How to Lay Brick

Updated September 2026 · Home Project Resources

Bricklaying is a rhythm built on consistent mortar joints. A 3/8 inch joint, held the same from the first brick to the last, is what makes a wall look right, and it is also what makes the coursing math work. Three courses of standard modular brick plus three 3/8 inch joints equals exactly 8 inches, so your window heads and your corners land where the drawing says they should.

Let that joint wander to 1/2 inch and you gain 3/8 inch every three courses. Ten courses up and you are more than an inch off, with a wall that reads as wavy even to someone who could not tell you why.

Working out how many bricks and how much mortar? Our brick calculator converts wall dimensions into brick counts, mortar bags, and sand by the ton.

Updated September 2026

A note on numbers. This page gives you joint widths, coursing math, brick and mortar quantities and the line items that belong on a mason's quote, not dollar figures. Brick, mortar and mason labor are priced locally and move with your region and your supplier. Work out the quantities here, then take the same written scope to two or three masons.

How to lay brick, step by step

1. Build or verify the footing, level and below frost depth for anything structural.
2. Dry lay the first course without mortar to set your spacing and find the cuts.
3. Mix the mortar to a consistency that holds a ridge on the trowel.
4. Lay the corners first, building them up 4 to 6 courses as leads.
5. Run a line between the leads at the top of each course.
6. Spread a mortar bed, furrow it lightly, and butter the head joint on each brick.
7. Set each brick to the line, tapping down to level and back to plumb.
8. Cut off the squeeze with the trowel edge and throw it back on the board.
9. Check level, plumb, and range every few bricks.
10. Tool the joints when the mortar is thumbprint firm.
11. Brush the wall lightly once the tooling has set.
12. Clean the finished wall after the mortar has cured, typically 7 to 14 days.

A first timer lays maybe 60 to 100 brick a day. An experienced mason lays 400 to 600. Do not judge your pace against a video.

Mortar types: N, S, M, and O

Mortar is not one product. The letters come from the word MASONWORK, taking every other letter, and each type is a different mix of portland cement, hydrated lime, and sand with a different compressive strength.

Here is the part that surprises people: stronger is not better. Mortar should be weaker than the brick it joins.

Every masonry wall moves. Thermal expansion, small settlement, and moisture all put stress into it. That stress has to be relieved somewhere. If the mortar is softer than the brick, cracks form in the joint, which is repairable with a grinder and a pointing trowel over a weekend. If the mortar is harder than the brick, the crack goes through the brick faces instead, and now you are replacing units, or living with spalled brick that keeps getting worse.

This matters most on older buildings. Soft handmade brick from before roughly 1930 was made to work with lime rich mortar. Repointing it with a modern type S or M mix is a well documented way to destroy a historic wall. Type O or a lime based mix is the right call there.

For most residential above grade work, type N is the answer. Use type S where you are at or below grade, in a high wind zone, or where the code official tells you to.

Mixing mortar and the slump test

Buy premixed mortar in bags for small jobs. It is more expensive per unit but it removes a variable, and mixing your own portland, lime, and sand to spec is not worth it until you are laying thousands of brick.

Mix in a wheelbarrow or a mortar tub with a hoe, or rent a mixer for anything over a few hundred brick. Add most of the water first, then the mortar, then adjust. Mix for 3 to 5 minutes after the last water goes in, because undermixed mortar has weak spots.

The trowel test. Scoop a load onto the trowel and turn the trowel on edge. Correct mortar hangs on and holds a defined ridge when you furrow it, without slumping flat and without crumbling. Then flip the trowel upside down. Good mortar clings for a moment before it drops. Too wet and it runs off immediately. Too dry and it falls off in a lump.

Retempering. Mortar stiffens as it sits. You can add a little water and remix once, within about the first 90 minutes to two hours. After that the cement has started to hydrate and adding water just makes weak mortar that looks fine. Throw it out. Board life on a hot windy day can be as short as an hour.

Keep the mortar board damp so it does not pull water out of the mix, and cover the tub between loads.

The footing: a brick wall needs a real base

A structural brick wall needs a poured concrete footing, and the bottom of that footing must sit below the local frost depth. Frost heave lifts a shallow footing unevenly and cracks the wall right up the middle. Frost depth ranges from a few inches in the deep South to 48 inches or more across the northern tier, and your building department publishes the number for your area.

Typical residential footing rules of thumb are a footing twice the width of the wall and at least as thick as the wall is wide, but the actual size comes from your soil bearing capacity and the load. Any freestanding wall over a few feet, and any wall carrying structure, needs a permit in most jurisdictions and often an engineered design. Check before you pour.

