Cubic Yard Calculator - Yards, Tons, Truckloads & Cost

How to use it

1. Pick the material first. It sets a starting density and a price band, and both stay editable because a wet yard weighs more than a dry one.
2. Name each area the way you would say it out loud: front bed, path, trench. The list should match the sketch in your hand.
3. Choose the shape, then enter feet and inches in their own boxes. 12 ft 7 in goes in as 12 and 7, never as 12.7.
4. Set the depth in inches. This is the number people get wrong: 3 means three inches, and typing it into a feet box orders twelve times too much.
5. If the ground falls away, tick the sloped depth box and give the depth at each end. The tool averages them.
6. Use the quantity box when several beds are genuinely identical rather than adding the same row twice.
7. Set the allowance. Five percent covers spillage and settling on a spread material; fill mode uses compaction instead and starts at twenty.
8. Read the order figure, not just the measured one, then check the delivery panel before you phone: what fits in your truck decides whether this is a delivery or six trips.

At a glance

• A 12 ft by 3 ft 6 in bed at 3 in: 10.5 cubic feet, which is 0.39 cubic yards. Nowhere near the one yard minimum most yards will deliver, so this is a bag job.
• Three mulch beds summed: Front bed 0.39, ring bed around the tree 0.44, path 0.37. Total 1.20 cu yd measured, 1.26 to buy at 5 percent, order 1.5 cu yd.
• The same 1.26 cu yd, weighed: 0.38 tons of mulch at 600 lb per yard. The same volume in sand at 2,700 lb per yard is 1.7 tons, which is over the payload of a half ton pickup.
• A 24 ft trench, 3 ft wide, 6 in deep at one end and 18 in at the other: 72 cubic feet at the 12 in average, which is 2.67 cu yd. Add 20 percent compaction and you order 3.5 cu yd, about 3.5 tons.
• One cubic yard, spread: 324 sq ft at 1 in, 108 sq ft at 3 in, 81 sq ft at 4 in, 54 sq ft at 6 in, 27 sq ft at 12 in.

How the math works

Every length is held in inches, so feet and inches never have to be merged in your head. Each area is turned into square inches by its own formula, divided by 144 for square feet, multiplied by the depth in feet to give cubic feet, and multiplied by the quantity. A rectangle is length times width, a round bed is pi times the diameter squared over four, a ring is the outer circle minus the inner one, a triangle is base times height over two or Heron's formula from three taped sides, and a trapezoid is the average of the two parallel sides times the depth between them. A sloped run uses the average of the two end depths, which is exact for a straight taper. The areas are added in cubic feet and divided by 27 once, at the end, to give cubic yards. The allowance multiplies that measured figure: buy volume equals measured times one plus the percentage. The order figure rounds that up to the step your supplier sells in, a quarter yard or a half. Weight is cubic yards times the density in pounds per cubic yard, over 2,000, and the density is an editable field with its honest range printed beside it rather than a constant baked into the page. The per area rows you read are apportioned against the measured total, so the column always adds up to the figure it sits under, and the allowance row is the exact difference between the two printed totals rather than a separately rounded number.

1. Measure the area first, then decide the depth separately

   Volume is area times depth, and the two come from different places. The area comes off a tape on the ground. The depth comes from what the material is for: 2 in to top up mulch, 3 in for a fresh bed, 4 in for a gravel path or a slab, 6 in for topsoil you intend to plant into, 12 in or more for structural fill. Getting the area right and the depth guessed is the usual failure, not the other way round.

2. Put the depth in inches, in the inches box

   This is the single most expensive mistake in bulk ordering. A 20 ft by 3 ft path at 4 in is 20 cubic feet, which is 0.74 cubic yards. The same path entered as 4 ft deep is 240 cubic feet, which is 8.9 cubic yards, and you have just ordered twelve times what you need and paid for a delivery to dump it on your drive. Depth here lives in its own field, defaults to inches, and shows the depth it used on every row.

