Guide
How much concrete can a crew pour in a day?
Ask this question on a forum and you’ll get the two useless answers: “depends” and somebody’s best day ever. Both are technically true. Neither helps you plan Thursday. So here are the planning numbers a concrete sub can actually schedule against — and, more useful than the numbers, the two ceilings that decide which one applies to your pour.
The short answer
For formed flatwork placed straight off the chute, a five-person crew planning 40–50 cubic yards in an eight-hour day is our planning starting figure — concrete down, surface finished. With a boom pump under a big slab pour, the same question changes shape: placement can run to several hundred yards in a day, and the crew stops being the limit at all. Which is the real lesson of this whole guide: the honest answer depends on which ceiling your pour hits first.
Placement rates by equipment
- Direct from the chute — a truck on the chute empties in minutes while it’s flowing. Nobody sustains that all day; the day is spent cycling trucks, moving the pour, and keeping the crew ahead of the mud. Hence 40–50 yards as a crew-day planning figure.
- Trailer / line pump — plan around ~15 yards an hour sustained. The win is reach, not speed: it puts concrete where the chute can’t go.
- Boom pump — 70–90 yards an hour sustained when delivery keeps up. On volume, the boom is how a day goes from fifty yards to three hundred.
- Crane and bucket — around 20 yards an hour, and every bucket is a crane pick. It exists for the pours nothing else can reach, not for production.
Sustained rates, not peak — and our own planning numbers, not a published standard. To check them against outside figures: one concrete contractor reports 60–100 yards an hour pumping straight off the boom with few moves, and 40–60 through a downline (For Construction Pros, 2018); line pumps run from about 5 yards an hour for the smallest to 60 for the largest (For Construction Pros, 2004). A pump’s spec sheet is what it can do; your day is what the trucks, the site, and the crew let it do.
Ceiling one: the truck math
A standard mixer carries about 10 yards. Trucks spaced 30–45 minutes apart land 13–20 yards an hour on your site — which means a boom pump rated at 90 yards an hour spends most of its day waiting unless the order locks a faster rotation. This is the mismatch that quietly runs pours: order faster than you can place and trucks stack at the curb burning their 90-minute discharge window; order slower than the pump and the placement stalls between loads, which is how cold joints happen without anyone doing anything wrong. The pour plan is the delivery rate.
Run the truck math for your pour
Pick the equipment, set the trucks, and it returns the two ceilings side by side — what placement can do in the window and what the trucks can land — with the spacing that would keep the pump busy, and the trucks and hours a given volume needs.
Two ceilings only. On flatwork the finishing crew and the set time cap the day; on walls the form’s rate of rise does — neither is in this arithmetic. The rate beside each method is our planning default — type your own sustained rate over it. The chute figure comes from the planning crew-day (five men, 40–50 CY in eight hours), not from how fast a truck discharges.
Ceiling two: the finishing window
On flatwork, the pour usually isn’t racing the pump — it’s racing the set. Every yard placed is fresh surface the finishing crew has to stay ahead of, and the finish spec decides how heavy that work is: a broom finish and a burnished floor are different days entirely. Wall pours carry their own version of the limit — forms are engineered for a rate of rise, and filling faster than the form was designed for is how blowouts happen, so the placement rate is capped by the formwork before the crew ever gets a vote. When someone’s best-day number sounds unbelievable, the missing context is almost always the finish spec.
What moves the number
- Crew size and mix — placing and finishing are different skills; the day is set by the thinner of the two.
- Weather — heat shortens the discharge window; in the cold, every 20°F drop in concrete temperature roughly doubles the set time (NRMCA’s rule of thumb) and drags finishing into the dark. Cold-weather pours are their own planning problem.
- Access — a truck that backs to the forms and a pour 200 feet from the nearest standing point are different equipment days.
- Mix and slump — what the spec allows changes how fast the crew can move it and close it.
- Daylight — the pour ends when the finishing ends, not when the last truck leaves.
Plan crews against the real number
Here’s where this stops being trivia. Once you know your crews’ real rate — not the forum number, yours — the week either fits or it doesn’t, and you can see which before the GC does. A spreadsheet doesn’t know that Thursday holds ninety yards against a crew that places fifty; it adds nothing up until someone remembers to check it. On the Place & Finish board, every pour carries its yardage and the week rolls the cubic yards up per day and per job, so an overloaded Thursday looks overloaded from across the room — and Manpower projection shows whether the crews you’re counting on even exist that week. The companion question — what those yards cost in labor — is its own guide: man-hours per cubic yard.
Put Thursday on one board
Your crews already have a real daily rate — the only question is whether the schedule respects it. Put next week’s pours on a live board, let the yardage roll up against the crews you actually have, and catch the overloaded day while it’s still cheap to fix. Planning Ops is built for concrete subs, veteran-owned, with a 14-day free trial and your whole crew riding free as viewers. See Your Week in Cubic Yards →