Polished Concrete Floor Cost Calculator

Why This One Is Different

Call three contractors for a polished floor quote and you'll likely get three different numbers, and it's rarely the sealer that explains the gap. Polishing a concrete floor doesn't consume material the way pouring one does: a crew grinds through progressively finer diamond grits, applies a chemical densifier, and the labor hours in that grinding process are what drive your bill, not the bags or gallons on the invoice. This calculator uses sealer and densifier coverage of roughly 200 to 400 square feet per gallon as the material side of your estimate, then pairs it with a modeled masonry-crew labor band, because your 1,000 sq ft floor and a 1,000 sq ft floor with heavy existing damage take very different hours to grind flat before polishing even starts. Treat what you get here as a planning range for budgeting, not a bid to hand a lender.

Where the Numbers Come From

• Densifier/sealer coverage runs approximately 200-400 sq ft per gallon, a manufacturer product-data-sheet range that shifts with broom-finished versus smooth, dense surfaces. Source: sealer PDS class range (construction-estimating coverage engine)
• A unit labor cost decomposes into bare labor plus an O&P add-on (workers' comp, overhead, profit). Polishing labor, which dominates this job's price, follows the same structure rather than a flat per-sq-ft rate. Source: Wiley, How to Estimate with RSMeans Data (4th ed.)
• Polishing is a multi-pass diamond-grinding process before densifier and sealer are ever applied: the coverage-rate math here estimates only the chemical-treatment material, not the grinding labor hours, which are modeled separately. Source: worked example, closed-form geometry (process framing)