How the two differ in kind
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
Show
| 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. |
| Reinstating after a dig | A trench is patched, and the patch is permanent evidence of itself — colour, texture and joint never match. | Lifted, the trench dug, the units relaid. Done carefully the reinstatement is invisible, which on a drive over services is worth a great deal. |
| Ground movement | Cracks. A rigid slab on ground that moves goes at its weakest line unless the joints were placed to take it. | Accommodates it. A flexible pavement rides small movements and can be lifted and re-laid where it does not. |
| Surface water | Impermeable, so it needs falls and somewhere legitimate for the runoff to go — increasingly a consent question for a new drive. | Can be permeable if specified and built as such, which removes the drainage problem rather than relocating it. |
| Joints and movement | Needs control joints at a spacing set by thickness, and they decide where the cracks go. Omitting them does not prevent cracking, it only removes the choice of where. | Every joint is a movement joint. The pavement has no continuous rigid element to crack. |
Which one, and when
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.
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.
- Why did my concrete drive crack?
- Almost certainly because it was going to, and the joints did not decide where. Concrete shrinks as it cures and moves with temperature, and a restrained slab develops tensile stress that exceeds its modest tensile strength — so it cracks. Control joints are cut or formed to a depth of about a quarter of the slab and at a spacing related to its thickness, and their entire job is to create a deliberate weakness so the crack forms there and is invisible. A slab poured without them, or with them cut too late or too shallow, cracks wherever the stress happens to concentrate. Reinforcement does not prevent the crack either — it holds the two sides together and keeps the crack tight, which is a different and also useful job.
- Do pavers sink, and can it be prevented?
- They sink when what is under them moves, which is a sub-base question rather than a paving one. A flexible pavement transfers its load down through the laying course into a compacted granular sub-base, and if that sub-base was thin, poorly graded, laid on soft ground or compacted in one thick layer rather than in lifts, it consolidates under traffic and the surface follows. Edge restraint is the other half: without a properly bedded edge course or kerb, the pavers spread sideways under turning vehicles and the joints open. Both faults are invisible once the paving is down and both are far cheaper to get right than to correct, which is why the depth of excavation on a paving job is a better indicator of its quality than the blocks.
- Which is better over services?
- Pavers, decisively, and it is one of the strongest practical arguments for them. A drive over a water main, a gas service, a drain or a duct will be dug up eventually, and a block-paved surface is lifted, stacked, relaid and compacted with a result that is genuinely hard to see. A concrete slab is broken out and patched, and the patch announces itself permanently in colour, texture and joint line. If you know there are services under the area, or if the property is likely to gain a new connection — an electric vehicle charger, a heat pump, a new supply — that consideration alone can settle the choice.
- Which lasts longer?
- Both outlast their sub-base, which is the honest answer and the reason the comparison is usually made about the wrong layer. A concrete slab of adequate thickness on a properly prepared base with correctly placed joints is a very long-lived surface, and its failure mode is cracking that gets worse rather than sudden. A block pavement on a properly prepared base is effectively renewable — individual units are replaced, sunken areas are lifted and relaid — so it does not have an end of life in the same sense. What kills either prematurely is the same thing: an inadequate sub-base, water that has nowhere to go, or loads the design never anticipated.