Plain concrete is your most affordable option for driveway replacement in Canberra. You’re looking at roughly $65-$85 per square meter for a standard residential driveway with basic concrete. That’s removal, disposal, base preparation, and a simple broom finish concrete surface.

Asphalt comes in slightly cheaper at $50-$70 per square meter, but here’s what most Canberra homeowners don’t realize – asphalt doesn’t handle our temperature extremes as well as concrete. Those 40°C summer days soften asphalt and our sub-zero winter nights make it brittle. You’ll be resealing it every few years and probably replacing it sooner than concrete.

A thousand square feet translates to about 93 square meters – that’s a decent-sized driveway. For concrete removal in Canberra, you’re looking at $40-$60 per square meter depending on access and thickness. So for 93 square meters, expect somewhere between $3,700 and $5,600 for removal alone.

That price includes breaking up the concrete, loading it into trucks, and disposing it at a local recycling facility. Properties in older Canberra suburbs like Ainslie or Turner where access is tight might hit the higher end of that range because we need smaller equipment and more labor time. A wide-open driveway in Gungahlin with great access might come in at the lower end.

A properly installed concrete driveway in Canberra should last 25-30 years minimum. I’ve seen driveways in Forrest and Red Hill that are 40+ years old and still going strong. The ones that fail earlier usually had installation problems – poor base preparation, no reinforcement, or they were too thin to start with.

Canberra’s climate is tough on concrete though. Our freeze-thaw cycles in winter stress the surface. Water gets into tiny cracks, freezes overnight, expands, and makes those cracks bigger. Do that every winter for twenty years and even good concrete starts showing its age. Summer heat isn’t much better – thermal expansion and contraction between 40°C days and 15°C nights creates stress too.

Shared driveways between properties are tricky in Canberra, especially in older suburbs like Turner or Ainslie where blocks are narrow. If you want to remove your half and the neighbor wants to keep theirs, we need to saw cut along the property boundary first.

A concrete saw with a diamond blade cuts a clean line straight down through the concrete. We cut to the full depth of the slab, which creates a clean separation. Without that saw cut, breaking up your side would crack and damage your neighbor’s side too. That’s a quick way to end up in a dispute or paying for their driveway repairs.

The cut line needs to follow the actual property boundary, which means you need a survey if there’s any doubt about where that boundary sits. I’ve seen situations in older Canberra suburbs where the driveway was poured decades ago and nobody’s quite sure where the property line runs through it. Get a surveyor out before you start removal – costs a few hundred dollars but saves thousands in potential disputes.