3. Break curves and odd corners into shapes you can tape

   A kidney shaped bed is not a shape with a formula, but it is two rectangles and a half circle, and the sum of those is within a few percent. Draw the biggest rectangle you can inside it, then add the leftovers as their own rows. On the curved side, overestimate slightly: material is cheaper by the yard than by the second delivery. A border around a tree or a pond is a ring, which is the outer circle minus the inner one, and entering it as one big circle is a classic overbuy.

4. Measure both ends when the ground is not flat

   A trench for a footing, a swale, a driveway that falls to the road: all of these are wedges, not boxes. Measure the depth at both ends and let the tool average them, because the average of a straight taper is exact rather than approximate. A 24 ft trench that runs 6 in at one end and 18 in at the other holds exactly what a flat 12 in trench of the same footprint would.

5. Add the allowance that matches what the material does

   Spread materials lose a little to spillage, raking and settling, and 5 percent covers it. Fill dirt does something different: it goes into the hole loose and compacts as it is tamped and rained on, so the hole takes 15 to 25 percent more than its measured volume. Those are two different corrections and adding both is double counting, so the tool shows one allowance at a time and names it after what it is doing.

6. Round to the step the yard sells in, not to the nearest number

   Most suppliers load in half yard increments with a one yard minimum, and some will only do whole yards. Rounding 1.26 up to 1.5 is not waste, it is the smallest thing they will sell you. Rounding it down to 1 leaves you 0.26 of a yard short, which on a 3 in mulch bed is 28 square feet of bare dirt and a second trip.

7. Check the weight before you decide how it gets there

   Volume tells you what to order and weight tells you how to move it. A yard of mulch is about 600 lb and a half ton pickup will take two. A yard of sand is 2,700 lb and that same pickup is over its payload before the bed is a third full. The delivery panel does this arithmetic at the density you set, which is why the density is an editable field rather than a hidden constant.

Worked scenarios, start to finish

Real jobs with the numbers carried all the way through, so you can see how the estimate is built and check your own figures against them.

The judgement calls a pro makes

Decisions the tool cannot make for you, and how someone who does this for a living thinks them through.

Round up to the supplier's step, or pay a second delivery fee

The gap between 1.26 yards and the 1.5 you have to order costs a few dollars of material. Coming up short costs another delivery, which is usually 50 to 100 dollars, plus the day. When the numbers are close, buy the extra quarter yard. The only case where restraint pays is a material you cannot store or return, and even then the spare usually finds a hole.

When bagged genuinely beats bulk

Bags cost roughly 50 to 80 percent more per cubic yard, so on volume alone bulk always wins. What flips it is everything around the volume: the delivery fee, having nowhere to dump a pile, a job you are doing over three weekends, a driveway you do not want stained, or a back garden with no access. Under about two yards bags usually win outright once delivery is counted. Over about four they almost never do.

Moist or dry, and which one the ticket will say

Moisture adds 10 to 20 percent to the weight of soil, sand and mulch, and it adds nothing to the volume. If you are ordering by the yard, ignore it. If the supplier prices by the ton, or you are checking whether a load is legal on your trailer, use the wet figure, because material sitting outside in a yard after rain is wet. Sand and soil are the worst offenders; clean stone barely changes.

One big delivery or two smaller ones

A single 12 yard drop is one fee and one pile. Two 6 yard drops are two fees but let you clear the first pile before the second lands, which matters if the pile has to sit on a driveway or a lawn. Grass under a pile dies in about three days in summer. Price both, then decide with the calendar rather than the spreadsheet.

Whether to trust the yard's own coverage sign

Most yards have a sign saying a cubic yard covers 100 square feet. That is true at 3.24 inches and nowhere else. Coverage is 324 divided by the depth in inches, so the same yard covers 324 sq ft at 1 in and 27 sq ft at a foot. Use the depth your job actually needs rather than the depth the sign assumed.