A garden wall a couple of courses high can sit on a compacted gravel base with a concrete footing that is modest. A 6 foot privacy wall cannot. Our concrete calculator sizes the pour once you know the dimensions.

If you are building a foundation wall or a large structural wall, concrete block is usually the more sensible core, with brick as the outer wythe. Our cinder block calculator covers block counts for that, and the how to build a retaining wall guide covers the drainage rules if the wall is holding back soil.

Laying: leads, line, and the trowel

Dry lay first. Set a full course out on the footing with 3/8 inch spacers or just an eye for the gap. This tells you whether the wall length works out to full brick or whether you need cuts, and it lets you move the cuts to a spot where nobody looks.

Build the leads. A lead is the corner, or the end of the wall, built up 4 to 6 courses first and checked obsessively for level, plumb, and range. Everything else in the wall is set to a line stretched between two leads. This is the single biggest difference between how a mason works and how a beginner works. Beginners run a whole course end to end and try to keep it straight. Masons build two accurate ends and then fill between them.

Use line blocks or line pins to hold the string at the top outside edge of the course you are laying. Set each brick so its top outer corner just kisses the line, about the thickness of the string away. Crowding the line pushes it out and your whole course wanders.

Spread the bed. Pick up a trowel load, roll it off along the wall in a bed about 1 inch thick and a little wider than the brick. Run the trowel point down the middle to furrow it lightly. A deep furrow leaves a void that lets water through, so keep it shallow.

Butter the head joint. Put mortar on the end of the brick you are about to lay, on all four edges of that face, and push it on. A brick set with a hollow head joint is a leak path and a weak point.

Set and tap. Press the brick down into the bed and tap it with the trowel handle until it sits on the line. Do not lift a brick once it has been set and then reset it in the same mortar. The bond is broken. Scrape the mortar off, throw fresh, and start that brick over.

Cut the squeeze. Slice the extruded mortar off with the edge of the trowel held at an angle and flick it back onto the board or into the next head joint. Do this immediately. Mortar smeared on a brick face and left there is a stain you fight for the life of the wall.

Check constantly. Level across the course, plumb on the face, and range along the top with a straightedge. Every four or five brick early on. It gets faster.

Tooling the joints and the thumbprint test

Tooling compresses the mortar in the joint, which closes surface pores and makes the joint dramatically more water resistant. It is not a cosmetic step.

Timing is judged by feel, not by clock. Press your thumb into a joint. When it leaves a print but no mortar comes away on your thumb, it is ready. That is usually 30 minutes to 2 hours after laying, depending on temperature, humidity, wind, and how absorbent the brick is. On a hot dry day it can be 20 minutes.

Tool too early and you smear soft mortar and drag it out. Tool too late and the jointer just scratches the surface without compressing anything, and the joint stays porous.

Tool head joints first, then bed joints, so the horizontal pass cleans up the ends of the vertical ones.

After tooling has set up for an hour or so, brush the wall lightly with a soft masonry brush at an angle to knock off the crumbs. Brushing too soon smears everything.

Brick bonds

The bond is the pattern of overlapping units. It changes both appearance and strength.

The header courses in English and Flemish bond are doing real structural work on a solid brick wall, tying the two wythes into one unit. On a modern brick veneer over a stud wall there is nothing behind the brick to tie into, so headers are usually cut half bricks used purely for appearance, and the actual tying is done with metal wall ties.

Brick veneer is a rain screen, not a waterproof layer

This is the misunderstanding that causes the most real damage, so it is worth being blunt about it.

A modern brick veneer is a single wythe of brick standing in front of a stud wall, with an air gap of about 1 inch between the brick and the wall sheathing. Water gets through it. Not through a defect, through the ordinary joints, in normal driving rain. That is expected and designed for.

The system works because water that comes through runs down the back face of the brick, hits a flashing at the base of the wall or above each opening, and exits through weep holes. The actual water barrier is the water resistive barrier on the sheathing behind the air gap, not the brick.

So three things have to be right:

Keep the air gap clear. Mortar droppings that fall into the cavity and pile up on the flashing dam the water and hold it against the sheathing. Bevel your bed joint back slightly, and pull the droppings out as you go.

Weep holes every 24 inches or so, in the head joints of the first course above every flashing, at the base of the wall and above every window and door. Leave them open. Do not point them up later because they look untidy, and do not let landscaping or mulch bury the bottom row.

