Per finished square metre, poured concrete usually is — one material, one operation, minimal base preparation by comparison. Pavers carry the excavation, base stone, compaction passes, bedding, units and edge restraint. But price the LIFETIME honestly: the first slab crack repair that matters costs more goodwill than a decade of paver touch-ups. Run both calculators with your dimensions and your local quotes.

Can pavers take a car?

Yes — streets are built from them. What takes the car is the base: driveway-rated thickness, full-depth compaction in lifts, and edge restraint that stops lateral creep. Skip any of those and the wheel tracks will tell on you within a season.

Can I lay pavers over an old slab?

If the slab is sound and drainage is planned, an overlay on a bedding layer works and skips the base-building. The catch is height — you gain 60–80 mm against every door threshold and damp-course line — and any slab movement still telegraphs. A cracked, heaving slab under pavers is a cracked, heaving paver surface in slow motion.

Honest comparison

Concrete Slab vs Pavers

Concrete is monolithic: cheaper per area, faster to place, and it cracks as one piece. Pavers are modular: dearer up front, repairable a unit at a time, and their real cost is the base underneath.

This is a choice between one big piece and a thousand small ones, and every consequence flows from that. A slab is placed in hours, cures as a monolith, and thereafter every movement in the ground beneath expresses itself as a crack somewhere in the slab — which is why control joints exist: not to prevent cracking but to decide where it happens.

Pavers pre-crack the surface into units on purpose. Ground movement shows up as a dip you can lift and re-bed, a frost heave that settles back, a stained unit you replace from the spare stack. The price of that repairability is the system under it: a paver surface is only as good as its compacted base and edge restraint, and that base is more excavation, more material and more compaction than most first-timers expect — the visible pavers are the cheap layer.

Climate leans on the decision. In hard-freeze ground, a slab fights frost heave as a monolith and shows every defeat; pavers flex with it and forgive. In benign climates the slab's simplicity is hard to argue with.

The factors that actually differ

	Poured concrete	Pavers
Failure mode	Cracks — guaranteed eventually, managed by joints, repaired by nobody happily.	Settles locally — lifted, re-bedded and relaid by one person with a screwdriver and sand.
Installation window	Weather-critical hours: one pour, one finish, then it cures on its own schedule.	As long as you like: a paver job pauses at any row without a cold joint.
The hidden layer	Sub-base plus mesh where specified; the slab itself is the structure.	The compacted base IS the structure; pavers are the wearing surface on top.
Weight-bearing repair	A truck-cracked corner is an angle-grinder-and-patch job that always shows.	A rutted wheel track is lifted and re-based invisibly.
Freeze-thaw	Monolith versus heave; air-entrained mixes resist surface scaling but joints still fight.	Units ride the movement; polymeric-sand joints re-set.
Look over time	One surface, ages evenly, stains spread.	Patterned, ages unit by unit — and a stained unit is a spare-stack swap.

Choose poured concrete when…

Budget-led area coverage — a shed base, a plain drive, a utility yard.
Benign ground and climate where the monolith's weakness rarely shows.
You want it DONE this week, in one operation.

Choose pavers when…

Freeze-thaw ground where heave is a when, not an if.
Repairability matters: services under the surface, trees nearby, heavy point use.
The surface is part of the design, not just a floor for the car.

Now run your own numbers

This page holds no prices on purpose — a national average is wrong for almost every real project. Quantify both options with your dimensions and your local quotes:

Concrete Calculator →Paver Calculator →

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper?: Per finished square metre, poured concrete usually is — one material, one operation, minimal base preparation by comparison. Pavers carry the excavation, base stone, compaction passes, bedding, units and edge restraint. But price the LIFETIME honestly: the first slab crack repair that matters costs more goodwill than a decade of paver touch-ups. Run both calculators with your dimensions and your local quotes.
Can pavers take a car?: Yes — streets are built from them. What takes the car is the base: driveway-rated thickness, full-depth compaction in lifts, and edge restraint that stops lateral creep. Skip any of those and the wheel tracks will tell on you within a season.
Can I lay pavers over an old slab?: If the slab is sound and drainage is planned, an overlay on a bedding layer works and skips the base-building. The catch is height — you gain 60–80 mm against every door threshold and damp-course line — and any slab movement still telegraphs. A cracked, heaving slab under pavers is a cracked, heaving paver surface in slow motion.