There is no square foot rate that survives contact with a real driveway. Two drives the same size in the same Atlanta subdivision can be a long way apart on price, and the reasons are worth understanding before you take the cheapest number you are given.
Pace the length and the width. A normal adult pace is close enough to three feet that the answer will be within a few percent, which is all you need to sanity check a quote.
Length in paces times three, width in paces times three, multiply the two. Do the apron at the road separately if it flares out, and do the parking pad separately if there is one, because both get missed and both get billed.
Now you know roughly what you own. Anyone who quotes you without knowing that number is guessing, and a guess that is low gets corrected on the day.
This is the line that surprises people who have read northern pricing advice. Up in Ohio the crack filling is routinely the largest part of a residential job, because a freeze and thaw winter opens cracks faster than anything else does. Atlanta does not have that winter. What Atlanta has is sun, damp shade, and a lot of organic debris.
So the bigger line here is getting the surface ready. A sunny drive that has oxidised has to be cleaned back to something the sealer can grip. A shaded drive may need the algae and moss killed and lifted, which is a treatment and a wait, not a pass with a blower. A drive with red clay washed onto it from the beds has to have that off, because sealer over clay film bonds to the clay and comes up with it.
A quote that does not mention preparation on a drive that plainly needs it is not cheaper. It is the same job with a step left out.
A flat drive takes one pass with a squeegee. A steep one takes more material, because sealer run downhill has to be worked back, and it takes longer because it is done in smaller sections to stop it moving before it grabs.
Anything with a real pitch to a basement garage, which is common north of the city, is a slower job than its square footage suggests. It should be measured on the driveway rather than off a satellite image, because an aerial photograph has no idea a drive drops fifteen feet.
Crack filling is its own line, priced by the linear foot, and on most Atlanta residential drives it is a smaller share of the total than the preparation is. On a drive that has been left a long time, or one at the bottom of a slope where water collects, it can be the other way round.
Either way it should be measured rather than described. Cracks are countable. A quote that folds them into a round number is a quote that has not looked.
A drive that can be closed for two days is cheaper to seal than the same drive done in halves so a car can stay on it. Long wooded drives set back from the road cost more to reach with material than a short suburban one.
None of that is a surcharge invented at the door. It is the difference between one visit and two, and you should be told which one you are buying.
There are four ways to make a sealcoating number small, and all of them cost you within two years.
Watering the product down. Sealer thinned past the manufacturer's ratio covers the same area for less money and wears through in a season. You cannot see it going down and you cannot see it the week after.
Spraying instead of squeegeeing. Faster, less material, and it sits on top instead of being worked into the surface.
Skipping the preparation. The largest single line on an Atlanta job and the easiest to leave out, because the driveway looks the same either way on the day.
Sealing something that should not be sealed. The cheapest quote on a failing drive is still the most expensive way to spend that money.
What it costs is a few hundred dollars for a normal residential drive rather than a few thousand. The exact number comes back after the asphalt is measured and read, and if the honest answer is that it can wait a year, that is the answer you get.
One full strength coat is the standard job and it is what most Atlanta driveways should get. A second coat is not an upgrade tier, it is a specific answer to a specific surface.
It earns its money on a drive that has been left in full sun long enough to go properly porous, because the first coat is largely absorbed by a thirsty surface and the second is the one that actually sits on top and protects it. On a drive that is still in reasonable shape, a second coat is a thicker film that takes longer to cure and is more likely to track in summer heat, which is worse rather than better.
If two coats are being quoted, the reason should be something about your driveway, not something about the package.
