Yes — but only for the first year, and only if the problem is worse than a specific measurement the government actually publishes. That is the short answer, and it is worth knowing early, because the one-year clock on a new home’s driveway is the shortest of the four warranty periods and it is the one most homeowners find out about too late.
If your home is a few years old and the driveway has cracked, this page tells you where you stand. If it is only a few months old, it tells you what to measure and who to call, this week.
We are a division of Omega 2000, and a fair number of the driveways and garage pads we look at in Calgary belong to people who assumed a ten-year warranty covered everything outside the house. It does not. Here is how it actually splits.
The four warranty periods, in plain language
Every new home built in Alberta has to come with warranty coverage. The coverage is layered, and each layer covers different things for a different length of time:
| Period | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1 year | Defects in materials and labour — how the home was built and what it was built from. This is the layer your driveway, walkway and garage floor live in. Also flooring, staircases, baseboards, cabinets, railings and trim. |
| 2 years | Defects in the delivery and distribution systems — electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation and air conditioning. |
| 5 years | The building envelope: the roof and walls, and the separation between the inside and the outside. Providers must offer you the option to buy an extra two years on this one. |
| 10 years | Major structural components — the frame, including the roof’s structural integrity, and the foundation. |
The word doing the heavy lifting is “structural.” The ten-year layer is about the bones of the house. Your driveway is not a structural component of the house, and neither is the slab your car parks on. Both are exterior concrete, and exterior concrete sits in the one-year materials-and-labour layer.
There are also minimum dollar amounts behind the coverage, which is worth knowing exists even though you will probably never test it: $265,000 for a single-family home, $130,000 for a condominium or multi-family unit, and up to $3.3 million for common property, per building.
When your year actually starts
This catches people out. The coverage begins at whichever of these happens first:
- you move into the home,
- permission to occupy is granted, or
- title transfers to you.
For most Calgary buyers that means possession day, not the day the driveway was poured. And that is the awkward part: in this city, a huge number of homes take possession in winter with the driveway and walkways not yet poured. The concrete goes in the following spring or summer — sometimes months into your warranty year.
So do the arithmetic before you assume you have time. If you took possession in February and the driveway was poured in June, you have got roughly eight months of coverage on concrete that is only a few weeks old. Put the date in your calendar.
The measurements that decide a driveway claim
This is the part almost nobody finds, and it is the reason a claim gets accepted or refused.
Alberta publishes a Construction Performance Guide for new home warranty, and it contains actual tolerances for exterior concrete. Not opinions — numbers. The ones that matter for flatwork:
| What you are looking at | The threshold in the guide |
|---|---|
| A crack in a driveway or walkway | Displacement — one side sitting higher than the other, or pulled apart — of more than 6 mm is excessive |
| Settling of a driveway or walkway | Must not subside more than 50 mm over 3 metres |
| Water sitting on a sloped walkway | Ponding deeper than 6 mm that stays longer than 30 minutes is excessive |
| Surface breaking up | Deterioration affecting more than 10% of the affected panel or panels calls for rectification |
Garage floors are held to the same crack and settlement standards as driveways, with one added instruction in the guide: consideration should be given to the amount of frost in the ground. In Calgary, that qualifier does a lot of work — more on that below.
What this means in practice is that “my driveway has a crack” is not a claim. “My driveway has a crack where one side is now sitting 9 mm higher than the other” is. Before you phone anyone, get a tape measure or a ruler out, take photographs with something in frame for scale, and write down the date.
Note what the guide also says: minor cracks that develop in driveways because of frost heave, erosion, or normal shrinkage are not covered. Concrete cracks. That is not a defect; it is what the material does as it loses moisture and as the ground under it moves. The warranty exists for workmanship and materials, not for physics.
If you are trying to work out whether what you are looking at is normal or not, our guide to the types of concrete cracks and when to worry walks through what different crack patterns mean. That page is about diagnosis. This one is about who pays.
What is definitely not covered
The guide is explicit that landscaping and site grading beyond what the building code prescribes may be excluded from coverage. So:
- Regrading your yard because water pools at the back fence — generally not a warranty matter.
- Sod, trees, beds, retaining walls you had put in after possession — not covered.
- Anything you or a contractor you hired added after you took possession — not covered, because the builder did not build it.
- A patio, extended parking pad, or walkway you added yourself in year two — outside the warranty entirely, though your own contractor’s workmanship warranty may apply.
There is also a category worth naming honestly: surface wear from de-icing products. Calgary homeowners salt their steps and their driveway, and salt is hard on young concrete. If the surface of a first-winter driveway is flaking, the question of cause gets contested quickly. Our page on spalling repair for homeowners explains how surface flaking happens and what can be done about it — and the short version is that a bag of ice melt on brand-new concrete is the fastest way to lose an argument with a warranty provider.
The Calgary wrinkle: frost
The guide’s instruction to consider frost in the ground is not boilerplate here. Calgary sits on ground that moves, and it moves seasonally. A driveway that looks level in September and has a lip at the garage apron in February may be back to level in June.
