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Mortar tonnage as delivered.
About 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for sand-cement mortar; close to concrete but without coarse aggregate.
Approximate volume
5.556 yd³
About 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for sand-cement mortar; close to concrete but without coarse aggregate. Mortar heaps; allow room beyond this figure.
- Conversion factor applied
- 0.56 yd³ per short ton
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Mortar Tons to Cubic Yards Calculator: 5.56 yd³ — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
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How this was calculated
Formula source(s)
- Inverse of approximately 1.8 short tons per cubic yard
- 1 short ton = 2,000 lb; a metric tonne is about 10% heavier
Inputs used
- Mortar weight (short tons)
- 10
Intermediate steps
- Conversion factor applied
- 0.56 yd³ per short ton
Confidence note: About 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for sand-cement mortar; close to concrete but without coarse aggregate. Mortar heaps; allow room beyond this figure.
What this calculation does not cover
- Check whether the tonnage came off a ticket as a dry weight. Bagged premix and silo mortar are weighed before mixing, and the mixing water is mass as well as volume, so a dry ton makes more than a ton of mixed mortar and more volume than this returns — read the answer as a floor, unless the ticket was for wet ready-to-use mortar, which needs no adjustment. That comparison is by weight; by volume it runs the other way, because loose dry materials make less mortar than their own bulk suggests.
- Some of this volume never reaches a joint. Mortar is left in the drum, dropped off the board, and squeezed out of beds to be struck off and thrown, and that pulls against the dry-weight allowance rather than adding to it. The two do not reliably cancel — a wet ready-to-use ticket carries the losses with no offset at all — so take them off explicitly instead of assuming one has already covered the other.
- On repointing the depth is not yours to choose: joints are cut back until sound mortar is reached, and on perished work that runs deeper than any nominal figure. With the quantity already fixed, the shortfall shows up as area rather than as a bigger order — the elevation stops partway up, and what finishes it comes from a second batch that will not match the first in colour. Cut out a trial length, measure what it takes, and set the area from that before the rest of the wall is committed to this figure.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
Computed in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded. Presented in US customary units and US trade terminology. Where a formula follows a published standard, that standard and its edition are cited beside it on this page; where none governs, the page says so. Local amendments override model codes — verify against the code in force where you build.
Sources checked 2026-08-26 · in the site-wide review of 2026-09-06 · v1.0.0
Regulatory standards & verification citations2
- Inverse of approximately 1.8 short tons per cubic yard
- 1 short ton = 2,000 lb; a metric tonne is about 10% heavier
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Converting a mortar tonnage back to volume tells you how much wall it will build once the joint dimensions are known. Mortar has a working life that aggregates do not: once mixed it must be used before it stiffens, and retempering with extra water to extend it weakens the mix. That constraint means mortar is mixed in batches sized to the pace of laying, so the total tonnage matters less for delivery scheduling than for knowing how much sand and cement to have on site.