The problem
Ask what a patio costs and you get three quotes with three very different numbers, and no way to tell which is fair. The cost guides that come up first are mostly averages of other people’s averages, undated, and frequently published by somebody who wants to sell you the slabs.
Collecting prices that can be checked
Every figure is a real listing at a named seller — Wickes, B&Q, Travis Perkins, specialist paving merchants — looked up on a recorded date, rather than a range copied from another guide. For most materials that means pricing a budget option, a mid-range one and a premium one, because “what does a patio cost” has a completely different answer depending on the slab.
Delivery is priced where delivery matters: a bulk bag of aggregate with £40 of haulage on it is not the price on the shelf. Labour comes from published trade rates and quote data, and is always presented as a range.
Each price is stored with the URL it came from and the date it was checked. That is what produces the “Prices checked July 2026” line under every figure.
Sense-checking the basket, not the headline item
The slab is the part everyone quotes and the smallest part of the cost. A patio is decided below the surface: 100mm of compacted MOT Type 1, a 40mm full wet mortar bed, then the slab — plus £45–£70 per m² of labour for the full dig-to-point job. Price only the slab and you are out by a factor of three.
Ranges instead of invented precision
A calculator that returns £2,347 for a patio looks more exact and is less true. The published answer for a typical 25 m² job is £1,875–£4,500 fitted, and the width of that band is doing real work rather than hedging.
Where region comes in
The bands are national. Labour is the component that moves most by area, so London and the South East sit at or above the top of a band while much of the North and Scotland sits nearer the bottom. The honest instruction is to read the band width as the regional signal rather than expect one number to be right everywhere.
Three jobs wearing one name
The patio tool asks which job it actually is before it prices anything. A new patio from bare ground is £3,000–£3,500 for a typical 25 m². Re-laying slabs you already own and want to keep is £20–£34 per m² in materials. Repointing crumbling joints is £3–£6 per m² and one afternoon. Answering all three with a single average would be the easy route and the useless one.
Designing as well as costing
The whole-garden planner takes the same data further: pick your elements, choose basic, good or luxury spec, fit it to a budget, carve out the parts you will do yourself, and leave with a written brief you can hand to any tradesperson — specified before a salesperson specifies it for you.
Independence, stated plainly
Nothing is sold on the site and nobody pays to be listed. Retailers are named because their prices were checked, not because of any arrangement. Where a link earns commission it says so next to the link, and on several pages the honest recommendation is to buy from somewhere that earns nothing — the sand that is cheaper at a builders’ merchant, the tool better hired than bought.
A cost site that never revisits its figures quietly becomes fiction. Pages carry the date of their last check so readers can judge the freshness for themselves.