Paver Patio Materials — What You Need and How Much

How deep you dig is not a decision — it is the sum of everything that goes back in: the compacted base, one inch of bedding sand, and the thickness of the paver itself. For a patio base and a standard 60 mm paver that comes to 7⅜ inches below the finished surface, and for a base built to carry a car it is 11⅜. Dig wider than the patio too: the base has to run about six inches past the paver edge on every open side so the edge restraint has something solid to be spiked into.

Two things happen in this hole that nothing later can fix. Cut a slight, consistent fall away from the house while you are digging, because every layer above copies the shape of the subgrade. Then compact the exposed subgrade before anything goes back in — the base can only be as stable as the ground it rests on, and a soft spot left here will show up as a dip in the pavers two summers from now.

A geotextile sheet between the subgrade and the base keeps the two materials from mixing. Without it, every time the patio is wet and loaded, fine soil pumps up into the voids between the stones; the base loses the point-to-point contact that makes it rigid, and the patio starts settling unevenly a few seasons in.

It matters most on clay and anywhere that stays damp, which is most yards. On clean, free-draining sand it is closer to cheap insurance. Overlap the seams — the figure below already includes ten per cent for that — and run the fabric up the sides of the excavation rather than cutting it flush.

The base is the patio. Everything above it is a wearing surface; this is the part that spreads the load and stays put. ICPI guidance puts a compacted aggregate base at four inches for pedestrian patios and walkways and six to eight where vehicles drive, which is why switching this page to Cars doubles the stone and the digging together.

Place it in two- to three-inch lifts and compact each lift before the next. A single four-inch dump compacted from the top leaves the bottom half loose, and that loose half is what eventually moves. Crushed stone is sold by weight, so the tonnage below converts your volume at a typical density — the supplier's scale ticket is the number that actually governs what arrives.

Gravel & Stone Calculator — methodology, other materials and the full density table.

One inch of coarse washed concrete sand, screeded flat, and never more than an inch and a half. ICPI Tech Spec 17 caps it because a thick sand layer behaves like a cushion: the pavers press into it under load and rut, and no amount of joint sand fixes that afterwards.

Screed it; do not compact it, and do not walk on it once it is flat. The two common substitutions are stone dust and mason's sand, and both are wrong for the same reason — they hold water and break down. The layer does not get thicker for a bigger patio, so this is the one quantity on the page that scales with area alone.

Paver counts come from the coverage of the shape you pick — a 4×8 Holland covers four and a half per square foot, a 12×12 covers one — multiplied by your area, plus a waste factor for the cuts. Ten per cent suits a rectangular patio in a running bond. A herringbone turned at forty-five degrees, or any curved edge, produces far more offcuts, so use fifteen.

Order the whole job in one delivery. Pavers are made in batches and cured in batches, and a replacement pallet bought three weeks later can be a visibly different colour in daylight. Work off the laid field rather than off the sand, and pull from several pallets at once so any batch variation is spread across the patio instead of sitting in one corner.

Paver Calculator — custom paver sizes, the full methodology block and the per-tool FAQs.

This is the part beginners leave out and the reason most failed patios failed. There is no mortar in a paver field; what stops it spreading under foot traffic, furniture and frost is a restraint pinned around the perimeter holding every joint closed. Lose the edge and you lose the interlock that makes hundreds of separate pavers behave as one surface.

Plastic or aluminium restraint sits on the compacted base against the outside course and is spiked down at roughly one spike per foot — which is the reason step 1 asked you to run the base past the paver edge. Fit it before the joint sand goes in, so the final compaction beds the pavers against something that is already fixed.

Sweep polymeric sand into the joints, blow or brush the surface completely clean, then run the plate compactor over the pavers with a protective mat so the sand drops and the pavers set down into the bedding layer. Top the joints up, sweep clean again, and water it exactly as the bag instructs — the wetting is what activates the binder.

Coverage depends on how wide your joints are, which is why the bag quotes a range rather than a number; the figure below uses the middle of that range, so check your own bag before buying the last one. And be thorough about clearing the surface: polymeric sand left on the paver faces when you wet it sets there, and it is a haze you cannot sweep off afterwards.