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We’re in the middle of a home remodel and just got the driveway re-paved with concrete. After new concrete is poured, you obviously have to stay off of it while it is curing. But how long do you actually have to wait before you can walk on it and more importantly, how long do you have to wait until you can drive or park on new concrete?
The short answer is you can probably walk on concrete after 2-3 days and you can drive on it after 1 week. I stress the word probably because there really isn’t a hard and fast number that you can go by. However, these are general guidelines that will keep you safe from damaging your fresh new concrete. If you want to learn a little more, I’ll go into some more detail to give you a better understanding of the concrete curing process.
Let’s first talk about concrete. Concrete is quite strong in compression, but extremely weak in tension. This is the reason why reinforced concrete involves the use of reinforcing steel to be placed at the lower section of a concrete slab. When there’s a load bearing on the concrete, the top part of the concrete experiences compression and the bottom part sees tension. The end result is a combined system of steel reinforcement taking on the tensile load and the concrete taking on the compressive load.
Here’s a graph that I put together based on information from one of my old reinforced concrete textbooks from college, showing how the compressive strength increases over time. Concrete takes 28 days to achieve full compressive strength. If you’re using 3,000 psi concrete, then it will take 28 days for that concrete to achieve 3,000 psi compressive strength.
Obviously, a person walking on concrete is not going to be a whole lot of load on the concrete, so you can already walk on concrete a couple days after the concrete was poured. A car on the other hand will be a lot more force, so it’s safe to wait at least 7 days. If you wait longer than the 7 days, it’s even better. If you want extra assurance of keeping that fresh new concrete from getting damaged, you might wait 2 weeks before driving/parking your car back on it. You’d achieve 67% of the compressive strength at 7 days and 83% strength at 14 days.
Concrete is also highly susceptible to cracking, so putting a large load on concrete can potentially cause the concrete to crack in areas more prone to cracking. As the saying goes, it’s not a matter of if concrete will crack, but when. Even with expansion joints cut into the concrete, your concrete slab could still crack at susceptible locations such as corner locations.
I hope this post was helpful if you’re trying to figure out when you can park your car back onto your newly-poured concrete driveway. I personally waited a week before driving my car back on and the concrete felt well more than capable of handling that extra load already at the 7 day mark. If you want the ultimate in surface protection, I’d recommend sealing the concrete and allowing it to cure. This will help minimize staining and tire marks on the concrete.
