Josh Hunt@iAmJoshHunt
How much does it cost to fill a pothole?
Not the council cost. Not the contractor cost. Not the system cost. The actual, physical cost. Materials and labour. Tarmac in a hole and a person to put it there.
I wrote recently about how Britain's institutions have gradually turned inward, spending more energy managing themselves than delivering for the public. That thread looked at the pattern from above. This one starts from the ground. Literally.
The data in this thread comes primarily from the 2025 ALARM survey, published by the Asphalt Industry Alliance, which is the source for all pothole and road condition figures cited below. A newer 2026 survey has since been published with some figures having worsened further. Additional data is drawn from Freedom of Information requests published by Citroën UK and vehicle damage estimates from the AA.
A typical pothole might be about half a metre across and 40 to 50mm deep. That's a rough illustration, not a universal standard, but it gives us a starting point. It needs roughly 25kg of material to fill. A bag of cold lay tarmac costs between £7 and £15 from any builders' merchant. Hot mix asphalt, the better long-term option, costs £40 to £70 a tonne, enough to cover 8 square metres. The raw material for a single pothole costs somewhere between £5 and £15.
The labour is similarly modest. Repair times vary by method. The Local Government Association notes that hot asphalt patching takes around 10 to 30 minutes per pothole. Cold lay can be driven on almost immediately. Specialist machines can prepare a repair in under ten minutes. Even with a manual two-person crew doing preparation, filling, and compaction, the hands-on work takes a fraction of an hour. At standard labour rates, that's roughly £10 to £20 of human time per repair.
So the total physical cost, materials and hands-on labour, to repair one pothole is in the region of £15 to £30. For the purposes of this thread, let's use £25, the conservative end of that range. This is an illustrative estimate, not an official benchmark. Costs vary by method, geography, scale, and equipment. But it gives us a reasonable baseline for what the physical work actually involves.
Now here's what it actually costs.
According to the 2025 ALARM survey, the average reported cost of filling a pothole in England and Wales is £72.37. In London, reactive repairs average £106.52. Analysis by Citroën UK, using Freedom of Information data from 145 councils, found the reported cost ranged from £4.13 in Cardiff to £656 in the Shetland Islands. Some councils spend over £300 per repair.
And here's what makes that comparison even more striking. The ALARM survey notes that its reported pothole fill figures exclude relevant staff, overhead, and traffic management costs. The £72.37 is not the full system cost. Because those figures are excluded, the full all-in cost would be higher still.
Using our rough illustrative estimate of around £25 for materials and hands-on labour, the physical work may account for only around a third of the reported repair cost. And since the reported cost understates the true total, the share going to the physical work is likely even smaller.
Where does the rest go?
Traffic management. Cones, signs, lane closures, permits. Inspection regimes, before and after. Procurement and contractor management. Health and safety compliance documentation. Reporting, logging, performance tracking. Insurance and liability. Council management overhead. Contractor profit margins.
Now let me be clear. Some of these costs are legitimate. You need traffic management to keep road workers safe. You need inspection to make sure the repair holds. Contractors need to make a margin or they wouldn't do the work. Insurance exists for good reason. Nobody is arguing that the system cost should be zero.
But when the reported cost is nearly three times the physical work, and the true cost is higher still, something has gone wrong. Not because any single element of the overhead is unreasonable, but because the cumulative weight of process, compliance, procurement, administration, and contractor margins has grown to the point where it dwarfs the thing it exists to support.
A reasonable overhead on a £25 job might be 50%. Maybe even 100% for complex or safety-critical work. But nearly 200%, before you've even counted everything? At some point the system stops supporting the work and starts consuming it.
And here's the consequence of that weight. Every pound absorbed by the system rather than spent on the work is a pothole that doesn't get filled. Every pothole that doesn't get filled is a road that deteriorates further. Every road that deteriorates further generates more vehicle damage, more compensation claims, more reactive callouts, and more cost. The system's own weight makes the problem worse, which makes the system more expensive, which means even fewer potholes get filled. The overhead feeds the backlog and the backlog feeds the overhead.
