Cubic Yard Calculator

27. A yard is 3 feet, and a cubic yard is a cube 3 feet on every side, so 3 x 3 x 3 = 27 cubic feet. This is the only conversion you need to memorize for bulk materials, and it is the reason so many of the other numbers on this page are round: 27 / 2 = 13.5 bags of 2 cu ft, 27 / 3 = 9 bags of 3 cu ft.

The common mistake is dividing by 3 instead of 27, because a yard is 3 feet. That gives an answer nine times too small, and it is why somebody always ends up ordering a third of what they needed.

Turn everything into feet, multiply the three dimensions, then divide by 27. Inches become feet by dividing by 12, so 4 inches is 0.3333 ft and 6 inches is 0.5 ft.

Worked example, the one everybody looks up: a 20 ft x 20 ft area at 4 inches deep. That is 400 square feet x 0.3333 ft = 133.33 cubic feet. Divide by 27 and you get 4.94 cubic yards. The calculator above shows exactly this working with your own numbers substituted in.

13.5 bags if they are 2 cubic feet, which is the most common size for bagged bark mulch, and 9 bags if they are 3 cubic feet. You cannot buy half a bag, so 14 bags of the 2 cu ft size is one cubic yard with a little spare.

Bag sizes vary by brand, region and product, so read the front of the bag rather than assuming. Bagged garden soil and compost are often 1 or 1.5 cu ft, which changes the count to 27 or 18 per yard. Somewhere around a dozen bags, bulk delivery usually costs less per yard and saves you the plastic.

Between 9 and 14, depending on the wheelbarrow and on how honest you are about filling it. A contractor wheelbarrow is usually rated 6 cubic feet, which gives 4.5 loads per cubic yard when level full, but almost nobody fills a barrow level with heavy material.

The realistic figures: a 6 cu ft barrow carrying a practical 3 cu ft of wet soil is 9 loads. A homeowner 3 cu ft barrow carrying 2 cu ft is around 14 loads. Plan on 9 to 14 trips per yard and one sore back.

Because people measure it in a different unit. Length and width come out of a tape in feet, but depth is almost always a number of inches: 2 inches of mulch, 4 inches of gravel, 6 inches of topsoil. Forcing you to convert 4 inches to 0.3333 feet before you can use a calculator is where errors get introduced.

It is also the dimension that most affects your total. Doubling the depth doubles the volume, so a bed you planned at 2 inches and filled at 4 inches uses twice what you ordered. If a number on this page looks wrong, check the depth first.

0.7646 cubic meters, and going the other way, one cubic meter is 1.308 cubic yards. The conversion is exact rather than approximate: a yard is defined as 0.9144 meters, so a cubic yard is 0.9144 cubed, which is 0.764554858 cubic meters.

Practically, a cubic meter is about 31% bigger than a cubic yard. If a European supplier quotes you a price per cubic meter and you are comparing it to a US price per cubic yard, you are not comparing like with like until you apply that 1.308.

Yes. Switch to Several Areas at the top, enter each area, name it if you like, and press Add Area To List. The list keeps a running total and the materials ticket prints every area line by line, which is what you want when you are ordering one delivery for a whole yard's worth of beds.

It is also the right way to handle an odd shape: slice it into rectangles at the corners, add each rectangle as its own entry, and the total is correct. For genuinely curved or angled areas, work out the square footage on the square footage calculator first, then enter it here as a rectangle with that area.

No, and this is the most expensive confusion in the whole bulk materials world. A cubic yard is a volume, always 27 cubic feet. A ton is a weight, always 2,000 pounds. What connects them is the density of the specific material, and that changes completely from one product to the next.

One cubic yard of bark mulch weighs roughly 600 lb, about a third of a ton. One cubic yard of crusher run weighs roughly 3,000 lb, about one and a half tons. Same volume, five times the weight. If your supplier quotes in tons, use the gravel calculator, which carries a density for each material and shows both numbers side by side.