Landscape Material Calculator: Feet In, Yards and Tons Out
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You have paced out a drive, a bed or a trench and you have square feet, but the product page wants tons. A landscape material calculator closes that gap, and the reason it needs your material as well as your measurements is that a cubic yard of shredded mulch and a cubic yard of 21AA weigh nothing like each other.
Gravel ships by the ton, soil and mulch by the yard
The split is not arbitrary: a yard of stone is a predictable weight, while a yard of loose soil or bark is not, so the trade sells each in the unit it can actually check. Every tool on this site shows both figures, so you never have to convert by hand, but order in the unit the product page asks for.
Why 600 lb and 3,000 lb fill the same box
A cubic yard is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. Fill that box with shredded mulch and you have roughly 600 lb. Fill it with crusher run or road base and you have roughly 3,000 lb, five times as much weight in the same hole. That is why a tool set to the wrong material gives a confidently wrong tonnage. The published figures behind the tools run like this: crusher run, road base and paver base at about 3,000 lb a cubic yard, which is 1.50 tons; stone screenings, #4 stone and ballast at 2,900 (1.45); driveway gravel, pea gravel and the #57 and 3/4 inch stone at 2,800 (1.40); river rock and the mason, washed and paver sands at 2,700 (1.35); fill dirt at 2,400 (1.20); screened topsoil at 2,200 (1.10); garden soil at 2,000 (1.00); shredded mulch at 600 (0.30); and RipRap and armor stone at 3,100 (1.55).
Count them and there are nine figures for fourteen tools. Three tools share the 2,800 lb line and three share 3,000, so choosing between tools inside a group does not change the answer by an ounce. It is the depth each material wants, and the job the layer does, that the fourteen are actually sorted by.
The quick estimate on this page, and when to go deeper
The box at the top takes a rectangle, a circle or up to five separate areas at once. Length, width and diameter go in feet; depth goes in inches, anywhere from 0.25 to 24. Pick the material, decide whether to tick the 5 percent allowance for compaction and spillage, and the result comes back as cubic yards, tons and cubic feet. You can have the estimate emailed to you.
The arithmetic is short enough to check: length times width gives square feet; divide the depth in inches by 12 and multiply through for cubic feet; divide by 27 for cubic yards; multiply by the tons-per-yard figure above.
One tool per layer, not one tool per job
A Michigan drive is rarely one material. The base wants the 21AA and road base calculator or the 22A and crusher run tool; the surfacing course wants the gravel calculator; a paver apron wants paver base and paver sand run separately, since a compacted course and an inch of bedding are not one calculation. Soil jobs split the same way, with fill dirt bringing a low spot up to grade, topsoil finishing the top few inches, garden soil for beds and planters and mulch going over them.
Stone covers the graded washed sizes and the foot or more a wet trench wants. Pea gravel covers paths and play areas, river rock beds and dry creek runs, and sand bedding and mixes. Rip rap covers a bank or a culvert outlet and is measured in layer thickness rather than as a spread depth.
Work the layers out one at a time, order them together from the catalogue, and read how the load is delivered before you fix a drop spot.
Depth is where estimates go wrong, especially over thawing clay
Double the depth and you double the order, so an inch of guesswork costs more than a foot of sloppy pacing. Dense-graded material settles as the fines wedge between the stones, which is what the 5 percent box is for. And a wet stretch of lane over lake-plain clay usually wants more depth than the firm ground either side of it, so measure that stretch as its own area rather than averaging it out.
Common questions
I am comparing pea stone and river rock for the same path. Do I run the numbers twice?
Run the same length, width and depth through each tool. The volume in cubic yards will not move, because the hole is the same hole. Nor will the tonnage move far: pea stone is figured at about 2,800 lb per cubic yard and river rock at about 2,700, under four percent apart. The two are worth comparing on stone size and on how each sits underfoot, not on what the scale says.
Does that five percent allowance matter on a cottage path as much as on a lane?
Tick it for anything that gets compacted or raked out over a long run, which means base material, road gravel and screenings. It matters less for a decorative bed you can top up by the bucket. On a lane that will settle unevenly through its first thaw, the allowance is usually cheaper than arranging a second thin load later.
My drive is not a rectangle. How do I measure a curved turnaround?
Break it into pieces. The tool takes a circle by diameter and will total up to five separate areas in one run, so a rectangular run plus a circular turnaround can be entered as two areas. Where a shape is genuinely awkward, square it off generously rather than trying to be clever; the offcut is smaller than the cost of running short.
Can I put base stone and topsoil on one delivery?
Yes. Calculate each layer in its own tool, because each uses a different weight, then add both to the order. Remember that the stone will come back in tons and the soil in cubic yards, so check that the quantity in each line matches the unit its product page is asking for before you set the delivery date and ZIP code at checkout.
Priced it? It ships free.
All 24 materials in these calculators are in stock, delivered free across Michigan.