Flashing under the weeps and turned up behind the water resistive barrier, with end dams at the ends of window heads. Flashing that stops short at the ends dumps water into the wall.

Wall ties connect the veneer to the structure so the brick does not fall over. Corrugated metal ties are typically spaced around 16 inches vertically and 24 inches horizontally, nailed into studs, and set so the tie sits flat in the bed joint rather than bent up or down. Codes give specific spacing and it varies with wind load, so use the local requirement.

If you inherited a house with mortared shut weep holes and damp interior walls at the base of a brick wall, that is very likely the cause.

Cutting brick, and the silica warning

Cutting concrete, brick, stone, or mortar with a power saw releases respirable crystalline silica dust. It is fine enough to stay airborne for hours, it goes deep into the lungs, and it causes silicosis, an irreversible and sometimes fatal disease. It is also classified as a human carcinogen. This is not a nuisance dust and a paper mask does nothing.

Cut wet. A saw with a water feed, or a hose trickling onto the blade, suppresses the vast majority of the dust. If wet cutting is impossible, use a saw with an integrated vacuum dust collection system fitted with a HEPA filter.

Wear a properly fitted N95 or better respirator on top of the wet cutting or dust collection, not instead of it. Add eye protection and hearing protection. Work outdoors, stand upwind, and keep other people out of the area.

For a handful of cuts, a brick set chisel and a 3 pound hammer will snap a brick cleanly with no dust at all. Score all four faces, then strike the scored line firmly once. It is slower per brick and much safer.

Sizing your cuts. Try to design the wall so it comes out on full brick. Standard modular brick is nominally 8 inches long including the joint, so wall lengths in multiples of 8 inches work out clean. When you must cut, put the cut brick at an inside corner or at a spot the eye does not land on, and never at the outside corner of a wall.

Cleaning and efflorescence

Let the mortar cure before cleaning, typically 7 to 14 days. Cleaning green mortar washes cement out of the joints and leaves them soft and porous forever.

Most fresh mortar smears come off with water and a stiff brush plus a little patience. For stubborn mortar, proprietary masonry cleaners exist. Straight muriatic acid is harsh, it can burn the brick faces and bleach the mortar, and it needs full protective gear. Always saturate the wall with clean water first so the acid cannot soak into dry brick, work top down, and rinse thoroughly. Test on a small hidden area before you commit.

Efflorescence is the white powdery bloom that shows up on new brickwork. It is soluble salts from the mortar and the brick being carried to the surface by water and left behind when the water evaporates. It is cosmetic, not structural.

New wall efflorescence usually weathers off in the first year or two. Dry brush it off on a dry day, then rinse. Do not scrub it with water first, because that dissolves the salts and drives them back in, and they come out again next week.

Efflorescence that keeps returning years later is telling you water is still getting into the wall and moving through it. That is a flashing, weep hole, gutter, or grade problem, and cleaning the surface is treating the symptom.

Worked example: a 12 foot by 6 foot garden wall

Say you want a single wythe brick garden wall, 12 feet long and 6 feet tall, laid in running bond with standard modular brick.

Wall area. 12 x 6 equals 72 square feet.

Brick count. Standard modular brick with a 3/8 inch joint covers a nominal 8 inches by 2 2/3 inches of wall face, which works out to roughly 6.75 brick per square foot for a single wythe. So 72 x 6.75 equals 486 brick. Add 10 percent for cuts and breakage, which brings you to about 535. Order 540, since brick comes in cubes.

Courses. 6 feet is 72 inches. At 3 courses per 8 inches, that is 27 courses.

Mortar. A common planning figure is about 7 to 8 bags of premixed mortar per 1,000 brick for a single wythe wall with 3/8 inch joints. For 540 brick that is roughly 4 bags. Buy 5, because running out mid wall is worse than having a spare. If mixing from portland and lime, plan on roughly 1 ton of masonry sand per 1,000 brick, so half a ton here.

Footing. A 16 inch wide by 8 inch deep footing running 12 feet is 12 x 1.33 x 0.67, which is 10.7 cubic feet, or 0.4 cubic yards. Bagged concrete works at this size, at roughly 22 to 24 bags of 80 pound mix. If frost depth in your area is deeper than 8 inches, and it is almost everywhere north of the Gulf states, the trench goes down to frost depth and the volume grows accordingly. Run your real numbers through the concrete calculator.

