Driveways: How to Plan, Build and Choose the Right One

Key Takeaways

• A driveway needs 3 metres of width per car: 1.8m for the car and 0.6m each side so the doors open over paving. The 2.4m strip on most new builds is why passengers step out onto the garden.
• The sub-base decides whether a driveway lasts. I use MOT Type 1 compacted in layers, because the surface on top is only ever as good as what is underneath it.
• For a block-paved driveway I lay herringbone every time; it interlocks under turning wheels better than any other pattern. Basketweave is for patios, never for cars.
• Gravel wants laying at roughly twice the size of the stone, so 20mm gravel sits at about 40mm deep. Lay it deeper and you have built a gravel trap, and vehicles eventually just sink into those.
• Water needs a planned way off a driveway. I work to a fall of at least 1 in 80 along the length and 1 in 40 across it, and at home I like a touch more, because nobody tolerates a puddle by their own front door.
• Building a 50m2 driveway yourself is genuinely rewarding and doable, but budget 8 or more weekends for what a three-person crew finishes in about 5 days.
• Before paving a front garden, check with your council: from my research, an impermeable surface over 5 square metres generally needs planning permission unless the water drains to a lawn, border or soakaway.
• When a driveway sinks or cracks, the surface is rarely the culprit. Find out why it moved before paying anyone to relay it, or you will buy the same problem twice.

Most driveway failures are decided before a single block goes down. The rutted paving, the puddle that sits by the door for a day after rain, the gravel you wade through rather than walk over: nearly every one of those traces back to a choice made at the planning stage, usually to save money on the parts you never see again.

I once had a client down in the South West whose previous owners had hired some cowboy outfit to lay their driveway, and blimey, they hadn’t a clue. They only dug out about 150mm, dumped in a load of sand with some weed fabric on top and stuck the pavers straight down without a proper sub-base at all. It was all sitting on heavy clay as well, so the sand never properly locked the joints and the whole thing was shifting and sinking within a couple of years. I had to rip the entire lot up, cart away a tonne of the old sand and muck, dig out the worst of the clay, bring in some crushed aggregate where it went deep, compact everything properly, lay a solid base, compact again, then sand, lay the new pavers, compact once more and finish with polymeric. It cost them a fortune, but it’s been rock solid since.

You can watch this play out in any homeowner forum. Somebody posts a photo of a sunken driveway asking what it will cost to put right, and the reply that rises to the top is never a price. It is a question: what is underneath it, and where is the water going? That is the correct instinct. Fix a surface without fixing the cause and you have bought the same problem twice.

A driveway is the biggest single piece of hard landscaping most houses ever get, and the first thing every visitor stands on. Different surfaces suit different houses, budgets and appetites for graft, and I have opinions on all of them below. But the layers underneath and the way the water leaves are the same job every time. Get those two right and almost any surface will behave.

Designing Your Driveway

Design starts with function, not material. How many cars, and are they parking or turning? Will a caravan or boat sit on it half the year? Each of those answers changes the size, the construction and the detailing, so settle them before you fall for a surface in a brochure.

The most common design mistake I see is paving the entire frontage. It nearly always disappoints; the finished effect is a couple of fuel pumps short of a petrol station. Keep some planting. A drive framed by beds reads better cared for than wall-to-wall paving, and in a small garden, flooding the plot with hard surface ties it visually to the fences and actually makes the space look smaller, not bigger.

Shape should follow material. Concrete and resin surfaces will take any shape you like. Small units such as blocks and setts handle curves and cuts easily. Large flags fight curves, so if your heart is set on a sweeping arc, rule the big flagstones out early. Sort your exit onto the road at this stage too: you want to pull out with good visibility, and where space allows, a horseshoe layout or a turning head keeps the reversing off the public highway altogether.

Two smaller things I would settle now rather than later. If an electric car is anywhere in your future, lay a length of duct across the drive before the sub-base goes down; it costs next to nothing at this stage, while retrofitting one under a finished drive means digging it up. And if you are shrinking an oversized forecourt, mock the new edge up with logs or soil-filled pots and live with it for a few weeks. Wherever you keep clipping them, move the line out. There is more on how to landscape a driveway, from the edges to the islands in its own guide, because the planting side deserves more than a paragraph.

