Cubic Yards Calculator

What this calculation does not cover

• Length, width and depth are multiplied straight through, so the figure describes a single box with square corners and one depth held across the whole of it. Ground that shelves, a trench that steps down, a circular or tapered outline, and anything standing inside the footprint — a post base, a plinth, an existing pad — sit outside the arithmetic and have to be measured as separate pieces and added or taken off by hand.
• Dividing by 27 is pure geometry and drags no material behaviour along with it. Nothing is compacted, nothing settles over a season, and nothing bulks up the way dug earth does once it is loosened, so the in-place yardage here and the loose yardage riding on a truck are two different numbers.
• There is no waste percentage anywhere in the working and no rounding up to a whole load. What comes back is the space you measured rather than the amount to buy, so spillage, spread beyond the edges, what stays in the barrow and the supplier's own rounding all land on top of the figure.
• Volume is as far as it goes: cubic yards, with the cubic-foot figure shown behind it. No density is asked for or applied, so the result will not turn into tons, tonnes, bag counts or a delivery weight, and it carries no price — heavy wet gravel and light bark chip of the same yardage come back identical.
• Depth is entered in inches on the imperial view and centimetres on the metric one, while length and width are read in feet and metres, and the three numbers are multiplied exactly as typed with no check that they belong together. A depth meant as inches but entered as feet returns a tidy, badly wrong yardage; the depth field's range also runs only to about ten feet, and a side to roughly 650, so a deep excavation or a long haul road has to be split into sections.