Materials list to price out. Four line items, in descending order of what they will cost you: 540 common brick, 5 bags of mortar, roughly 22 to 24 bags of 80 pound concrete for the footing, then ties, sand and sundries. The brick is the large one by a wide margin, and brick is where the spread between suppliers is widest, because face brick, common brick and reclaimed brick are three different price tiers for the same wall. Price the brick at a masonry yard as well as a big box, and ask about the per pallet price rather than the per brick price. If you are ordering ready mix instead of bags, the concrete cost per yard guide covers delivery minimums and short load fees.

Labor, separately. Masons quote by the square foot of wall face, and on a wall this size labor is comfortably larger than the materials. What moves that rate: how many corners the wall has, whether there are arches or curves, whether a mixer and pallets can get to the wall or everything has to be barrowed, how far off the ground the work is and therefore whether scaffolding is needed, and the bond pattern, since anything other than running bond is slower to lay. Get the quote per square foot of face, with the footing, the ties and the cleanup called out as separate lines, and give every mason the same wall dimensions so the numbers can be compared.

Frequently asked questions

What kind of mortar should I use for brick?

Type N for most above grade residential brickwork, indoors or out. Type S where the wall is at or below grade, in a high wind or seismic zone, or where a code official specifies it. Type O for repointing soft older brick, generally pre-1930 work, because a hard modern mix will spall the faces off historic brick.

How thick should a mortar joint be?

3/8 inch is the standard, and consistency matters more than the exact number. Modular brick coursing is built around it, with three courses plus three joints equaling 8 inches. A 1/2 inch joint is used occasionally with oversize brick, but pick one and hold it for the whole wall.

How many bricks are in a square foot?

About 6.75 standard modular brick per square foot of single wythe wall face with 3/8 inch joints. Queen size runs about 5.8, and utility or oversize brick runs about 3.7. Always add 5 to 10 percent for cuts and breakage, and more if the wall has a lot of openings. Our brick calculator handles the size variants.

Do I need a footing for a brick wall?

For anything structural or freestanding above about knee height, yes, and the bottom of the footing has to be below your local frost depth. Frost heave lifts a shallow footing unevenly and cracks the wall. A brick veneer on a house sits on a shelf cast into the existing foundation, so the footing question is already settled there.

When should I tool brick joints?

When a thumb pressed into the joint leaves a print without any mortar sticking to your thumb. That is typically 30 minutes to 2 hours after laying, but on a hot windy day it can be 20 minutes and on a cool damp day it can be much longer. Check often rather than working to a clock.

Why does my brick wall have white powder on it?

That is efflorescence, soluble salts carried to the surface by water and left behind as it evaporates. On a new wall it is normal and usually weathers away within a year or two, and dry brushing removes it. If it keeps coming back on an older wall, water is still entering the wall and you have a flashing, weep hole, gutter, or grading problem to find.

Can I lay brick in cold weather?

Below 40 degrees Fahrenheit mortar cures very slowly, and mortar that freezes before it sets is permanently weakened. Cold weather masonry means heated materials, heated enclosures, and insulated blankets, which is professional territory. For a DIY project, wait for a stretch with lows above 40 degrees for at least 48 hours after laying.

How much does it cost to lay brick per square foot?

Brick is quoted by the square foot of wall face, and labor is the larger half of that number on almost every residential job. Six things move it: the brick itself, since face, common and reclaimed brick sit in different tiers; the number of corners, because leads are the slow part of any wall; anything that is not running bond, which is slower to lay; height off the ground, which decides whether scaffolding gets added; site access, because barrowing brick and mortar around a house adds hours; and the footing, which is a separate excavation and concrete line that some bids quietly leave out. To get a real number, work out your square footage of wall face from the coursing math above, write the wall down as a scope, and collect three quotes against it with the footing and cleanup itemized.

The short version

Pick type N mortar for ordinary above grade work, mix it to hold a ridge on the trowel, and remember that mortar is supposed to be softer than the brick so cracks land in the joint.

Put a real footing under any structural wall, below frost depth. Dry lay the first course, build your corners as leads, then run everything else to a line. Hold a 3/8 inch joint from start to finish, butter every head joint fully, and cut the squeeze off before it stains anything.

Tool when the joint takes a thumbprint without smearing, use a concave or V profile outdoors, and brush after it sets. On a veneer, keep the cavity clear, keep the weep holes open, and understand that the brick is a rain screen and the barrier behind it is what keeps the wall dry.

Cut wet with a respirator, or snap with a brick set. Then let the mortar cure a week or two before you clean anything.

Our brick calculator will give you brick, mortar, and sand from your wall dimensions, and the cinder block calculator covers the block core if you are building a two wythe or backed up wall.