The usual checklist won’t help you here. Licensed, insured, references, how long have you been trading. Every contractor answers all of those the same way, and none of the answers tell you whether they can actually polish concrete.
These questions do, because the wrong answers are hard to fake and the right ones are hard to rehearse.
We polish floors, so treat this as interested advice rather than neutral advice. It’s still worth having, and most of it applies whoever you hire. Nine questions follow, roughly in order of how much the answer tells you about who you’re dealing with. If you’d rather just have someone look at your floor instead, request a free estimate. Someone comes out.
Why the standard checklist doesn’t separate anyone
Generic contractor questions exist to filter out people who shouldn’t be working at all. That’s a low bar, and most companies clear it.
Look at any guide to hiring a concrete contractor and you’ll find the same list: how many years have you been trading, can I see a portfolio, can I speak to previous clients, do you carry insurance. Ask those of four companies and you’ll get four sets of yeses.
Concrete polishing is a narrow, sequential trade where the result depends almost entirely on decisions made in the first two days. Preparation before grinding. Grit stages in order. Densifier given time to react. A contractor who takes shortcuts at any of those produces a floor that looks identical on handover day and different two years later.
None of that is visible in a portfolio, because every portfolio photo was taken on handover day. A gallery tells you a company can make a floor look good once. It cannot tell you whether the floor still looks good three years later, which is the thing you are actually buying.
So the questions worth asking are the ones about process and judgement, not credentials.
Is polishing your main business or one of several things you do
This is the single most useful question, and it’s the one people ask least.
Plenty of flooring companies list polished concrete alongside coatings, overlays, staining, stamped work and sealing. That’s a legitimate way to run a business. It also means the person grinding your floor may have done it a handful of times between other jobs, and that the company has a financial reason to steer you toward whichever product suits them this month.
A specialist has no second option to sell. If polishing is wrong for your slab, they have to say so and lose the job, which is a useful thing to know about whoever you’re talking to.
Ask how many floors they’ve polished, not how many years they’ve been in business. Those are different numbers and only one of them is relevant.
A useful follow-up: what do you do when a customer asks for something you don’t offer. A specialist will name it and refer it on. A generalist will find a way to sell you something, because they have something to sell.
What grit will you start at, and how did you decide
The technical question a generalist can’t answer, and the fastest way to find out whether someone has done this before.
Coarse tooling comes in different bonds, and the right one depends on how hard the slab is. A soft slab needs a hard bond, because soft concrete would clog a soft tool. A hard, tightly troweled slab needs the opposite. Get it wrong and you either waste passes achieving nothing or leave a scratch pattern that no later stage removes.
A good answer sounds uncertain. I’d need to see it. Probably somewhere around here, but I’d test a patch first and adjust. That’s someone describing a real decision.
A bad answer is a single number with no conditions attached, or a change of subject. Neither means the person is dishonest. It usually means they’re quoting a process they learned rather than one they’ve had to think about.
You don’t need to understand the answer. You need to hear whether it has conditions in it.
Who actually does the work
Ask whether the crew that quotes is the crew that grinds, and whether any of it is subcontracted.
Subcontracting isn’t dishonest and plenty of good work gets done that way. What it does mean is that the person who assessed your slab, made promises about the finish and understood the compromises may not be the person operating the machine. Anything they noticed and didn’t write down is lost.
On a job where the assessment drives everything, that handover is where expectations go missing. The person who noticed the level change between two rooms and decided how to handle it needs to be there when the grinder reaches it.
We don’t subcontract, which is easy to say and worth verifying with anyone who says it. Ask who will be in the building and whether they’re employees.
What will you tell me if my floor isn’t a good candidate
This is the question that reveals the most, and almost nobody asks it.
Some slabs aren’t worth polishing. Heavy structural cracking, movement that hasn’t resolved, a surface troweled too tight, aggregate at inconsistent depths, an unresolved moisture source. A contractor who has been doing this a while has turned work down for all of those.
Ask when they last did, and what the floor was. A specific answer means it happened. A vague one, or a confident assurance that any floor can be polished, tells you they either haven’t been doing this long or aren’t going to tell you the truth about yours.
The honest version sounds unimpressive: this floor will polish, but there’s a seam through the middle of the living room where the addition meets the original and it will show. There’s a whole page on when polished concrete is the wrong answer, and a contractor who can’t produce their own version of that list is selling rather than assessing.
Will you give me samples rather than photographs
Grinding depth and sheen are two separate decisions, and both look different in person than on a screen.
