Three yards quoted the same driveway in three different units
The drive measures 18 metres by 3.6, it wants 150 millimetres of crushed stone under the blocks, and there needs to be a heap of it on the verge by Friday. Three calls go out on the Tuesday morning. The first yard quotes sixty-two a cubic yard, delivered, on a ten-yard minimum. The second quotes by the tonne, ex-works, with haulage added at a rate per mile. The third does not quote a unit at all — it quotes a load: an eight-wheeler, tipped where you want it, one price, and the voice on the phone is mildly puzzled that this needs explaining.
None of the three is being evasive. Each is quoting in the unit its own business actually runs on. The quarry weighs everything across a weighbridge, so its price has always been a price per tonne. The landscape yard buys in bulk, stores in bays and sells out of a loading shovel, so it prices by volume. The haulier sells a vehicle movement, and the vehicle is the product. Converting between the three needs two facts that appear in none of them: the bulk density of that particular material in the condition it will arrive in, and the payload of the truck hiding behind the word load.
The work therefore comes in a fixed order, and the order is not cosmetic. Quantity first, because every rate is a rate against a quantity and a per-load price cannot be judged at all until you know whether the job is one load or two. Then the rates get flattened into one number that carries haulage, minimum charges, surcharges and anything else that falls on the order rather than on the material. Only after that is there a comparison worth making — and by then the cheapest-sounding quote has usually stopped being the cheapest one.
Fix the quantity before arguing about the rate
Start with the as-drawn quantity: the void at its finished dimensions, with nothing added to it. Eighteen metres by 3.6 by 0.15 is 9.72 cubic metres, which is 12.71 cubic yards, or 343 cubic feet — one quantity wearing three unit labels, and not yet an order. Keeping this figure clean of allowances is what makes everything downstream honest. An allowance folded in at this stage silently inflates every rate comparison built on top of it, and it does so identically for all three suppliers, so nothing looks wrong.
Depth is where the arithmetic goes wrong, because it is the smallest number on the page and the one people convert in their head. Six inches is 0.5 ft and four inches is 0.333 ft, not 0.4 — that one rounding over-orders by a fifth. The divisor from cubic feet to cubic yards is 27, not 3, because a yard is three feet on each of three sides. Dividing by three over-orders by a factor of nine, which sounds like a mistake nobody makes right up until nine yards are tipped on a verge that wanted one.
Irregular shapes get split into rectangles and added, never averaged: averaging a length and a width across a shape that is not rectangular is a guess dressed as a measurement. And the excavation is not the fill. Ground taken out bulks as it is dug and does not go back in the same lorry space it came out of, so a dig quantity and a fill quantity are two separate numbers that happen to share a hole. Where the formation has been dug by machine rather than trimmed, the depth on the drawing is the shallowest depth anywhere on site.
Length, width and depth straight to the as-drawn yardage — the quantity every quote gets measured against, with no allowance folded into it yet.
The length of the area.
The width of the area.
The depth or thickness of the material layer.
Volume (cubic yards)
3.13 cubic yards
- Volume in cubic feet
- 84.5 ft³
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Cubic Yards Calculator: 3.13 cubic yards — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
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.
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.
A load is not a unit of measurement. It is an axle limit
When the third yard quotes a load, it is quoting whatever that vehicle may lawfully carry between its gate and yours. In the United States the ceiling on the Interstate system is set by 23 U.S.C. 127 — 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem, with the Federal Bridge Gross Weight Formula tying permissible weight to axle spacing; states set their own limits off the Interstate network. In the United Kingdom, The Road Vehicles (Authorised Weight) Regulations 1998 put a four-axle rigid tipper at 32,000 kg gross and a six-axle articulated combination at 44,000 kg. Subtract the tare weight of the vehicle and what is left is payload, and payload is a weight.
Which means the volume in a load is entirely a function of density, and different materials hit different limits. Dense material weighs out: the body is half empty and the axles are full, so a load of crushed rock is a weight the truck cannot exceed. Light material cubes out: bark, woodchip and shredded mulch fill the body long before they trouble the axles, so a load of mulch is a struck volume the body cannot exceed. The same lorry, the same driver, the same word on the quote, and two completely different products being sold. Ask which of the two limits the price was built on, and the answer tells you what you are buying.
Access then decides the vehicle before anything else does. A lane with a turning problem, an overhead cable, a soft verge or a gateway that will not take a rigid eight-wheeler forces a smaller truck, and a smaller truck means more drops for the same tonnage. The number of drops is frequently what the per-load price is really pricing, which is why the same material is dearer down a track than it is on a trading estate. It is worth asking whether the drop is tipped or grabbed as well: a grab lorry places material where a tipper can only pile it, and the difference is measured in barrow runs you would otherwise be doing yourself.