How much compaction to allow on fill

Clean granular fill placed in lifts and tamped properly loses about 15 percent. Clay dumped in and left to settle loses more, and can keep settling for a season. Twenty percent is the sensible default for a backfill you tamp as you go. If the fill is going under anything structural, that is not a calculator question, it is a compaction test and an engineer.

Common mistakes, and the fix

• × Typing the depth in inches into a field that wants feet. Three becomes three feet, not three inches.

  ✓ That is a twelvefold overbuy, and it is the reason depth has its own clearly labelled inches field here with presets beside it. If your order comes out over about 10 yards for a garden bed, this is almost certainly what happened. Check the depth shown on each row of the breakdown, which prints the number it actually used.

• × Dividing cubic feet by 9 instead of 27.

  ✓ Nine is the square yard conversion, twenty seven is the cubic one, because a yard cubed is 3 times 3 times 3. A path of 60 cubic feet is 2.2 cubic yards, not 6.7. If a result looks three times too big, this is why.

• × Ordering the measured volume of a hole you are backfilling.

  ✓ Loose fill compacts into the hole, so the hole takes 15 to 25 percent more than its own volume. Use fill mode, which starts at 20 percent and says so on the ledger. The same effect works in reverse when you dig: spoil swells about a quarter, so the pile you haul away is bigger than the hole it came out of.

• × Assuming a pickup carries whatever fits in the bed. It does not, for anything heavier than mulch.

  ✓ Payload governs. A half ton pickup is rated near 1,500 lb, which is 2.5 yards of mulch but only 0.55 of a yard of gravel and about half a yard of wet sand. The bed will happily hold three times that and the truck will not. Check the sticker in your door jamb for the real payload of your vehicle, because it varies by trim and options.

• × Using topsoil prices to budget for fill dirt, or the reverse.

  ✓ They are different products at different prices. Fill dirt is subsoil for building grade, often 10 to 30 dollars a yard and sometimes free if a site nearby is excavating. Screened topsoil is 20 to 50 and is meant to grow things. Putting fill where plants go, or paying topsoil money to raise a grade, is the same mistake in two directions.

• × Measuring a ring bed as one big circle.

  ✓ A border around a tree is a ring, and the bare circle at the trunk is not getting mulched. An 8 ft ring with a 2 ft clear centre is 47 sq ft, not the 50 sq ft of the full circle. It is a small difference on one tree and a real one across a row of them, and the ring shape does it for you.

• × Believing a coverage figure without the depth attached to it.

  ✓ A cubic yard does not cover a fixed area. It covers 324 square feet divided by the depth in inches. Any coverage claim without a depth beside it is missing the only variable that matters.

Material and unit specifics

What a cubic yard actually is

A cube three feet on each side: 3 times 3 times 3, which is 27 cubic feet. That is 46,656 cubic inches, 0.7646 cubic metres, and about the volume of a standard household bath filled nine times. Poured into a pile it is roughly 3 ft high and 5 ft across at the base, which is worth picturing before you have one dropped on your drive.

Density by material, in pounds per cubic yard

Mulch 400 to 800, compost 800 to 1,300, topsoil 1,800 to 2,200, fill dirt 2,000 to 2,700, asphalt millings 2,300 to 2,700, crushed limestone 2,500 to 2,900, gravel and crushed stone 2,300 to 2,900, river rock 2,400 to 2,900, sand 2,600 to 3,000, concrete 3,600 to 4,050. Every one of those is a range because source, screening and moisture all move it. The tool prints the range beside the density field and lets you type the number off your supplier's spec sheet.

Coverage from one cubic yard, by depth

324 sq ft at 1 in, 162 at 2 in, 108 at 3 in, 81 at 4 in, 54 at 6 in, 40.5 at 8 in and 27 at 12 in. The rule behind the table is coverage equals 324 divided by the depth in inches, which falls out of 27 cubic feet spread one inch thick. Going the other way, cubic yards equals square feet times depth in inches divided by 324.

