Most driveways that get sealed did not need it, and some that badly need it get left. In Atlanta the tests are not the ones you will read on a northern website, because what wears asphalt out here is not ice.
This is the first question in Atlanta and it decides everything after it. A city with this much canopy has two completely different populations of driveway, and they fail in opposite ways.
Full sun. Ultraviolet is the problem. It breaks down the binder holding the stone together, the surface goes from black to grey to pale, and eventually the stone starts letting go. This happens faster here than it does up north because there is simply more sun landing on it for more of the year.
Under canopy. Almost no UV, so the surface can still look dark years later, and people assume it is fine. The problem there is damp that never gets a chance to dry, plus leaf litter, tannin staining, and algae or moss in the low spots. Sealing over that is sealing over a slick, and it will not bond.
A lot of north metro drives are half and half, shaded at the house and open at the road. It is normal for one end to need work and the other not to.
Press a palm flat on the surface in the sunny section and drag it a foot. If your hand comes away grey and gritty, the binder has oxidised and the stone at the surface is no longer properly held. That grit is your driveway leaving.
This is called ravelling, and in this climate it is the thing to look for rather than fine cracking. A drive that is ravelling is at the point where sealing actually buys you something, because you are replacing the binder that the sun took off the top.
If your hand comes away clean and the surface is still dark, it can wait, whatever the flyer on your door says.
A bucket of water on a healthy surface beads and sits. On a surface that has opened up it goes dark immediately and soaks in.
Soaking in matters more here than the rainfall totals suggest it should. Atlanta takes around fifty inches of rain a year, more than most of the Midwest, and a surface that lets water through is handing all of it to whatever is underneath. Which in most of this metro is red clay, and clay holds water rather than draining it.
Green or black staining, a surface that stays damp two days after rain, or a slick feel underfoot is algae. It is extremely common on shaded Atlanta drives and it is not a sealing problem, it is a cleaning problem that has to be solved first.
Anyone who quotes a shaded, mossy drive without mentioning what happens to the growth is quoting a coat that will lift. Ask.
Hairline cracking is worth filling before it collects water and grit. Anything you can put a finger into is past filling and into repair.
The pattern to worry about is a web of interconnected cracks in the wheel tracks, which means the base under that section has gone rather than the surface. Sealer over that is money spent on a darker colour for one season. On red clay this shows up at the bottom of a slope and next to the beds, where the water collects.
Grey, gritty to the hand, water soaking in. Yes, and it is overdue rather than early.
Dark, beading, no grit. No. Ask again next year. A coat on a sound surface is not doing anything except costing you.
Dark but damp, shaded, slick. Maybe, but the growth comes off first and that is a separate conversation from sealing.
Cracks you can put a finger in, or a web in the wheel tracks. No. That needs repair, and sealing it first wastes both jobs.
Send the address and we will tell you which of those four it is, including when the answer is that you should keep your money.
The usual advice is two to three years and it is a national average that fits almost nobody. In Atlanta the same driveway can want sealing on two different schedules from one end to the other.
The open section takes the sun all day and is the part that greys, goes gritty and wants doing sooner. The shaded section keeps its colour far longer, because the thing that bleaches it is not reaching it, and sealing that end on the same cycle as the sunny end is usually paying for a coat the asphalt did not need.
Turning hard in the same spot beats both. The apron at the road and the patch in front of a garage door take more punishment from steering than the rest of the drive sees in years, and those are the places to judge from rather than the middle.
Which means the honest answer to how often is that you look, using the tests above, and you seal it when it asks rather than when a calendar says so.
