Most exterior cleaners will happily take your money to “remove” an oil stain from a driveway. We would rather tell you the truth first: unless the surface is very well sealed or the tile has a closed pore, an oil stain almost never comes out completely — not by us, and not by anyone.
Concrete, unsealed pavers and terracotta are porous — think of them as a very hard sponge. Dirt, moss and grime sit on the surface, which is why pressure cleaning works so well on them. Oil does the opposite. It soaks down into the pore structure, sometimes millimetres deep, and then it sets.
A pressure washer only cleans what it can reach. Once the oil is below the surface, blasting harder does not pull it back up — it just wears the concrete away around it, which can leave a lighter patch shaped exactly like the stain you were trying to hide.
Degreasers help, but only with the oil they can actually make contact with. Each application lifts a bit more of what is near the top, and each one does less than the last. At some point you are paying for a result you can no longer see.
Unless it is on a very well sealed surface or a closed pore tile, we can usually never fully remove oil stains — and nobody can. The best we can do is sometimes make them significantly lighter. Please do not expect an amazing result, if any.
Lighter, not gone. If a cleaner shows you a driveway that came up spotless, look closely — the concrete has usually been ground back, acid etched or resurfaced, not cleaned.
Oil treatment is normally added to a driveway or pressure clean rather than sold on its own — you get a clean driveway either way, and the stain is lighter than it was.
Clean the whole driveway. A uniformly clean slab makes a stain read as a mark rather than as neglect. This is the single biggest visual improvement and it is the one that actually works.
Seal it afterwards. A sealed driveway is the only reliable defence. Once the sealer is down, the next spill sits on top of it and wipes away. It also keeps the concrete looking washed for far longer.
Deal with fresh spills fast. Cat litter or sand on a fresh spill, left overnight to draw the oil up, then a degreaser, will do more than anything we can do six months later.
If it truly has to go, it is a concreting job. Grinding, resurfacing or replacing the affected section is the only guaranteed fix. That is a job for a concreter, not a cleaner, and we will happily tell you that rather than take a booking we cannot deliver on.