One more thing worth knowing: design-and-build contractors are not always neutral on materials. Some will steer you toward whatever suits their margin or their cutting kit. Take any “we always use this” line with a pinch of salt.

How Big Should Your Driveway Be?

Allow 3 metres of width per car: 1.8m for the car itself and 0.6m of clearance each side, so people get out onto paving rather than flowerbed. Larger 4x4s and executive models can want up to 2.4m for the car alone.

This is exactly where new builds go wrong. A typical single garage door is about 1.9m wide and the driveway outside it often only 2.4m, which is enough for the car and the driver, while the passenger steps straight onto the garden. On double driveways, 4.8m is the standard build but you actually need three walking channels: the outside of each car plus the gap between them. In my opinion 6m is where a double drive starts being comfortable rather than technically double.

For turning, a family car needs a circle of roughly 10m across, and minimum dimensions are genuinely minimums; built to them, it takes careful driving to keep the back wheels off the kerb. The rule of thumb I like for curves, because only the front axle steers, is that any curved section should be at least a third wider than the car using it. A horseshoe drive, with a separate in and out, needs an inside arc of at least 3m and around 12m of overall width to work.

Do You Need Planning Permission for a Driveway?

Usually not, provided the surface lets water through. To my knowledge, the long-standing rule in Britain is that paving more than 5 square metres of a front garden with an impermeable surface needs planning permission, unless the water drains to a lawn, border or soakaway within your boundary. Permeable surfaces, gravel among them, are exempt, which is one reason gravel drives stay popular.

A few extra issues to note: a new access across the pavement needs a dropped kerb approved by your highway authority, some councils restrict loose gravel within a few metres of the public highway, and most home EV chargers in England now go in without a planning application after a recent rule change. These rules get re-reported as brand new every year, and half of what you will read online about “the new driveway rule” is the 2008 rule in a fresh coat of paint. Check with your local council before committing.

Choosing a Driveway Surface

TLDR: for most houses my shortlist is block paving or gravel. Block for the neatest all-rounder, gravel for the budget and the DIY-friendliness.

I judge a driveway surface on six things: how it wears under tyres, whether it can be repaired, how DIY-friendly it is to lay, how much maintenance it demands, how it looks against the house, and what it costs. Nobody scores top marks on all six.

Repairability is the factor most comparison pieces skip, and it matters more each year you own the drive. Modular surfaces, meaning blocks, flags and setts, repair almost invisibly: lift the unit, sort the bedding, drop it back. Monolithic surfaces such as concrete, tarmac and resin can only be patched, and the patch is permanent, which is exactly why many tarmac and imprinted-concrete firms are reluctant to do repairs at all. Tarmac itself I would leave off the DIY list entirely; the plant needed to lay it properly is professional-only, though there is aftercare you can do yourself, which I cover further down.

One caveat on that, because homeowners who have actually had it done will tell you differently. Swapping a single stained or cracked block really is a five-minute job. But a sunken area of block paving is not a block problem, it is a bedding or sub-base problem, and putting it right means lifting the whole affected patch, correcting what is underneath and relaying it. That is a proper day’s work, and it is why “pavers are high maintenance” comes up so often in owners’ complaints. The repairability advantage is real; it is just an advantage in outcome rather than in effort.

Two more surfaces worth a word. Resin-bound gravel gives you the gravel look without the looseness, and it is more DIY-accessible than people assume; our resin bound gravel kits page covers how the system works. Slate chippings, on the other hand, I would steer you away from for a driveway, and I have written up why slate does not suit driveways and what to use instead rather than repeat it here.

And a trap I want you to sidestep: those lovely riven-effect flags in the garden centre are patio flags. They are too soft for a driveway. Vehicle traffic wears the decorative face off and exposes the plain concrete underneath, and no amount of sealing brings it back. Their proper home is a patio, and our patio guide covers where they work.