That has two practical consequences.
First, timing your inspection matters. A settlement measurement taken at the coldest, most heaved point of the year is not the same measurement taken in late summer. If you are documenting a problem, document it more than once, in different seasons, with dates.
Second, a seasonal movement is not automatically a defect. Frost heave that returns to position is the ground doing what Calgary ground does. Permanent settlement — a driveway that has dropped 50 mm over 3 metres and stayed there through a full cycle — is a different conversation.
This is also the reason we usually tell people in a first-year home not to rush into cosmetic repair. Let it go through one winter and one spring so you know whether you are looking at movement or damage.
How to make a claim without losing it
If you have decided you have a real problem, the process is not complicated, but it is unforgiving about paperwork and deadlines.
- Find out who your warranty provider is. It is named in your home’s documents. It is a company, not the government.
- Notify your builder in writing. Email counts. Keep it. Verbal conversations with a site super are not a record.
- Notify the warranty provider in writing too, within the coverage period. Do not wait for the builder to respond first — the clock does not pause while you wait.
- Include measurements, dated photos, and the date you first noticed it. Reference the specific tolerance if you can. A claim that says “6 mm is the threshold and mine measures 11 mm” gets a different reading than one that says “it’s cracked badly.”
- Do not repair it first. Fixing the thing yourself, or hiring someone to, removes the evidence and may end the claim.
- Keep going if you are refused. There is a dispute resolution path, and a refusal from a builder is not the end of the process.
What if your year is already gone?
Most people who read a page like this are past the one-year mark. That is fine — it just changes the question from “who pays” to “what is the right fix.”
At that point it becomes an ordinary condition assessment. A driveway with tight shrinkage cracks and a sound surface usually wants sealing and joint maintenance, not replacement. A driveway that has broken into pieces, lost its surface across whole panels, or settled hard against the garage is a replacement conversation. In between sits resurfacing, which works well on some slabs and is a waste of money on others — our comparison of resurfacing versus replacement sets out how to tell which you have.
The honest framing: warranty coverage is a one-year window on workmanship. After that, concrete is maintained like a roof or a fence — you look after it, and you replace it when it has had its life.
Where this page stops
This page is about the statutory new home warranty and what it does and does not cover on your home’s concrete: the four coverage periods, the published tolerances for driveways, walkways and garage floors, the exclusions, and how to file in time. It does not diagnose whether a particular crack is serious — that is a separate question. It does not cover repair pricing, permits for new concrete work, or the private workmanship guarantee a contractor gives you on a job you commission yourself. And it is not legal advice; if a claim is refused and the amount is significant, talk to someone qualified.
Not sure whether it is a warranty problem or a repair problem?
The fastest way to find out is to have someone look at it who does not have a stake in the answer. If your driveway, walkway, steps or garage floor has cracked, dropped or started breaking up — whether your home is one year old or fifteen — we will come and tell you what we see, what is causing it, and the honest range of what it takes to fix. Have a look at our concrete repair services, or send a few photos and the approximate age of the concrete and we will tell you what you are dealing with before anyone quotes anything.
FAQ
Is my new home’s driveway under warranty in Alberta? Yes, under the one-year materials-and-labour period. Exterior concrete is not a major structural component, so it does not get the ten-year period that covers the frame and foundation.
When does the one year start? At the earliest of: moving in, permission to occupy being granted, or title transferring to you. Not the date the concrete was poured — which matters in Calgary, where driveways are often poured months after winter possession.
How big does a crack have to be to count? Alberta’s Construction Performance Guide treats displacement of more than 6 mm in a driveway or walkway crack as excessive. Minor cracks from frost heave, erosion or normal shrinkage are not covered.
How much settlement is too much? The guide says a driveway or walkway must not subside more than 50 mm over 3 metres.
Is my garage floor treated differently? It is held to the same crack and settlement standards as a driveway, with the added instruction that the amount of frost in the ground should be taken into account.
Is puddling on my walkway a defect? On a sloped walkway, ponding deeper than 6 mm that remains longer than 30 minutes is considered excessive under the guide.
Does the warranty cover my back patio or my landscaping? Generally no. The guide notes that landscaping and site grading beyond what the building code prescribes may be excluded, and anything added after possession is outside the builder’s warranty.
What if the builder says it is normal? Get your own measurements and dated photographs, notify the warranty provider in writing within the coverage period regardless, and use the dispute resolution process if you are refused.
Sources
- Government of Alberta, New home warranty – Overview — https://www.alberta.ca/new-home-warranty-overview
- Government of Alberta, New home warranty — https://www.alberta.ca/new-home-warranty
- Government of Alberta, New home warranty claims — https://www.alberta.ca/new-home-warranty-claims
- Government of Alberta, Construction Performance Guide (new home warranty in Alberta) — https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/992c4887-b14e-4709-93eb-9f09d7e2bd2f/resource/3781b401-3aa8-4be1-ae30-6e2f46ebd306/download/2014-12-15-construction-performance-guide-for-new-home-warranty-in-alberta.pdf