What sits under a GTA parking lot

Each layer in that stack has a price that a municipality has already published. The City of Toronto's preliminary cost estimate for the Broadview Avenue Extension, prepared as part of a Municipal Class Environmental Assessment, prices Granular A base material at $34.00 per tonne, asphalt binder course, HL-1, at $183.60 per tonne, asphalt surface course, HL-8, at $142.80 per tonne, and tack coat at $1.36 per square metre. Those are road-construction unit prices for material rather than a private parking lot tender, which is exactly what makes them useful: they show what sits inside a contractor's blended square-foot number.

The blended number is the one most lots are actually quoted at. Empire Paving, a Toronto and GTA commercial paving contractor, publishes $3.00 to $6.00 per square foot for standard commercial asphalt paving. One figure covers labour, equipment, material and margin for a standard duty design. Reading it against the municipal material prices is the difference between judging a quote as a number and judging it as a section, since two contractors can both land inside that band while proposing different tonnage in the ground.

In the City of Toronto's own estimate, the binder course is the more expensive material: $183.60 per tonne for HL-1 against $142.80 per tonne for HL-8. That runs against the intuition that the visible top layer must be the premium one, and it has a direct consequence for pricing. A two-lift design, binder plus surface, uses more tonnage than a single thin lift and weights that tonnage toward the costlier of the two mixes.

The tack coat between them is the cheapest line in the stack and the easiest to leave out of a comparison. It is a thin asphalt emulsion sprayed on the old or milled surface so the new asphalt bonds to what is underneath instead of peeling away in sheets, and the City of Toronto's unit pricing puts it at $1.36 per square metre. On a resurfacing scope, whether that line appears at all tells you something about how carefully the rest of the bid was written.

AsphaltWorkx, a GTA commercial asphalt contractor, describes a typical commercial process of 8 to 12 inches of excavation and granular base compaction before any asphalt goes down, with the asphalt itself placed in 2 to 3 inch layers, roughly double the preparation used on a residential driveway. That range is wide enough to matter. The difference between 8 inches of base and 12 inches is material volume, haul trips and compaction time, and none of it is visible once the lot is black.

Duty class is the part the published data does not resolve. No source with a named author publishes a separate GTA rate for a lot built to carry loaded trucks or a loading dock apron, which is why this site prints none. Empire Paving's $3.00 to $6.00 per square foot describes standard commercial paving, so a heavy-duty area belongs on the bid as its own line item with its own depth. Where an existing lot is being taken out first, the City of Toronto's estimate prices full-depth removal of asphalt or concrete pavement at $40.80 per square metre, a separate item from the new section entirely.

Water is the reason a section fails, and the structures that handle it are priced per unit rather than per square foot. The City of Toronto's preliminary cost estimate prices a new catch basin, fully installed with excavation and connection, at $6,800 each. The Region of Peel's 2022 functional cost estimate for an arterial road in Brampton breaks the same object into parts: $900 for the precast 600x600 structure to OPSD 705.010, $1,900 for a twin inlet basin to OPSD 705.020, $150 for frames and grates, and $60.00 per linear metre for 150 mm PVC lead pipe or $75.00 per linear metre for 250 mm. A lot with several low points carries several of those, and the full breakdown sits at /costs/catch-basin-repair-cost-toronto/.

The index shows how thin the specialist end of this work is. Site Drainage is the smallest of the nine categories with 7 companies out of 376, against 92 in Parking Lot Paving and 181 in Asphalt Paving. The seven are AddAline Asphalt Maintenance in Burlington, MT Catch Basin Toronto Cleaning, Repair & Installation Service in Thornhill, All Pave Construction in Forest Hill, York Seal Paving Inc and Pave-1 Construction Limited in Willowdale, Anta Catch Basin in Islington-City Centre West, and Addaline Asphalt Maintenance in Whitby. Four of those seven also hold Parking Lot Paving, so most of the drainage records in this index sit in a paving category as well rather than standing alone. The category page is at /site-drainage/.

Material cost is not fixed while a project waits for a start date. Ontario's asphalt cement price index, tracked by the Ontario Asphalt Pavement Council, stood at 1569.50 in June 2026. Asphalt cement is the binder inside every tonne of hot mix and is priced separately from aggregate, so a quote written against one month's index and paved against another can move without anyone changing the scope.

The condition of what is already there moves the number further. The Paving Company, a Toronto and GTA contractor, publishes $3 to $7 per square foot for overlay work on an existing surface, and that range assumes the base underneath is sound. Where the old surface has to be ground off first so the new layer sits flush with curbs and catch basins, Sure-Seal Pavement Maintenance, a Toronto and GTA contractor established in 1993, prices cold milling at $0.75 to $1.25 per square foot on top of the overlay. Where the base itself has failed, neither figure applies and the work becomes reconstruction, which is why /costs/asphalt-resurfacing-cost-toronto/ treats base condition as the first question rather than a detail.

Season plays into the same account. Contractor demand in Ontario tends to peak through the summer, and the site's resurfacing guide points to shoulder-season scheduling as one of the few levers a buyer holds over a price that is otherwise set by material and design. The lot still has to be paved in weather that lets the asphalt compact.

The categories map the work reasonably well. Asphalt Paving holds 181 companies, Parking Lot Paving 92 and Excavation and Grading 66, which are the three that touch a full section from subgrade to surface. A company can appear in all three, and 157 of the 376 records sit in two or more categories.

What no record shows is equipment, crew size, years in business or licence status, so the index cannot say which of those companies places asphalt in two lifts as a matter of course and which quotes a single thin one. The bid says that, or it does not, and comparing bids on the section rather than on the total is the only way the difference surfaces. Area pages such as /areas/toronto/ and /areas/brampton/ narrow the list; the section depth has to come from the paperwork.