Permeable concrete in New South Wales

No two councils want the same thing

There's no single stormwater rule for permeable concrete in NSW. Every council writes its own water sensitive urban design controls and its own on-site detention numbers, and both change the moment you cross a council boundary. A driveway in Ryde and a driveway in Parramatta can face genuinely different targets. Nobody here pours to a state template. We design to your council's own controls, read the drainage conditions straight off your development consent, and size the pavement and the base underneath it to meet them. For jobs in the Sydney metro area specifically, our Sydney page goes deeper, suburb by suburb.

Clay moves the work, it doesn't stop it

Clay is common across Sydney and much of regional NSW, and clay doesn't take water quickly. That's not a reason to rule out the job. It just shifts the work into the base. The Permcon slab itself passes rain through at 8,000 to 10,000 mm/hr, so the surface is never the bottleneck. Underneath, a bed of clean screenings does the storing: 28 litres per square metre for every 100 mm of screenings, at 85 per cent design capacity. Where the ground genuinely can't soak it away fast enough, an under-drain releases the surplus at a controlled rate, which is exactly what an on-site detention tank is there to do anyway. Outside Victoria we pour with 10 mm aggregate. Full profiles, estimated loading by thickness and base storage figures sit on our technical page, and any hydraulic consultant on the job is welcome to them.

Where it turns up on NSW sites

• Infill and dual-occupancy driveways, where site coverage and landscaped area are already tight and a detention tank would eat the front yard.
• Car parks on commercial, school and community sites carrying detention and treatment conditions. Delivery trucks generally call for a thicker profile: see our car park page.
• Footpaths and public realm, where council wants water and air still reaching the roots of the street trees.

That's the shape permeable concrete takes across NSW: a driveway that keeps an infill block inside its coverage numbers, a car park that shrinks or removes a detention tank, a footpath that finally gets water to the trees instead of past them. Ask and we'll point you to comparable jobs.

The track record and how we work

Our Sydney and regional NSW team pours Permcon at the standard 125 mm slab, going thicker only where the vehicles on it ask for it. Nationally, we've poured over 100,000 m² of permeable surface since 2018, on driveways, car parks, council paths and sports courts.

Send us the address, the area, and a drainage plan or your consent conditions if you've got them. An estimator from the NSW team calls you back, then comes out to the site: checks fall, access, what the ground will actually take, and what council has asked for. You get a real figure for that site: slab thickness, base depth, any under-drain, written down. If a consultant needs the storage figures for their own design, we send them through.

Upkeep after that is light. A look each month for leaves and sediment. A sweep once a year. The slab carries a 10-year structural warranty. Tell us about the site and the NSW team will call you back.