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Trade Playbook
Concrete is one of the few trades where the work literally will not wait for you — the truck is here, the slab is going off, finish it or lose it. The questions reflect that: flatwork or forming or structural, residential or commercial, how to survive the 5am pours and the weather, and whether decorative and polished work is the upgrade that gets you off price competition.
Where it starts
$18–24/hr
Labourer
Where it tops out
$100k–250k+
Crew owner / contractor
Union route
OPCMIA Local 598
Ontario figures for concrete & forming, from the first day on site to the top of the trade. Approximate, and worth checking against current collective agreement rates and job postings in your region.
| Stage | Pay | What is going on at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Labourer | $18–24/hr | Placing, raking, pulling forms while you learn to finish. |
| Finisher (244G) | $28–40/hr | Union (OPCMIA/LiUNA) sits at the top with a pension. |
| Foreman / lead | More + truck | |
| Crew owner / contractor | $100k–250k+ | Volume business income — and weather-dependent. |
Two concrete finishers with the same ticket can be twenty dollars an hour apart because they picked different work.
Driveways, slabs, sidewalks, garage pads — production work for builders, priced per square foot, competitive.
Best for: People who want the highest-volume, fastest-entry concrete work.
Foundations, walls, structural formwork — carpentry-adjacent, more commercial/ICI, often unionized.
Best for: People who like the structural, layout side.
Stamped, exposed-aggregate, and polished finishes — craft sold from a portfolio, well off the price war.
Best for: People with an eye who want premium, lower-competition work.
Every figure above is what concrete finishers get paid. It is not what you charge once you run a concrete business. Your rate has to carry the hours you are not on the tools, the truck, the tools themselves, WSIB, insurance, the quote you wrote and lost, and the holdback sitting in someone else's account for 60 days. Contractors who set their rate off their old hourly wage are the ones who work every weekend and still cannot say whether the year was profitable.
The step from paid by the hour to paid by the jobOff the tools: foreman, estimator, superintendent, ACI inspector/testing, or owning a concrete business. The early mornings and the knees-and-back finishing toll push people toward running crews. Decorative and polished work is the off-ramp to higher margins and somewhat easier days — many crews add it as the premium line and never look back.
Wage data, union rate sheets, and the places concrete finishers talk about money openly.
The rates above are the market. The live feed is the market this week: which builders and contractors just pulled a permit or won a contract in Ontario, what they are about to need, and who to call.
Concrete and Forming Jobs in Ontario: Who Is HiringAEC Stack handles incorporation, WSIB, insurance certificates, quoting, invoicing, and chasing the money, so a concrete business runs like one with an office behind it.
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