A Landscape Material Calculator for Each Material, Not One for All of Them

Choose your material

A cubic yard of shredded mulch and a cubic yard of dense graded base fill exactly the same cube, three feet on every side. One weighs about 600 lb and the other about 3,000. That is why a generic gravel tool will hand you a tonnage wrong by a factor of five if you feed it the wrong material.

It is not, though, why there are fourteen calculators. Nine published figures cover the fourteen, with three tools apiece sitting on 1.40 tons a cubic yard, on 1.50 and on 1.35. Where two tools agree on the tonnage, what separates them is the depth the layer is built to and what the material is actually for.

Volume is the easy half. Weight is the half that catches people

The volume arithmetic never changes:

Cubic yards = (length in feet x width in feet x depth in inches divided by 12) divided by 27

Tons = cubic yards x the density of that material, which runs between 0.30 for mulch and 1.55 for riprap

The tool does both steps. What it cannot do is check your depth. At 2 inches, an 8 by 14 patio takes a third of the stone it takes at 6 inches, and a depth guessed from memory is the commonest reason an order comes up short. In this state the depth decision also has to answer frost, and it cannot: frost goes deeper than any landscape layer of stone is going to reach, so depth and drainage are all a base has to work with. Thin bases on clay that stays wet into May are exactly the ones that rut in the third week of March.

Which of the fourteen tools matches your material

• Driveways, lanes and pads: gravel, road base for traffic bond, crusher run for the compacting layer beneath.
• Graded stone of any size, including #57, 3/4 inch, screenings and ballast: stone.
• Hardscape layers: paver base and paver sand, which are two separate calculations and always have been.
• Decorative and walkable: river rock and pea gravel.
• Bedding and mixes: sand.
• Soil work: topsoil for lawns and finish grading, soil for beds and planters, dirt for filling and raising ground.
• Beds: mulch.
• Shoreline and slope: rip rap, where the layer is measured in thickness rather than a surfacing depth.

Each one has the weight of its own material built in, so entering identical measurements in two of them gives matching cubic yards and different tonnage.

The shape row, the depth box and the tick for compaction

• Shape. Rectangle, circle, or multiple areas, up to five of them added together.
• Size. Length and width in feet for a rectangle, diameter in feet for a circle.
• Depth. In inches, anywhere between 0.25 and 24.
• Material. The select list, which is what sets the weight.
• Extra. A tick box adds 5 percent for compaction and spillage.
• Result. Cubic yards, tons and cubic feet together, and a quote can be emailed to you.

Measure to the finished edge rather than the lawn line, and take depth in three or more places on an old drive, because nothing wears evenly under a plow.

One 60-foot lane, run twice, to show what density does

A hypothetical lane, 60 feet long and 10 feet wide, getting 4 inches.

• 60 x 10 = 600 square feet.
• 4 inches is 4 divided by 12, or 0.333 feet.
• 600 x 0.333 = 200 cubic feet.
• 200 divided by 27 = 7.4 cubic yards.

Now the same 7.4 cubic yards, counted in weight rather than volume, using this site's own published figures:

• As traffic bond, at about 3,000 lb per cubic yard or 1.50 tons: 7.4 x 1.50 = about 11.1 tons.
• As driveway gravel, at about 2,800 lb per cubic yard or 1.40 tons: 7.4 x 1.40 = about 10.4 tons.
• As shredded mulch, at about 600 lb per cubic yard or 0.30 tons: 7.4 x 0.30 = about 2.2 tons.

Same hole in the ground, three very different loads coming off the truck. Run the base layer and the surface layer as separate calculations, then order against the unit each product page uses. The full catalogue is on the materials page, and the delivery page covers what the truck needs at the other end.

Common questions