The number that matters is the delivered number
Ask what paving costs in Aruba and the honest answer is another question: costs where, and including what? A rate for the stone alone is genuinely useful for comparing one material against another and genuinely useless for setting a client budget. It answers a question nobody on site is asking. Between the quarry price and a finished terrace sit ocean freight, customs duty, a border tax, clearance, handling, a road leg and a full build-up of materials that never appear in a stone quotation. Build the figure the way the money is actually spent and the budget stops moving on you halfway through the job.
Line one: the stone itself
Start with the material, and start with the things that genuinely change its price rather than the things that feel like they should:
- Stone type and the format you have specified
- Thickness, which drives both material volume and shipping weight
- Finish, since worked faces take more processing than sawn ones
- Whether units are stock sizes or cut to a bespoke schedule
- Order size, because part-pallet quantities never price like full ones
If you want a starting range before any freight or duty is layered on, work from our openly published rate tables and treat that as line one only.
Line two: getting it to Barcadera
Ocean freight is priced against weight and space, and stone is heavy, so this line is a real number rather than a rounding. It is also a line you can influence directly, because thickness, format and how tightly a load is planned all move it. A part load shares a container with other cargo and carries a share of its cost; a full load spreads fixed costs across more square footage. Cargo discharges at Barcadera, Aruba’s cargo port since it officially opened on 12 April 2016, and the routing should say so from the outset. Two schedules with the same square footage can carry very different freight bills, purely because one specified a deeper unit everywhere and the other specified depth only where duty demanded it.
Line three: duty and the border tax
Two government charges apply, and both are calculated on the CIF value, meaning goods plus insurance plus freight:
- Customs duty, which varies roughly between 2 and 22 percent by product line
- Classification, which is what actually decides which end of that band applies
- Turnover tax collected at the border since 1 August 2023 at a combined 7 percent
- That 7 percent split as BBO 2.5, BAVP 1.5 and BAZV 3 percent
- Confirmation of the current rate from your broker before you commit a budget
The line you can design out
One cost here is purely self-inflicted. Where freight and insurance are not shown as separate itemized lines on the invoice, Aruba Customs applies a surcharge of 16.5 percent to the invoice value on shipments from the Americas. A bundled delivered price can therefore be valued upward before duty is even calculated. Insist on an invoice that separates goods, freight and insurance, keep the supporting documents together, and hand your broker a clean set. It costs nothing, it takes one conversation with your supplier before the order is confirmed, and it removes an entire line from the bill.
Line four: clearing, handling and the road leg
Between the quay and the site sits a group of smaller costs that add up to a real number:
- Broker fees and entry preparation
- Terminal handling and any storage if release is slow
- Trucking to site, and a second smaller truck where access is tight
- Lifting equipment at the receiving end, hired or already on site
- Labor to move pallets to where they will actually be laid
None of these is large on its own, and together they are large enough that leaving them out of a budget is how a job goes over on paper before a single unit is bedded.
Line five: what goes under and between
The stone is the visible part of an installed cost rather than the whole of it. Excavation, base build-up, bedding, jointing, edge restraint, drainage and installation labor make up the rest, and they vary far more with site conditions than the stone does. Check the formats behind your square-foot number before comparing quotations, because two prices built on different thicknesses, different bases and different wastage assumptions are not comparable figures at all. Ask each quotation to state the paving depth, the base build-up assumed, the jointing method and the wastage allowance, and the comparison becomes possible in about five minutes. Without those four items you are comparing confidence rather than cost.
Where the savings actually are
Real savings in Aruba are not hidden in the stone price. They sit in a short list of planning decisions:
- Classification confirmed with your broker before anything ships
- An invoice formatted so no valuation uplift can apply to it
- Thickness matched to genuine duty rather than over-specified site-wide
- One planned load instead of three unplanned part shipments
- Delivery booked against real site readiness, so nothing accrues storage
There is one more saving that costs nothing to take. Aruba sits outside the main Atlantic hurricane track, so there is no storm-season mobilization to price into a program, and work can be scheduled across the whole year rather than squeezed into a window. Every one of those savings is a planning decision, and all of them are still available before you order.