Is Microcement Expensive? What It Costs to Do It Yourself

Short answer: for materials, budget about $7 a square foot for our Core system and about $14 a square foot for Reinforced. That is what you pay to buy the product and apply it yourself. There is no trade account, no certification and no installer day rate on top.

The longer answer is more useful, because the price per square foot moves a lot depending on how big the job is.

What you are actually buying

Microcement is not one product. It is a system of coats that go on in order, and which coats you need depends on the surface.

Core is primer, microcement, sealer. It covers interior walls, bare concrete floors and indoor fireplaces.

Reinforced adds fiberglass mesh bedded into a structural build coat. You need it for anything wet, anything outdoors, and any floor that is not bare concrete — including straight over old tile. The mesh and build coat are what stop movement underneath reaching your finish.

Reinforced costs roughly double Core. The build coat is most of that difference, and it is doing the work that keeps grout lines from telegraphing through.

What a real job costs

These are worked from our own coverage rates, with the 10% overage we build into every estimate.

Job	System	Area	Materials	Per sq ft
Shower floor only	Reinforced	40 sq ft	$2,401	$60.02
Shower surround	Reinforced	100 sq ft	$2,401	$24.01
Bathroom, walls and floor	Reinforced	250 sq ft	$3,551	$14.20
Feature wall	Core	150 sq ft	$1,577	$10.51
Living room floor	Core	400 sq ft	$2,855	$7.14
Open-plan floor	Core	600 sq ft	$4,432	$7.39

Why small jobs cost so much more per square foot

Look at the first two rows. A 40 sq ft shower floor and a 100 sq ft shower surround cost exactly the same — $2,401 — because both need one unit of each product and you cannot buy half a pail.

That is the single most important thing to understand about pricing a microcement job. The per-square-foot number only gets good once you are using most of what you bought.

Two practical consequences:

• Do the whole room, not one surface. Adding the walls to a shower floor costs you almost nothing extra in material.
• Do rooms together. If you are planning a bathroom now and a hallway next year, doing both off one order is dramatically cheaper per square foot than two separate orders.

Our material calculator works out the exact products and quantities for your area, so you can see this for your own job before you commit.

Is microcement cheaper than tile?

On materials alone, usually no. You can buy tile for less per square foot than microcement, and if you are comparing a box of tile against a pallet of our product, tile wins.

That is not where the money goes on a real job.

Tiling a bathroom over an existing tiled floor normally means tearing the old floor out first. That is demolition, disposal, and often a subfloor repair once you see what is underneath. Then it is a tiler's time, and a second trade if the waterproofing needs redoing.

Microcement goes on at about 2 mm over what is already there. No demolition, no skip in the driveway, no disposal. If you are doing the work yourself, there is no labour line at all.

So the honest comparison is: microcement materials cost more, total project cost is usually lower, and the gap gets wider the more demolition the tile job would have needed.

What the price does not include

We would rather you knew this before you ordered.

• Tools. A stainless trowel, a mixing paddle and drill, sandpaper and a roller. If you do not own them, budget a couple of hundred dollars once.
• Your time. Coats go on close together, so a room is days rather than the weeks a tile job takes — but they are real days.
• Colorant, if you want something other than the base tone.

Why we can sell it to you at all

Most microcement in the United States is sold only to certified installers. You take the training, you get the trade account, then you can buy the product. That is a reasonable model for a company building an installer network, and our sister company Microcement USA runs exactly that way for professionals.

Microvella is the other option. Same category of product, sold direct, no licence and no proof you work in the industry. You choose your system and you order it.

Microvella ships late 2026. Join the waitlist and we will email you the day it is ready to order.

Related: Microcement for homeowners and DIY · For contractors and home builders · Shop the full system