layers that crack and flake. The cheapest way to own an asphalt drive in this climate is a coat every few summers with the cracks filled each time, and repairs done while they are small.
If yours does not need it this year, the quote will say so. That is part of the price too.