Truck capacities, and which number is the real limit

A single axle dump truck carries about 5 yards, a tandem about 10, a tri axle about 14. Those are volume figures and they hold for light material. For stone and wet soil the legal axle weight caps the load first, which is why a tandem rated at 10 yards of mulch may only be allowed 6 or 7 yards of gravel. Ask the yard how many yards of your material they put on the truck, not how big the truck is.

Pickups and payload

Bed volume is about 2.2 cubic yards for a standard 8 ft bed level with the rails, and roughly 1.5 for a 6 ft short bed. Payload is what actually stops you: near 1,500 lb for a half ton, 3,000 for a three quarter ton and 4,000 for a one ton, though the sticker in the door jamb is the only figure that applies to your truck. In practice that is 2 yards of mulch, half a yard of topsoil or a third of a yard of wet sand for a half ton.

Bag sizes and what a yard costs in bags

Common retail bags are 0.75 cu ft for topsoil, 1 and 1.5 cu ft for garden soil and compost, 2 cu ft for mulch and 0.5 cu ft for sand and stone. A cubic yard is 36 bags at 0.75, 27 at 1, 18 at 1.5 and 13.5 at 2. That last one is the useful benchmark: a yard of mulch is about fourteen 2 cu ft bags, so if bags are $5 you are paying $67 a yard against maybe $45 delivered.

Wheelbarrows, and why the number is not what the barrow says

A contractor barrow is stamped 6 cubic feet, which would be 4.5 loads to the yard. Nobody fills one level to the brim with wet soil and then pushes it up a plank, so a realistic fill is two thirds, which is 4 cubic feet and about 7 loads a cubic yard. A 3 yard delivery is 21 barrow runs. That is not a reason to order less, but it is a reason to get the pile as close to the work as the truck can reach.

Swell and shrink, the two corrections that pull opposite ways

Dig soil out and it swells: 1 cubic yard of ground becomes about 1.25 yards of loose spoil in the truck, so the skip is always bigger than the hole. Put fill back and it shrinks: 1.2 yards of loose fill compacts into 1 yard of hole. Excavation quotes use the swelled figure and fill orders use the compacted one, and they are the same soil.

Reading your result

There are four numbers here and each one answers a different question. The measured volume is the truth about your space and is the one to check against your own arithmetic. The buy volume is that plus the allowance, and it is what you would order if suppliers sold any quantity you asked for. The order figure is what they will actually load, rounded up to their step, and it is the number to say on the phone. The weight in tons is not an ordering number at all: it is there so you know whether your trailer is legal, whether the delivery needs a truck that can reach your drive, and whether an invoice priced by the ton looks right. The per area rows underneath add up to the measured total exactly, so if one of them looks wrong, that row is where the wrong number was typed. Everything on this page is a planning estimate built from the dimensions you entered and a density you can edit, so treat it as the figure to check a quote against rather than as the quote.

Limitations

• Densities are typical ranges, not measurements of your supplier's material. Source, screening and moisture all move them, so tons are a band rather than a figure. Ask the yard for pounds per cubic yard, or for the weight on a full yard scale ticket, and type it in.
• Truck capacities are volume figures. Legal axle weight caps a real load first for anything heavy, so a truck rated at 10 yards of mulch may only be allowed 6 or 7 yards of stone.
• Compaction and swell factors are planning rules of thumb. Anything structural needs a compaction spec and a test, not a percentage in a calculator.
• Regular geometry only. Curved and organic beds have to be approximated by splitting them into rectangles, rings and part circles, and the more pieces you use the closer you get.
• No map, satellite or GPS measuring. Everything comes off a tape you hold, which is why the answer is only as good as the measuring. For a large area, pace it out and confirm with a tape in one direction.
• Concrete volume only. This page never counts concrete bags, sizes a ready mix order or handles slab thickenings, footings or rebar. Choosing the concrete preset prints the volume and hands you to the page that does.
• Prices are typical delivered bands for planning and they move a long way by region, season and how far you are from the pit. Use your own quote in the ledger.

Frequently asked questions

How many cubic feet are in a cubic yard?

