Asphalt Price per Ton — Real Bid Data, Not a National Average

Five things that move price per ton

The tables above are not a random scatter of numbers — every row differs from the others for a traceable reason. These are the five drivers, in roughly the order they surprise people:

1. Quantity. Small loads usually bid far higher per ton than mainline highway quantities — but not automatically. In the Texas delivered sample the middle quantity band’s median sits slightly above the smallest band’s, because mix type is not held constant. Volume is still the biggest hidden driver and the one competing "average" pages ignore; the truckload calculator shows how an order size turns into whole loads plus a partial one.
2. What the price buys. Pickup is material at the plant gate; delivered adds haul to the site; an in-place item pays for producing and placing the mix, so it already carries the paving. Three different quantities, three different numbers — never put them on the same line.
3. Grade and mix type. A PG64-22 dense-graded base mix, a PG76-22 polymer-modified wearing course, and an open-graded friction course are different products at different prices, even within one contract.
4. Region and date. Asphalt input costs follow crude oil and local aggregate supply, so a 2024 Texas bid and a 2026 Florida bid are not directly comparable without adjusting for time.
5. Public bid vs retail. State DOT contract unit prices are large-volume, competitively-let highway work. A residential driveway quote from a local plant is a different market — usually higher per ton on a small load.

Texas material prices: the haul premium, measured 28 times

Plants quote two prices for the same mix. Pickup is the mix loaded into your truck at the plant gate; delivered adds hauling to the site. The cleanest place to see the difference is one contract that prices both. This 2024 TxDOT letting in El Paso County lists pickup and delivered versions of three mixes, same project, same low bidder, same day — so the spread isolates the delivery term instead of confounding it with region or date.

One contract is an anecdote, so the same pairing was repeated across the Texas archives: 28 matched pairs from 18 contracts over 2024-01-16 to 2024-11-26, each pair the same contract and the same base mix. The pickup median is $117.45/ton and the delivered median $130.45/ton. The premium on a pair has a median of $16.00/ton (13.7%), with the middle 80% running $8.55/ton to $24.74/ton and the observed extremes $3.00/ton and $28.50/ton.

This is a delivery term, not a hauling rate. TxDOT does not print haul distance on the tabulation, and in some pairs the pickup item is a smaller quantity than the delivered item, so part of a pair difference may reflect quantity as well as distance. What the distribution does establish is the magnitude: a flat "add $10–$30 per ton for delivery" claimed without a source is not far off for many Texas jobs, but it is an assumption, not a measurement — and +7.1% to +28.3% is the honest range on these pairs.

Texas quantity bands and bidder counts

The same archives support a distribution instead of a handful of rows. Filtering to dense-graded HMA items with a printed DELIVERY suffix gives 42 item-level awarded prices across 33 contracts and 16 letting dates. Each band below carries its own sample size, so a median can never be read as a statewide price.

The expected direction appears at the top end: 2,500 tons and up has a median of $103.00/ton on 5 items, well below $131.90/ton for under 1,000 tons (n = 21). The middle band breaks the simple story — its median of $133.65/ton sits above the smallest band — and that is the honest lesson: these bands are sorted by quantity only, not by mix type, county or date, and a wide middle range ($109.88–$161.25) shows how much product mix varies inside one band. Quantity moves the number; it is not the only thing that does.

Bidder count points the same way as the Kentucky sample below: the median falls from $137.90/ton where one numeric bid was printed to $105.75/ton where three were. The 4-bid band rests on a single item (n = 1), so it is an observation, not a trend. Read the count as competition for that item, not for the contract: a single line item can attract one bid on a job with several bidders.

Florida: in-place bids, and why the biggest quantity is not the cheapest

Florida belongs on the in-place side of the panel, not the material side. FDOT Section 334 pays for producing and placing the hot mix, so an FDOT bid item is already an installed quantity. The figure in each row is the awarded bidder’s unit price — the price the winning contractor will be paid — not the lowest item price printed by any bidder, which can belong to a firm that did not win the contract. The 15 rows cover 3 contracts in 3 FDOT districts and 3 letting dates, with 4–6 responsive bidders on each contract.

Within the sample, quantity does what the rest of this page says it does: the 12 TN miscellaneous item bids $260.00/ton, while a 14,721.3 TN mainline item in another district bids $133.00/ton — a $127.00/ton gap between a patch-sized quantity and a highway-sized one.

But the largest quantity in the set is not the cheapest. The 69,752.1 TN high-polymer item bids $189.52/ton, $70.02/ton above the 21,021 TN dense-graded mainline item. Polymer modification and friction-course requirements carry their own premium, and they can outweigh the volume discount. Inside the T5860 contract, the FC-12.5 Traffic E item bids $181.00/ton on 2,137.3 TN, against $195.59/ton on 963.4 TN for FC-12.5 Traffic C — more than twice the tonnage for $14.59/ton less.

California: the in-place scope across 13 districts

The Texas rows are material prices — the mix at the plant gate or hauled to the site. Florida, California and Kentucky price the same product as a different quantity of work: an in-place item. Caltrans bid item 390132 (Hot Mix Asphalt, Type A) is paid by the ton, but the contract pays the contractor for producing and placing the mix: Standard Specifications 9-1.03 defines the payment scope, 39-2.01D measures the quantity "based on the combined mixture weight," and 39-2.02 covers placement. Mobilization and time-related overhead are separately paid contract items on the same bid tab, so they are not folded into the figure. What is left is an installed price per ton — the closest a public dataset gets to the number competing guides mean when they say "asphalt costs $140 per ton installed."

