Landscaping
Find out how many bags or cubic yards of mulch, gravel, or topsoil to buy for beds, paths, driveways, and lawns, with weight and cost.
- Mulch Calculator Bags or cubic yards of mulch for beds and tree rings, with a top-up mode and bags vs bulk delivery.
- Gravel Calculator Cubic yards and tons of gravel for paths, patios, and driveways, with stone weights, compaction, and two-layer driveways.
- Topsoil Calculator Bags or cubic yards of topsoil for sod, new lawns, topdressing, and low spots, with settling and bulk vs bags.
Area times depth
Every bulk landscape material comes down to the same math: the area you’re covering times how deep you want it. Measure each bed or path in feet, enter the depth in inches, and the calculator gives the volume in cubic feet and cubic yards. Odd shapes are fine. Break them into rectangles, circles, and triangles and add them up.
Bags or bulk?
Bagged mulch, soil, and gravel are easy to carry but cost more per cubic yard. Bulk material from a landscape supplier is cheaper by volume, but delivery fees can wipe out the savings on a small job. As a rough guide, a few bags handle a single bed, and a delivered load starts to make sense once you need a couple of cubic yards or more. Each calculator shows both so you can compare.
Loose materials also settle and compact. Topsoil and fresh mulch shrink a little after rain, and gravel packs down under traffic, so the soil and gravel calculators add a small allowance you can adjust. The mulch calculator starts at zero, following Clemson Extension’s formula, and lets you add one.
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