What Goes Under a Driveway

MOT Type 1, compacted properly, over ground that has had every scrap of topsoil and root stripped out. A driveway is a carpet and the sub-base is the underlay: get the underlay wrong and even the finest Axminster will never feel right. The single most common cause of rutted, channelled block paving is a sub-base that was missing, thin, or made of the wrong stuff. If you want the full breakdown of the material itself, I have a dedicated guide to what sub base is and which grade to use.

This is also the answer to the most common driveway question there is, which is some version of “my drive has sunk, what will it cost to fix?” Almost always the honest answer is that the sinking is a symptom. Dig a small inspection hole at the worst point and look at what is under there. If it is thin, if it is the wrong material, or if it is saturated, then relaying the surface without addressing it just resets the clock on the same failure.

Dig down to firm subsoil, and if you hit a soft spot, keep digging it out rather than bridging over it; organic material rots and settles. On the material, Type 1 (you will also hear MOT1, DTp1 or 40mm down) is the benchmark for a driveway, and a decent 50mm crusher run does the job too. “Hardcore” is a word to treat with suspicion, because one man’s hardcore is another man’s pile of useless rubble; old bricks and broken flags are only usable if crushed down to 40 to 50mm with a good blend of fines. The one I turn down flat is road planings. Asphalt-rich planings behave like a fluid once saturated, and under repeated wheel loads that means ruts within a few years.

A geotextile membrane under the sub-base is about separation, not weeds. It stops the stone and a soft or clay sub-grade churning into each other under load, which is valuable on sticky ground. It does not stop weeds, because driveway weeds arrive from above, seeding into joints and cracks; a properly built pavement is essentially weed-proof from below anyway. And the woven fabric sold in garden centres is a different product for a different job; I have covered that in my landscape fabric guide, alongside the heavy-duty weed membrane that does belong under a gravel surface. For the gravel-surface case specifically, my guide to what to put under gravel walks the whole build-up.

One design-stage check while the levels are still on paper: finished paving must sit at least 150mm below the damp-proof course of any wall it meets. That is Building Regulations, not preference, and it is far cheaper to catch now than after the concrete is down.

Driveway Drainage: Falls, Gradients and Where the Water Goes

A driveway needs a fall of at least 1 in 80 along its length and 1 in 40 across it, and at home I build in a touch more. Those are the British Standard minimums written for public pavement, and the difference at home is psychological as much as technical: nobody minds a 20-minute puddle on a footpath, but the same puddle outside your own front door after every shower becomes intolerable. A handy number to hold onto is 1 in 60, which works out near enough 17mm of fall per metre.

This is not just about comfort. Standing water freezes exactly where you park and walk, and water that soaks down instead of running off saturates the bedding and sub-base, which is how settlement starts.

Decide where the water goes before you set a single level. Point drainage means falling the surface to a gully, which should have a trap in it to catch silt and block smells. Linear drainage means a channel drain, and that is what I use across a garage threshold or anywhere you will wash the car. As for the destination, the order of preference is a soakaway or SUDS arrangement first, then the surface-water system, with the foul sewer as an absolute last resort. If your ground already struggles to swallow water, start with my French drain guide before designing the drive around the problem, and my guide to what a soakaway is covers the preferred destination in more detail.

One trick from the trade for a drive that needs to shed both ways: crown it. Lifting the centre line by about 25mm gives you a subtle camber that sends water to both edges without anyone ever noticing the hump. On a sloping drive, a crown matters more than you would think, because uncontrolled water running down the length is what scours channels through a gravel surface and undermines the edges of a solid one. Washout is a drainage failure wearing a surface-failure costume, and no amount of topping up the gravel fixes it.

Setting Out a Driveway

String, pins and a 3-4-5 triangle will set out almost any driveway. Any triangle with sides in that ratio, say 3m by 4m by 5m, contains a perfect right angle, and you can build every square corner on site from it. To prove a rectangle is true, measure both diagonals; if they match, you are square.

Two tolerances worth knowing so you neither panic nor get sloppy. A setting-out discrepancy under 50mm is normal site variation and not worth chasing; over 50mm means a real error somewhere, so trace it. And when a small discrepancy has to live somewhere, lose it on a curve, where the eye forgives, never on a parallel straight run, where it never does.

