If it moves underfoot, that is the urgent one.

What a soft spot actually is

Asphalt is a flexible pavement, but it flexes as a system with the compacted base beneath it. Where it moves independently, there is nothing solid underneath — a void, or saturated base material that has lost its bearing capacity.

You can often feel it before you can see it. Walking the driveway and feeling a section give slightly, or watching a tire deflect the surface as a car rolls over it, is the earliest available warning.

What comes next is predictable: the unsupported asphalt fatigues, alligator cracking appears over the area, and then it breaks through.

Why it happens

Water in the base. The most common cause by far. Saturated granular loses strength, and freeze-thaw creates and enlarges voids.

Insufficient or uncompacted base. The material was never dense enough to carry load and has continued consolidating unevenly.

A washout. A leaking service line or a poorly directed downspout gradually carrying fines out from under the surface.

Settled backfill, particularly near the garage or over a service trench.

The fix, and why it has to go deep

The affected area is cut out square and excavated to find how far the problem extends, which is nearly always further than the surface suggests.

The cause gets identified — if water is getting in, the surface repair alone will fail again. That may mean correcting grade, extending a downspout, or installing drainage.

Then geotextile, granular compacted in lifts, and asphalt in base and surface course tied into the surrounding surface.

Filling a soft spot from the top without excavating is the repair that always comes back, because nothing was done about the void or the water that made it.

How urgent is urgent

A small soft area is a modest repair. The same area after another freeze-thaw season is larger, and after two it has usually taken the surrounding surface with it.

This is the one finding worth acting on within the season rather than putting on next year's list.