How long does paving actually last?

People ring us asking how long pavers last, and it is the wrong question, though an understandable one. A concrete paver is a lump of 40 to 50 MPa concrete. A clay paver is fired ceramic. Neither of them has any intention of dying in your lifetime. What dies is the pavement, the whole system of base, bedding, pavers, joints and edges working together. When a Geraldton driveway is a dished, rocking mess at year five, we pull it apart and the pavers are almost always perfectly reusable. The base has gone.

Australian Standard AS 3727.1 sets out how residential pavements are supposed to be built, and the meat of it is the layer nobody sees. For a domestic driveway carrying a car and the occasional delivery van, that means excavating to firm ground, then laying and compacting road base in layers to a real, measured depth, typically 100mm over stable ground and 150mm or more over soft fill or reactive clay. Compaction is done in lifts with a plate or roller, not one dump and a quick pass. Get that right and the pavement carries load the way it was designed to for decades. Get it wrong and no paver on earth saves you.

Realistic lifespans by material.

Assuming the base is right and the edges are restrained, here is what we actually see across Geraldton and the Mid West, from jobs we have gone back to years later:

• Clay brick pavers: 40 years plus. Dense, fired-through colour, minimal water absorption and highly salt-tolerant. The oldest clay paving around Geraldton's older suburbs is still doing its job. This is the long-haul choice. See brick paving.
• Quality concrete pavers: 25 to 30 years. Structurally they go longer, but the pigmented face layer softens under our UV, and after about 15 years most people describe the colour as "faded" rather than "aged". Great value, honest lifespan.
• Reconstituted limestone: 20 to 30 years. Uniform, pale, cool underfoot. Needs sealing and a re-coat every three to five years, especially near the coast.
• Natural Geraldton limestone: 20 to 30 years. Genuine local stone with genuine local character. Same sealing story, more cutting waste, more charm. See limestone paving.
• The base, done properly: 30 to 50 years. The unglamorous bit outlasts most of the pavers on top of it, which is exactly the point.
• Jointing sand: 2 to 3 years loose, 10 to 15 years stabilised. This is the single biggest coastal variable in Geraldton.

Why Geraldton is harder on paving than most of WA.

Two local drivers shorten pavement life here more than anywhere else in the state. The first is the Geraldton Doctor, the strong afternoon south-westerly that blows most summer days and makes this one of the windiest coastal cities in the country. It does not damage pavers. It empties joints. Loose washed jointing sand is simply gone within a season or two, and once the joints are empty the pavers lose their interlock, start rocking under load, and the pavement begins to unravel from the surface down. Stabilised or polymeric jointing sand binds into a firm, flexible joint the breeze cannot scour, and it is standard on every job we quote. There is more detail on the coastal wind paving guide.

The second driver is the ground itself, and it changes street by street. Out at Tarcoola Beach, Drummond Cove and Glenfield you are on deep, fast-draining coastal dune sand. It drains beautifully and it moves under load, so the base needs a geotextile separation layer under it or the road base slowly migrates down into the sand and the pavement dishes. Inland and on the newer estates around Wandina, you are on reactive clay loam that swells through the 440mm of rain we get between May and August and shrinks hard through the long dry summer. That seasonal movement is survivable, but only over a base deep enough to bridge it. Ignore the site and the pavement tells you about it in year three.

A worked example: the 45 square metre double driveway.

Take a typical Wandina double driveway, 45 square metres, in interlocking concrete pavers. Built properly with a 150mm compacted road-base sub-base, concrete haunched edge restraint on both sides and stabilised jointing, that job costs about $75 to $110 per square metre supplied and laid, so roughly $3,400 to $5,000, plus around $25 to $45 per linear metre for the edge restraint. Call it $4,200 to $6,000 all up. It should give you 25 to 30 years with one re-sand somewhere in the middle.

The same driveway built with a token 50mm of base, no edging and washed sand might be quoted at $2,800. It will need a full lift and relay at $45 to $80 per square metre inside five years, so another $2,000 to $3,600, and you will still be paying for the base you skipped the first time. The cheap job is not cheaper. It is just invoiced in two parts, years apart. Our pricing guide shows what fair 2026 rates look like, and the Geraldton cost guide breaks down what moves them.

What you can do to add years.

Once the pavement is in, the owner's contribution is small but real. Re-sand the joints when you can see them emptying rather than after the pavers start to rock. Re-seal limestone every three to five years, sooner within a kilometre of the surf. Keep the edge restraint intact when you are doing garden work, because a broken haunch is how the creep starts. And do not park a loaded truck or a tandem trailer on paving that was designed for a family car, which is a genuinely common way to hurt an otherwise good driveway. That is the whole maintenance list.