A 100 square foot pad and a 1,000 square foot driveway can both eat a full morning. The small job is not a scaled-down version of the big one. It is the same fixed costs spread over a tenth of the revenue, and if you price it by the square foot alone, you pay for the privilege of doing it.
The costs that don’t shrink with the job
Drive time, loading the truck, setup and teardown, forms, cleanup, the dump run, and the time you spent quoting it. Every one of those costs about the same whether you pour 100 feet or 1,000.
A made-up round example: say showing up costs your crew $400 in time and truck before any work happens. On a 1,000 square foot job that is 40 cents per foot, buried and harmless. On a 100 square foot pad it is $4 per foot, nearly half of the $9 example broom rate from our demo calculator, and a per-foot price that ignores it hands the whole margin to the fixed costs.
When a $900 job is really a minimum-charge job
Run 100 square feet at the example broom rate of $9 from our demo calculator and you get $900. If your real minimum to roll a crew is, say, $1,500 (another example number, yours will differ), then $900 is not a price. It is a donation.
The honest fix is not inflating your per-foot rate until small jobs pencil. It is quoting your minimum as the minimum. Keep the unit rate true, and let a stated minimum charge carry the fixed costs. Customers take “our minimum for a crew visit is $1,500” better than a square-foot rate that looks double what you quoted their neighbor. Here is how to set a minimum job charge if you have never pinned yours down.
Batch small jobs by neighborhood
The other lever is scheduling. Two small pours on the same street on the same day split the drive, the mobilization, and often the concrete order between them. Some contractors keep a short list of quoted-but-small jobs and book them when another job lands nearby. The customer waits a little longer, the price stays fair, and the day actually pays.
Say that on the quote if it helps close: “I can do it for less if I schedule it with other work in your area.” A shed pad is the textbook small pour for all of this; how to price a shed slab walks it through.
Quote it fast either way
Small jobs do not deserve an evening of pricing work. With your rates and your minimum prebuilt, the math takes seconds, and a fast, itemized quote is often what wins it. PriceDesk applies your own minimum automatically every time you quote. Free for 14 days, no card.