On levels, know the limits of your kit. A timber straight-edge flexes noticeably past about 4m and a taut string line sags past about 10m. For a tight-fall job I would hire a self-levelling laser level for the weekend rather than fight a spirit level across the whole width.

How to Lay a Block-Paved Driveway

The excavation formula is block plus bed plus sub-base, so a 60mm block over a 40mm sand bed and 150mm of Type 1 means digging 250mm. The sub-base goes in compacted to a tolerance of plus or minus 15mm, and I give it at least eight passes with the vibrating plate.

The bed is grit sand, sometimes sold as sharp or concreting sand, and never building sand. Building sand holds too much water, and a driveway bedded on it settles, ruts, starts collecting water and ends up looking botched. Once the bed is screeded, the golden rule: never stand on it. One footprint compacts that spot more than its surroundings, and it will telegraph through as a dip once the drive is trafficked. You lay from behind the blocks you have already placed.

Pattern matters structurally, not just visually. Herringbone gives the best interlock of any standard pattern and is what I lay on driveways; the 45-degree version looks more professional to most eyes, the 90-degree version is easier to set out. Stretcher bond is fine run across the direction of travel. Basketweave has no place under a car. While laying, draw your blocks from at least three packs at once so the colours blend, and stand back every five or six courses to check alignment, because pattern drift only ever gets worse on its own.

To finish, brush kiln-dried sand into the joints while everything is bone dry, then consolidate with the plate, and stop the moment the plate starts bouncing; that is the surface telling you it is done. Top the joints up at about 4 weeks and then monthly for a few months while they settle in.

Setts, Cobbles and Other Rigid Driveway Surfaces

Setts on a driveway are laid rigid, on mortar rather than sand, and the working direction reverses from block paving: you work from the unpaved side, because walking on fresh mortar beds ruins them. Anyone who learned block first gets caught by that at least once. Reclaimed setts can vary 10mm or more in depth, so each one gets bedded individually and tapped to level.

For jointing, I would put in a word for pitch jointing, the traditional method using modified bitumen, which fell out of use after the war and deserves a comeback. It self-seals after minor movement where rigid cement jointing cracks, and there are pre-war sett streets still performing on it a century later. What I would not do is hand-point setts with a trowel: a square metre of 100mm cubes holds roughly 16 linear metres of joint, and your knees will not forgive you.

Cobbles are honestly a deterrent surface, historically laid to be uncomfortable, and that is how I use them: a threshold strip or a band to discourage foot traffic, not a whole drive.

Concrete Driveways

A concrete driveway slab wants to be 100mm thick for family cars and 150mm where anything heavier will stand, always over a proper sub-base with a damp-proof membrane beneath the pour. The standard mix is ST4, roughly 1 part cement to 2 of grit sand and 4 of 10mm gravel, which cures to around 20 newtons at 28 days.

For reinforcement, fibres have largely won the argument against steel mesh in my book: at 100mm thickness they add under a pound per square metre against two to three times that for mesh, there is no cutting or handling of sharp sheet, and they control fine surface cracking better.

The bit that decides how the drive looks for the next 30 years is the finishing, and the window is narrow. Float too early and you drag trails through wet concrete; leave it too late and the fine paste can no longer be worked to the surface, so the finish stays rough. When the surface holds a light tap but the float still brings up the fat, that is your moment. I like a brush-and-trowel finish on a driveway for grip, and exposed aggregate where the budget stretches to something decorative. Remember the trade-off from the surface table though: concrete done wrong cannot really be repaired, only patched.

Gravel Driveways

The mistake almost everyone makes with a gravel driveway is depth. Gravel becomes hard to walk and drive on once it is deeper than roughly twice the size of the stone, so 10mm gravel wants about 20mm of depth and 20mm gravel about 40mm, always as a dressing over a proper sub-base rather than a deep loose fill. That sinking behaviour is not a figure of speech: the gravel traps beside steep roads and racetracks are built on exactly this principle, deep loose stone that swallows a vehicle to a safe stop. Lay your drive too deep and you have built one on your own frontage.

