Gravel Calculator — Cubic Yards, Tons & Cost

For a 100 ft long, 10 ft wide driveway at a 4-inch depth of crushed stone, you need about 16.7 tons — 12.35 cubic yards. Enter your own width above; a 12 ft wide drive needs proportionally more.

For crushed stone at a 3-inch depth, one ton covers roughly 80 square feet. That figure moves with both depth and material — go deeper or switch to a denser stone and the same ton covers less ground. Use the calculator above with "price per ton" selected to get the exact figure for your material and depth.

Crusher run is a graded mix of crushed stone down to fine dust, which packs and compacts hard — it's the standard choice under a driveway or a patio base. #57 stone is single-sized, clean, angular stone with no fines, so it drains freely but will not compact into a solid base — it's used for drainage, French drains and decorative cover, not structural bases.

Multiply length × width × depth in feet, then divide by 27. The depth is the number people get wrong — it has to be converted from inches first. Three inches is 0.25 ft, four inches is 0.333 ft.

A 20 × 30 ft area at 3 inches deep is 20 × 30 × 0.25 = 150 ft³, which is 5.56 cubic yards. Round up when you order: yards are sold in whole or half increments and coming back for a second delivery costs more than the extra material.

About 1.35 tons for crushed stone, but the answer is entirely material-dependent and the spread is enormous. Crusher run is 1.5 tons per yard. Topsoil is 1.05. Shredded hardwood mulch is 0.4 — less than a third of stone.

This matters because yards sell by volume and weigh by the ton, and the two only reconcile through density. If a supplier quotes per ton and you calculated in yards, you need the right density or you will be out by a factor of three on light material.

It will fit. It will also probably overload the truck. One cubic yard of crushed stone weighs about 2,700 lb, and the payload rating of most half-ton pickups is between 1,300 and 2,000 lb.

The trap is that a yard of stone looks like a small pile in the bed — it is nowhere near full — so nothing about it looks wrong. Mulch is the opposite: a yard of bark weighs about 500 lb and the volume, not the weight, is your limit. This calculator flags whichever constraint binds first.

Depends on the job. Two to three inches for decorative stone over landscape fabric. Four inches for a gravel driveway wear course, over a compacted base. Three inches for mulch. Four to six inches for new topsoil over subsoil.

Under two inches, stone will not stay put and you will see the fabric within a season. Over four inches, mulch holds water against roots and can starve them of oxygen — and it should never be piled against a trunk regardless of depth.

Yes, if the depth you measured is the finished, compacted depth and the material compacts. Crushed stone, crusher run, road base, decomposed granite and sand all settle roughly 20% under a plate compactor.

Tick the compaction box and the tool adds that 20% back. If you skip it and your depth was the finished depth, you will end up about a fifth short — which on a driveway base means going back to the yard partway through the job.

Moisture, mostly. Aggregate densities are quoted air-dry, and rain can add 10–20% to the weight of stone and considerably more to soil and mulch. The yard weighs at the scale on the day you collect.

The practical consequence: if you are buying by weight after heavy rain, you are paying for water. Buying by volume avoids the problem entirely, which is one reason most landscape suppliers sell soil and mulch by the yard rather than the ton.