A driveway floods for one reason: the water arriving on it has nowhere to go. Either the grade is sending it to the wrong place, or the drain that should be taking it is undersized, blocked, or was never put in.
It is worth being clear about which problem you have, because the fix for one does nothing for the other.
This is surface water, not your perimeter drains
Perimeter drains sit underground around the footing and handle water in the soil against your foundation. We covered how those fail in five signs your perimeter drains are failing.
A flooding driveway is a different system. Hard surfaces shed water fast and all at once, so a driveway has to move a lot of it in a short time, on the surface, to somewhere it is allowed to go. When people say their drains are backed up in November, roughly half the time the drains are fine and the surface water never had a route in the first place.
The two can feed each other. Ponded water at the top of a driveway soaks in beside the house and ends up as a foundation problem. But you fix the surface first.
What usually causes it
The grade runs the wrong way. Driveways are supposed to fall away from the garage and the house. Over time, settlement, a repaved apron, or a garage slab poured slightly high can flatten or reverse that. Water then sits at the lowest point, which on many properties is the garage door.
There is no catch basin, or it stopped working. A lot of older driveways rely on one grate at the low end. Fill it with fir needles and silt through a wet October and it is decorative. Lift the lid and look. If it is full to the rim, that is your answer for this year, though not for why it flooded the first time.
The line under it is compromised. The pipe running from the basin can be crushed, root-filled, disconnected, or laid with too little fall. A basin that drains slowly after you clear it is usually a pipe problem, not a basin problem.
The ground underneath cannot take anything. A driveway is built on compacted base by design, and compacted ground does not absorb. On clay, which is most of the Lower Mainland, almost none of the rain that lands on a driveway soaks away. It all has to be moved.
The volume changed. A new roof line, a bigger garage, a patio where lawn used to be, or a neighbour regrading uphill can all add water to a driveway that was handling its own load fine. Nothing on your property broke, it just got more than it was built for.
What to check during the next downpour
Not a drizzle. Wait for a real one, put a coat on, and go stand outside for ten minutes.
Watch where the water actually runs, not where you assume it runs. Follow it from the top of the driveway down. Find the point where it stops moving and starts spreading, because that is the low spot and that is where the fix has to start.
Check whether water is coming off anything else onto the driveway: a downspout discharging onto the slab, a lawn shedding across it, runoff from next door. Look at the catch basin while it is raining rather than after, since a basin that takes water and then backs up is telling you something a dry inspection will not.
Take a photo. Two weeks of dry weather makes everybody forget the shape of the puddle.
What fixing it involves
It depends on what the walk-around finds.
If the grade is wrong, the surface has to be lifted and rebuilt to fall the right way. There is no patch for this. Adding a drain at the bottom of a slope that runs toward the house just moves the puddle a few feet.
If the route is missing, the work is a catch basin or a trench drain across the low point, a line with real fall on it, and somewhere legitimate for that line to discharge. Where it is allowed to go is not a free choice and it is worth sorting at quoting time rather than after.
If the base has failed and the surface is sunken and cracked, you are rebuilding the driveway rather than draining it. That is excavation and base work with a new surface on top.
If the volume is the problem, the answer is often catching the water earlier, higher up the property, rather than doing anything to the driveway at all.
Why the cheap fix tends not to hold
Most driveway flooding gets treated by cleaning the basin. That works until the next storm drops more than the basin can pass, which on a wet coast is a matter of weeks.
The thing that actually decides whether a driveway floods is the shape of the ground and whether there is a working route off it. Both are buried under the surface, both cost more than a bag of gravel, and both are why a driveway that was done properly does not turn into a pond every November.
We do driveways and the drainage under them across the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley, and because we dig it ourselves the grade and the water get sorted together rather than blamed on each other. You can see recent work here.
Send a photo of where it ponds, taken while it is raining if you can, and we will come look. The quote is free.