For the stone itself, 10 to 18mm is the range for vehicle areas, so our driveway gravel range is where I would look. Go angular over rounded every time, because the angular faces lock together under a tyre where rounded stones roll. Expect some early scuffing while fresh gravel beds in; choosing a sub-base close in colour to the surface stone makes those first weeks look far less ragged.

The two complaints gravel owners actually voice are spreading and migration, and both are edge problems rather than stone problems. Gravel travels because nothing is holding it, so it creeps onto the lawn, into the road and out of the drive a wheelbarrow at a time until you are topping up every year. An edge is not optional with gravel, it is the thing that makes it a surface rather than a pile; my guide to edging a garden compares the materials that do the job.

If loose stone puts you off, you will probably come across self-binding gravel: a gravel carrying its own fines, which lock the surface together without cement or resin. Breedon gravel, the buff limestone type, is the best-known name. It makes a lovely firm path, but it is not generally suitable for a driveway. Tyres wear the surface down, worst where wheels turn and brake, and the clay in the mix turns the top muddy in rain. For a drive, stick with angular driveway gravel, or a resin-bound surface if you want the gravel look without the looseness. For the full build, I have written a step-by-step gravel driveway how-to that goes deeper than this section can.

How Much Does a Driveway Cost?

I am not going to print prices here, because they date fast and every plot digs differently. What I will give you is the method a quantity surveyor would use, because once you have it, any quote can be taken apart. Every task on a driveway breaks into labour, plant and materials, each one costed as quantity times rate, then summed. Excavation, muck-away, sub-base, edgings, surface, jointing: line by line.

Get that written down as a simple bill of quantities, meaning a list of each task with its materials and amounts, and give the same document to every contractor bidding. It keeps the bids genuinely comparable and stops anyone quietly substituting a cheaper material once the job starts.

Two costing traps from experience with muck and materials. Loose aggregate ordered short of a full wagon usually carries a part-load charge per tonne, so it can genuinely cost less to order the full load. And a skip of broken concrete hits its weight limit long before it looks full, so ask the skip company about weight, not just size, before you start smashing flags into it.

One warning worth repeating from what homeowners report about repair quotes specifically. Prices to fix a sunken section vary enormously, and the wide ones usually reflect that nobody has diagnosed the cause yet, so the contractor is pricing in the unknown. Get the hole dug and the cause identified first, then the quotes converge fast.

DIY or Hire a Contractor?

Both answers are respectable, and I will give you the case for each straight. Building your own driveway is immensely rewarding if you are reasonably fit and active. It can be done at your own pace, there is not much that can go disastrously wrong, and finishing even a modest slab of paving gives a boost to self-confidence that surprises people. It is also a way to keep fit that costs less than a gym.

Now the other side, with numbers. Groundwork is physically among the hardest of the building trades; a groundworker burns more calories in a day than a coal-face miner. A 50m2 driveway takes a three-person crew roughly 5 days. A DIYer with one helper, working weekends at half a tradesman’s pace, realistically needs 8 or more weekends, call it 2 to 3 months once the weather has its say, with mud, stacked materials and nowhere to park for the duration. Run the sum before deciding: divide the contractor’s labour charge by the hours the DIY route will really take you, and see what your weekend hour is being paid. Contractors do not like taking over half-finished DIY drives, so I would think hard before starting anything I could not see through. Oh, and if the job is under about 30m2, many contractors will not want it anyway, because the paperwork outweighs the profit; small jobs often default to DIY whether you fancied it or not.

If you hire, driveways are paving-specialist territory rather than general landscaping. Word of mouth first, then vetted approved lists, then directories. Get every price in writing, because a verbal price is effectively worthless, and hand each bidder the same spec so the quotes actually compare. Ask whether the portfolio photos are their own completed jobs or manufacturer publicity shots; you would be surprised. Check for a landline and a verifiable trading address, and treat cold-callers as an automatic no, since good contractors never need to knock on doors. Lead time tells its own story too: a good crew is usually booked 4 to 12 weeks out, and if they can start tomorrow, ask yourself why they are not busy.

