Driveway square footage calculator
Four shapes, because a driveway is rarely a neat rectangle. The area comes back in all three units Ontario paving is quoted in, with the asphalt cost and the tonnage of mix underneath it.
Last updated: By The Pavement Desk
shapes: straight, L, widening and turnaround
units at once: square feet, metres and yards
Surface area
the same surface as 55.7 square metres or 66.7 square yards, with 100 ft around the edge
- In asphalt, HST in
- $2,034–$4,746
- Hot mix at 40 mm compacted
- 5.5 t
The area is plain geometry. One square foot is exactly 0.09290304 square metres and one square yard is exactly nine square feet, both by definition.
Asphalt rate from Green Building Canada (national Canadian home-building cost guide)
Tonnage formula and mix density from Ontario Ministry of Transportation (CDED B313, Detail Estimating: Hot Mix Asphalt, April 2025, s.313.8.3)
The one page here that needs no sources
Every other calculator on this site is built on published Canadian prices, densities or decision rules, each named on its own page. This one is not, and that is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as an absence. The area of a rectangle is not a claim anybody could source, and the two unit conversions used here are exact by definition rather than by measurement: the international foot is defined as 0.3048 metres, so a square foot is 0.09290304 square metres, and a yard is three feet, so a square yard is nine square feet. Attaching a citation to any of that would be decoration.
What the page does not do is tell you what size a driveway should be. There is a standard answer floating around for that, and no Canadian source turned up that publishes one with any authority, so none is printed here. Several Ontario cost guides use 600 square feet as their worked example for a two-car driveway and 400 for a single, which is why those numbers keep appearing in price ranges, but they are illustrations chosen by cost guides rather than a specification anybody has to meet.
Measure at the widest point of each section and round up. This is the least glamorous advice on the site and probably the most valuable: a surface measured short is a load of asphalt short, and a second delivery to a job that is already open costs more than the extra material would have. On the granular base underneath it, published Canadian guidance is to add a 10 to 20 percent allowance over the calculated volume for compaction and settling, which is the same idea one layer down.
The perimeter figure is there because it gets sold separately. Edging, concrete curb and a soldier course are all quoted by the linear foot or metre, and the City of Toronto’s own estimate prices concrete curb and gutter at $122.40 per metre. A rectangle and a circle both have a perimeter that follows from what you typed. An L does not, because it depends on how the wing meets the run, so this page reports nothing rather than reporting a guess with a measurement’s confidence.
Once you have the number, the rest of the calculators take it as an input: the cost of paving it, the tonnes of hot mix it takes, the granular base underneath it, and the cost of sealing it later.
Where the two figures under the area come from
The area itself is geometry, but the asphalt cost and the tonnage below it are not, so they carry sources like everything else on this site. The cost band is the $3 to $7 per square foot that Green Building Canada, Eastern Ontario Paving and Country Contracting all publish for an Ontario asphalt driveway, with 13% HST added. The tonnage uses the Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s own formula, area times lift thickness times mix density, at its published 2.460 tonnes per cubic metre for Superpave 12.5 and the 40 mm surface lift in the City of Toronto’s own pavement structure.
Canadian dollars, August 2026. Both figures are worked in full, with their sources, on the calculators they belong to.
Frequently asked questions
How do I work out the square footage of a driveway?
- Multiply length by width for a straight run. If it opens into a parking wing beside the garage, treat it as two rectangles and add them. If it widens toward the road, add the two widths, halve that, and multiply by the depth. For a circular turnaround it is pi times the radius squared, where the radius is half the diameter. All four are on this page, and none of them needs a source, because they are the geometry rather than somebody's estimate of it.
What size is a standard two-car driveway?
- This page will not tell you, because no Canadian source it could find publishes an authoritative figure and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What it will tell you is that several published Ontario cost guides use 600 square feet as the worked example for a two-car driveway, and 400 for a single, when illustrating their own prices. Those are illustrations from cost guides, not standards, and your driveway is whatever the tape measure says it is.
Should I measure in feet or metres?
- Measure in whichever is easier and read the other one off the result, because Ontario paving uses both. Asphalt is sold by the tonne and specified in millimetres of compacted lift, aggregate is sold by the cubic yard or the tonne, and contractor rates are quoted per square foot. The conversions this page uses are exact by definition: one square foot is 0.09290304 square metres, one square yard is nine square feet.
Why does the result show a perimeter for some shapes and not others?
- Because two joined rectangles do not have one. The perimeter of an L depends on exactly how the wing meets the run, and any single number this page printed would be a guess with a measurement's confidence. A rectangle and a circle both have a perimeter that follows from the dimensions you typed, so those get one. The figure is useful when pricing edging, curb or a soldier course, which are all sold by the linear foot or metre.
Should I round the measurement up or down?
- Up, and measure at the widest point of each section. A surface measured short is a load of asphalt short, and on a job that is already open a second delivery costs more than the extra material would have. The same logic applies to aggregate: published Canadian guidance is to add a 10 to 20 percent allowance over the calculated volume for compaction and settling on granular.
What can I do with the number once I have it?
- Almost everything else on this site takes a surface area as its input. The asphalt driveway cost calculator turns it into a budget band, the tonnage calculator turns it into tonnes of hot mix at the province's own mix densities, the gravel calculator sizes the base underneath it, and the sealcoating calculator prices protecting it later.
Next, price it
A measured area is the input every other tool here wants. Take it to the cost calculator for a budget band, or straight to the tonnage calculator if you are ordering mix rather than hiring a crew.