As the asphalt industry itself notes, the material is "a low proportion" of the total repair cost. The physical input that actually fixes the pothole is the smallest part of what we spend on it.
Now scale that up.
According to the ALARM survey, 1.9 million potholes were filled across England and Wales last year. One every 18 seconds. The total reported repair bill was £137.4 million. On top of that, councils spent a further £37.3 million dealing with pothole-related compensation claims, of which £17.6 million was staff costs to process the paperwork. Not the compensation itself. The administration of the compensation.
And it gets worse. Because the way the system is organised actively makes it more expensive.
The ALARM survey breaks costs down by repair type. Planned repairs, where councils schedule work in advance and send crews on efficient routes, cost an average of £57.87 per pothole in England. Reactive repairs, where a crew is sent out in response to a single report, cost £81.62. In Wales the gap is even wider: £54.25 planned versus £92.89 reactive. In London, reactive repairs cost nearly double the planned rate.
But most repairs are reactive, because the system isn't resourced or organised to plan effectively. The most expensive way to fix a pothole is the way we fix most potholes.
Citroën UK's analysis, based on their Freedom of Information data, suggested that if every council standardised at the most efficient repair method, the same national budget could have fixed significantly more potholes. Their estimate was 33 million, seventeen times the 1.9 million actually done. Even if that figure is optimistic, it points to a striking gap between what the money could achieve and what it currently does.
Meanwhile, the backlog to bring all roads in England and Wales up to standard now stands at £16.8 billion according to the ALARM survey. More than half of all roads have less than fifteen years of structural life remaining. Roads are resurfaced, on average, once every 93 years. The backlog would take 12 years to clear. And the AA estimates that pothole damage costs drivers around £645 million a year in vehicle repairs.
So the country spends £175 million a year filling potholes and processing claims. The damage to drivers costs £645 million. And the backlog to fix the problem properly is £16.8 billion. The cost of the roads deteriorating is many times higher than the cost of maintaining them. But the system can't get out of its own way long enough to do it.
That is not just a funding problem, although chronic underfunding is real and the ALARM survey rightly identifies it as a major factor. But it is also a system problem. Because even within the funding that exists, the ratio of physical work to system cost has become badly distorted.
Now here's why I'm telling you this.
The pothole is not the point. The pothole is the metaphor.
I've spent months documenting this same pattern across Britain's major institutions. The NHS, where the system around treating patients consumes a growing share of the budget and the legal costs of arguing about failures can exceed the cost of the care itself. Defence, where the procurement apparatus has become so complex that major projects routinely run years late and billions over budget. Education, where decades of deferred maintenance turned cheap early fixes into a £13.8 billion backlog. Local government, where councils spend billions on temporary accommodation partly because social housing was never built at the scale required, and where every £1 invested in a social home generates an estimated £2.84 in economic value.
Every case is different in its detail. But the pattern underneath is always the same. The physical cost of doing the work is modest. The system wrapped around the work is enormous. And the cost of the system failing to do the work is larger still.
At some point you have to ask a simple question. If the work itself is straightforward and the costs are modest, and the consequences of not doing it are enormous, why can't we just find better ways to do the thing?
Not no oversight. Not no safety. Not no accountability. But a system where the majority of the money goes to the work rather than the apparatus that surrounds it. Where a crew can fill a hole without generating more cost in administration than in tarmac. Where the goal of the system is to fix the road, not to document the process of considering whether to fix the road.
This is the hidden arithmetic of British public life. A country that spends record amounts and gets deteriorating results. Not because the work is expensive. But because the system that surrounds the work has become more expensive than the work itself.
EY has estimated that the productivity gap between the public and private sectors is costing the economy £80 billion a year. But £80 billion is an abstraction. A pothole makes it real. A rough estimate of £25 in physical work. A reported repair cost of £72 that doesn't even capture the full overhead. £645 million in damage because the system can't fill the holes fast enough. And a £16.8 billion backlog that nobody can afford to clear.
The tarmac was never the expensive part. The system around it was. And until we're willing to look at both the funding and the machinery that consumes it, nothing changes.