Across 13 bids from 12 distinct letting months, the in-place prices run $118–$200 per ton, on quantities of 1,540 TN and up. We publish only that large-load band on purpose: the same bid item priced on short loads runs materially higher per ton, and averaging the two together is exactly the quantity-blind mistake the rest of this page argues against. In the table, District 6 contributes two bids and every other district contributes one rather than every qualifying bid, so it cannot be read as a district price ranking.

Kentucky: 938 item bids, one quantity curve

Florida contributes 15 in-place rows and California 13; Kentucky prices the same family of items hundreds of times a year, which makes a different view possible: a distribution instead of a sample. We parsed 27 Kentucky Transportation Cabinet lettings from 2024-07-18 to 2026-09-24 — 530 contracts and 938 item-level low bids on standard asphalt base, surface and binder items — and re-checked the archive against the official Unit Bid Tabulations PDFs. The 12 rows below are published in full; the rest of the sample appears only as the two distributions that follow, each carrying its own sample size.

Kentucky measures and pays this work as an in-place quantity, not as delivered material. Section 403 of the Standard Specifications is titled "Production and Placement of Asphalt Mixtures"; 403.04.03 measures the mixture under 402.04, which states that the Department "will measure asphalt mixtures by the ton"; and 403.05 pays the completed and accepted quantity at the contract unit bid. There is no separate placement pay item, so the bid already carries producing and placing the mix — the same scope as the Florida and California rows, and equally not comparable with pickup or delivered prices.

The 12 published observations span every quantity band, from a 25 TN item in Magoffin County to a 28,798 TN letting in Boone County. Each row is the lowest numeric bid printed for its item — not the first bidder column, which is the most common way to misread a bid tab.

Across the full sample the median low bid falls 58% from $211.38/ton for under 100 tons to $88.50/ton for 5,000 tons and up. The bands are not adjusted for mix type, county or date — they are what the lettings paid, sorted by how much was bought. The small-load premium is why a driveway order spread over a few loads prices so far above a mainline let; the truckload calculator shows the load count behind that gap.

The second cut looks at competition. Among items of 500 tons or more, the median low bid falls from $121.50/ton where one numeric bid was listed to $76.00/ton where six were. Read that as a description, not a cause: the count is the number of numeric bids printed for the item, not the number of contractors bidding the contract, and one item's bid count says nothing about how many firms competed for the rest of the job. What it does show is that a single bid on a sizeable item is not where the low end of this market sits.

Why the averages online disagree

A search for "asphalt price per ton" returns confident numbers that contradict each other — one site says $40–$80, another $80–$160 with a "$110 national average," a third $70–$200. None cite a source, a date, or a quantity. They are not all wrong; they are measuring different things and none of them say which:

• Pickup vs delivered. A $40–$80 figure is usually a plant-gate material range; a $140+ figure is usually installed. Comparing them is a category error.
• Retail vs public bid. Highway contract unit prices and a homeowner's short-load driveway price are different markets.
• Dated vs current. Asphalt follows crude; a number with no bid date could be from any year.
• Quantity-blind. An average that mixes a 12-ton patch item with a 39,000-ton mainline let is averaging apples and bulldozers.

This page does not publish a reconciled national average, because there is no responsibly sourced one. It publishes the underlying observations — each with material, region, scope, quantity and date — so you can see exactly what a real number is attached to. When a bid quotes you one of those flat figures, how to check an asphalt quote reduces it to $ per ton and $ per sq ft in place before you compare totals.

Price trend vs price level: two indicators, neither a price

The panel above also carries two monthly series, deliberately side by side. The first is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index for asphalt paving mixture (series PCU324121324121); over the 13 months shown it moved from 411.2 to 442.7 (+7.7%). The second is the EIA Cushing WTI crude spot price: $63.96 to $97.31 per barrel over the same span (+52.1%). The first measures an output price for the mixture; the second measures a crude benchmark that feeds it. Different units, different things — this page never converts barrels into tons or uses either series as a cost multiplier.

Read the gap between the two lines as a warning about time-shifting prices. Crude moved far more than the mixture index over these months, so a bid from early in the window and a supplier quote today are not comparable without adjusting. The index tells you direction; the bid tab tells you a level; only a current local quote tells you your price. The latest PPI month is preliminary and subject to revision.

This is also the time-bridge between an older bid and today. The Texas delivered observation is dated 2024-08-01; if the mixture index has moved since, you can reason about direction, but the only price that matters for your job is a current local quote. A 2024 material bid and a 2026 in-place bid differ by more than index drift — the scope change dwarfs it, which is why the two tables in the panel are kept apart.

From price per ton to tons for your job

A unit price is only half the estimate — you also need tonnage, and that is pure geometry: area × thickness × asphalt density ÷ 2,000, plus an order allowance (see the waste factor guide). The engine computes it at build time. The example below is the same 600 sq ft, 2-inch driveway that competitor guides quote with an unsourced "$110 per ton"; here the tonnage is engine-computed and the dollar line uses a real, dated public-bid delivered price.

Tons = Area (sq ft) × Thickness (in) ÷ 12 × Density (lb/ft³) ÷ 2,000 • Material cost = Order tons × Your $/ton

What this page deliberately does not publish

• No national or regional average price per ton. There is no reliably sourced single figure, so inventing one would manufacture false precision.
• No ZIP-code or state multiplier tables. Multiplying a real bid by a made-up regional factor launders a guess into something that looks like data.
• No unsourced mix-type price grids. The "warm mix $90–$170, RAP $50–$100" grids ranking for this query carry no provenance; we only show prices attached to a specific bid.
• No blending of public-bid prices into a consumer estimate. Highway contract unit prices are shown as labeled evidence, never silently reused as your driveway price.