27. A cubic yard is a cube three feet on every side, so 3 times 3 times 3 is 27 cubic feet. To convert cubic feet to cubic yards, divide by 27: 100 cubic feet is 3.7 cubic yards. The common error is dividing by 9, which is the square yard conversion and gives an answer three times too big.

How much area does a cubic yard cover?

It depends entirely on the depth, because a cubic yard is a volume rather than an area. Spread one inch thick it covers 324 square feet. At 2 in it covers 162, at 3 in 108, at 4 in 81, at 6 in 54 and at 12 in just 27 square feet. The rule is 324 divided by the depth in inches. Any coverage figure quoted without a depth beside it is missing the only variable that matters.

How do I calculate cubic yards from square feet?

Multiply the square feet by the depth in inches, then divide by 324. A 500 square foot area at 4 inches deep is 500 times 4 divided by 324, which is 6.17 cubic yards. If you have the depth in feet instead, multiply square feet by depth in feet and divide by 27. Both routes give the same answer, and the converter on this page does either.

How many cubic yards fit in a pickup truck?

Volume is not the limit for most materials, payload is. A standard 8 ft bed holds about 2.2 cubic yards level with the rails, but a half ton pickup is rated near 1,500 lb, which is roughly 2 yards of mulch, half a yard of topsoil or a third of a yard of wet sand. A three quarter ton at 3,000 lb roughly doubles that. Check the payload sticker inside your driver's door jamb, because it varies by trim and options, and remember that passengers and a toolbox come out of the same allowance.

How many tons is a cubic yard?

It depends on the material, because a ton is a weight and a yard is a volume. Mulch is about 0.3 tons a yard, compost about 0.5, topsoil about 1.0, fill dirt about 1.1, gravel and sand about 1.35, and concrete about 2.0. The formula is cubic yards times the density in pounds per cubic yard, divided by 2,000. Moisture adds 10 to 20 percent to soils and sand, so a yard that weighed a ton in the sun can weigh 1.2 after rain.

How much does a cubic yard of dirt weigh?

Screened topsoil runs about 2,000 lb per cubic yard, which is one ton, with a normal range of 1,800 to 2,200. Fill dirt is heavier at 2,000 to 2,700 because it holds more clay and stone. Both go up 10 to 20 percent when wet. So a 3 yard load of topsoil is roughly 3 tons dry and can be 3.5 after a wet week, which matters for the trailer far more than for the price.

How many wheelbarrow loads are in a cubic yard?

About 7, using a 6 cubic foot contractor barrow at a realistic two thirds fill, which is 4 cubic feet a load. If you genuinely fill a 6 cu ft barrow level it is 4.5 loads, and with a smaller 3 cu ft homeowner barrow it is closer to 13. Plan on 7 for anything heavy and get the delivery dropped as close to the work as the truck can safely reach.

Do suppliers deliver partial cubic yards?

Most sell in half yard steps with a one yard minimum, and some will only load whole yards. A loader bucket is a fixed size, which is why the steps exist. Call before you order: the answer changes what you round to, and rounding to their step is not waste, it is the smallest thing they will sell you. Below one yard you are usually into bags.

Is it cheaper to buy in bags or in bulk?

Bulk is always cheaper per cubic yard, usually by 50 to 80 percent, but bulk has a delivery fee and bags do not. That fee is the whole argument. A 2 cubic foot bag at $4.98 works out at $67 a cubic yard, so against $45 a yard delivered with a $75 fee, bags are cheaper up to about 3.4 cubic yards and bulk wins clearly above it. Put your own delivery fee and bag price into the panel, because a waived delivery or a free local fill source moves the crossover a long way.

How much extra should I order for compaction?

For backfill placed in lifts and tamped as you go, allow 15 to 25 percent, and 20 is the sensible default. Clay dumped and left to settle on its own can take more and will keep settling for a season. This applies to filling a hole, not to spreading mulch or topsoil on the surface, where 5 percent for spillage and settling is enough.