Photographs are lit, and a lit floor reads glossier and more uniform than the same floor in your hallway on a grey afternoon. Aggregate exposure is particularly hard to judge from an image, because the scale is wrong and the colour balance is somebody else’s.
Ask for physical samples at the finish levels you’re considering. It’s a small request and it separates companies that expect you to choose properly from companies that expect you to choose fast.
Better still, ask whether they can grind a test patch in a corner of your own slab. Your aggregate is not the aggregate in their sample box, and on a floor you’ll live with for decades that difference is worth an hour of someone’s time.
About certifications and warranties
Two things every other guide tells you to ask about, and both need a bit of unpacking.
Certifications first. Real ones exist in this trade, they take documented hours and examinations to obtain, and they can be verified. A contractor who holds one has demonstrably done a lot of this work.
The useful question isn’t whether they have one. It’s what it involved. How many hours, what was examined, does it need renewing. A specific answer tells you something. A logo on a website tells you nothing, because nobody checks.
Absence of a certification isn’t a red flag on its own. Plenty of experienced crews never pursued one. What matters is whether the rest of the answers hold up.
Warranties are the more interesting one, because the standard advice doesn’t transfer.
Every guide says get a written warranty. That advice comes from coating work, where it makes sense: a coating is a layer bonded to concrete, and the thing that goes wrong is the layer separating. A warranty covers that.
A polished floor is the slab. Nothing was added, so there’s no layer to fail and no separation to warrant against. What can go wrong is preparation done badly, and the effect of that shows up as a floor that looks fine on day one and wrong in year three.
No warranty catches that in time. The earlier questions do, which is why they matter more here than the paperwork does.
What will the quote change if you find something unexpected
Preparation is where the cost lives, and some of it is genuinely not knowable until the covering comes up.
That’s not an excuse for open-ended pricing. It is a reason to ask, before signing anything, what happens if the tile turns out to be over two layers of adhesive rather than one. A good answer describes the process: they stop, tell you, and give you a revised figure before continuing.
A bad answer is either a promise that nothing will change, which nobody can make honestly, or a shrug about additional charges with no method attached.
Get it in writing either way. Not as a legal precaution, but because writing it down forces the specificity that makes the answer useful.
There’s more on which cost variables are knowable and which aren’t, if you want to understand a quote before you receive one.
The questions we cover elsewhere
Three more are worth asking and each has its own answer at length.
Do you test slab moisture, and with what method. Surface tests and in-slab tests measure different things, and the method matters more than the fact of testing. That question, and what a high reading should trigger, is covered on the moisture page.
What happens at the end of the floor’s life. Every flooring option has an exit cost and it almost never appears on a quote. The durability post explains why that difference is usually larger than the difference in installation price.
Have you actually seen the slab. This one shouldn’t need asking, but online quote forms have made it necessary. Nobody can price a floor from a description, and any figure produced without a site visit was produced without the information that decides it.
What a good answer sounds like
Specific, qualified, and occasionally disappointing.
Good answers contain conditions. This depends on what we find under the tile. That’s likely but I’d want to see it wet. We can do that, but it will show where the two pours meet. The qualifications are the expertise, because each one is a thing they have seen go wrong before.
Bad answers are smooth and unconditional. Any concrete can be polished. It’ll look just like the photo. We can start Monday. Those are answers designed to close rather than to inform, and the gap between them and reality appears after the deposit.
The one exception is pricing. A contractor who won’t give you a number after seeing the floor is being evasive. A contractor who won’t give you a number before seeing it is being honest, and the difference is worth understanding.
The same applies to timelines. Anyone quoting a start date before they’ve tested the slab is quoting a date they may not be able to keep, because a high moisture reading can move it by months.
When to walk away
Three answers should end the conversation.
A published per-square-foot rate quoted as final without a site visit. It means either they haven’t understood the job or they intend to revise it later.
Anyone who can’t describe their preparation sequence. Not in detail, just in order. If the grit stages and the densifier timing come out muddled, they haven’t done many.
Any claim that a coating and a polished floor are the same thing with different names. They are structurally different products with different failure modes, and a contractor who blurs that is either confused or selling the one with the better margin.
None of the above requires you to know anything about concrete. It requires you to notice whether the answers have edges on them. The people who do this well are usually the ones who tell you the least comfortable version first.
Established 2012, working across Austin and Central Texas. Fully insured, no subcontractors, and estimates are free.
Call (512) 900-5938 or request a free estimate. We’ll answer every one of the above about your specific floor.