Driveway Aftercare and Maintenance

The first three months are a running-in period. On block paving, the jointing sand settles, so top it up at around 4 weeks and then monthly until it stops dropping. Go gently on new tarmac while it finishes hardening off, and check your gullies for construction debris, because half of them are part-full of sand and off-cuts the day the contractor leaves. If a white powdery bloom appears on new blocks, that is efflorescence; it is harmless, it resolves on its own, and the “removers” only hide it for a while.

Hold off sealing until at least 3 to 6 months in, once the joints have self-sealed. When you do, know that sealant is effectively a one-way door: removal costs many times the application, and some chemistries will not bond over others, so test a spare corner first and note what you used for the day you re-seal. Pressure washing follows the same patience: not before the joints have sealed, then always at a shallow angle, and never straight into the joints unless you enjoy re-sanding them.

Two ongoing jobs that generate more frustration than anything else. Weeds in the joints come from above, not from below, which is why a membrane buried under 150mm of sub-base does nothing about them; seeds settle in the joint sand and germinate there. Keeping the joints properly filled is the real defence, then hand-pulling or spot treatment as needed. And oil spots respond far better to prompt action than to heroic scrubbing later: an absorbent material to lift what has not soaked in yet, then a degreaser, and accept that a shadow may remain on a porous surface. Both are arguments, quietly, for a modular surface, since a permanently marked block can simply be swapped out.

Before the final payment, walk the job with a straightedge and the contractor together. Any dip or high spot over 6mm is significant and worth remedial work, and a written snagging list agreed on the spot protects both sides better than a phone call a fortnight later. One question I would always ask before hiring, not after: will you come back and top up the jointing? In my experience very few firms build that into their aftercare, so the answer tells you plenty about the rest of their service.

Next Steps

The entrance and drive give the immediate impression of the whole property, so it deserves the same thought as the garden behind it. The order of operations does not change whichever surface wins you over: settle the function, size it for the actual cars, check the planning position, choose the surface with repairs and maintenance in mind, then spend properly on the sub-base and the drainage, because those two are the whole job wearing a disguise.

Next steps: we supply the materials that do the unglamorous work here, from MOT Type 1 sub-base and ballast through to the driveway gravel and resin bound gravel kits that finish the job. Run your measurements through the gravel calculator to work out quantities, or get in contact and we will sort the numbers with you, bespoke loads included.

If you would rather talk your driveway through with a person, ring Outdoor Aggregates on 0330 043 7585. The office is open 7am to 7pm, seven days a week.

Have you ever had a driveway installed, and if so, how is it going and how many years has it been down? Tell us in the comments.

FAQs

How long does it take to build a driveway?

A 50m2 driveway takes a three-person crew roughly 5 days. Doing it yourself at weekends with a helper, plan for 8 or more weekends, which is 2 to 3 months once weather interferes.

What is the cheapest driveway surface?

Gravel. It is also the simplest and most forgiving to lay and counts as permeable for the planning rules; the trade-off is regular raking and topping up.

How thick should a concrete driveway be?

100mm for family cars, 150mm for anything heavier, and always over a compacted sub-base rather than straight onto soil.

What size gravel is best for a driveway?

10 to 18mm, and angular rather than rounded. Angular faces lock together under a tyre; rounded stones roll.

Why is my driveway sinking?

Almost always something underneath it, not the surface itself: an inadequate or wrongly-specified sub-base, poor compaction, or water getting in and staying in. Dig a small inspection hole at the worst point before commissioning any repair, because relaying the surface over the same fault just resets the clock.

How do I stop weeds growing in my driveway?

Keep the joints full. Driveway weeds seed into surface joints from above rather than pushing up from below, which is why a membrane buried under the sub-base does nothing for them. Top up jointing sand as it settles and spot-treat what appears.

Can I lay a driveway myself?

Yes, if you are reasonably fit and go in with an eyes-open timescale. The graft is real, but done at your own pace there is not much that can go disastrously wrong.