Then there are the charges that attach to the order rather than to the material. Ready-mix plants apply a short-load or part-load surcharge below a full truck. Landscape and aggregate yards apply a minimum bulk order and a delivery charge that does not scale down, so half a load frequently costs far more than half a load's worth. Ordering three yards on Tuesday and three more on Thursday can cost noticeably more than six yards in one drop, and none of that shows up in a quoted rate per unit. This is exactly why the quantity has to be settled first: the effective rate is a function of how much you buy at once, and comparing rates at unspecified quantities compares nothing at all.
Density is the hinge between the tonne and the yard
There is no arithmetic that turns a price per tonne into a price per cubic yard without the bulk density of the product, loose, as tipped, at the moisture content it will arrive at. That figure is measured, not looked up. ASTM C29/C29M, Standard Test Method for Bulk Density (Unit Weight) and Voids in Aggregate, defines both the loose and the rodded condition, and BS EN 1097-3, Determination of loose bulk density and voids, does the same job in Europe. The quarry holds the number for the actual product on its technical datasheet. Ask for it, ask which condition it is quoted in, and be suspicious of any figure offered without one.
Moisture rides along with it. Material sold by weight is delivered wet, and the water is charged at the material rate — perfectly legitimately, since nobody is going to oven-dry twenty tonnes of sand before loading it, but it is a real difference between two quotes and it falls on the buyer who is paying by mass rather than the one paying by volume. Free surface moisture in sand after a wet weekend runs to a few per cent by mass, and it is measurable rather than arguable: ASTM C566, Standard Test Method for Total Evaporable Moisture Content of Aggregate by Drying, and BS EN 1097-5, Determination of the water content by drying in a ventilated oven, are the tests that settle it.
Finally, check which ton is on the quote before converting anything. A short ton is 2,000 lb, a tonne is 1,000 kg or 2,204.62 lb, and a long ton is 2,240 lb; there is 12 per cent between the extremes, which is more than most people are haggling over. The volume side has no such ambiguity, because a cubic yard has been exactly 0.764554857984 cubic metres since the international yard was fixed at 0.9144 m in 1959, giving 1.30795 cubic yards to the cubic metre. NIST Special Publication 811, Guide for the Use of the International System of Units, carries the exact factors if you want them from a document rather than from memory.
| What to ask for | Why the price moves with it | What defines it |
|---|---|---|
| Loose bulk density of that product, as tipped | It is the only bridge between a price per tonne and a price per cubic yard | ASTM C29/C29M; BS EN 1097-3 |
| The moisture condition the density is quoted at | Material sold by weight arrives wet, and the water is charged as material | ASTM C566; BS EN 1097-5 |
| Which ton — short, metric or long | There is 12 per cent between a short ton and a long ton | NIST Special Publication 811 |
| The in-place density the specification demands | It sets how much loose material a finished thickness swallows | ASTM D698 or ASTM D1557; field check to ASTM D6938 or ASTM D1556 |
| The vehicle and payload behind a per-load price | A load is a legal weight or a body volume, never a unit of sale | 23 U.S.C. 127; Road Vehicles (Authorised Weight) Regulations 1998 |
| Minimum order, part-load surcharge and delivery charge | They fall on the order rather than the yardage, so they move the effective rate | The supplier's own published terms of sale |
Getting all three onto one line
The comparable number is not the rate the supplier quoted. It is the all-in delivered total for the quantity you actually need, divided by the volume that actually arrives. Building it that way is the only method that survives a minimum charge, a haulage rate per mile, a fuel surcharge and a part load, because all of those are costs that attach to the order and then disappear when the order changes size. Work it out at the quantity you are really buying, not at one yard.
Below is the driveway at an ordered 16 cubic yards, with the quarry's datasheet density taken as 1.6 tonnes per cubic metre for the arithmetic — 16 yd³ is 12.23 m³, so 19.6 tonnes. The figures in the first column are invented. This site publishes no prices, and the point of the table is the shape of the arithmetic rather than the numbers in it.
Read the last two rows together, because that is the thing a per-load quote hides. Cost per yard from a load price is a step function: it falls to its minimum at exactly one full load and jumps vertically the moment the job needs one more yard than the truck holds. The same 890 that sits respectably mid-table at 16 yards is the worst number on the sheet at 18. If a per-load quote is in contention, the useful question is not what it costs but how many yards the load holds at this material's density — and then whether the job can be trimmed to fit inside it, or has to be sized to fill two.
One caution before declaring a winner: the comparison only means anything if all three yards are quoting the same product. A graded sub-base to a named specification and a bin of unscreened crusher run are different materials that both get called stone on the phone. In the United Kingdom the unbound mixtures are defined in the Specification for Highway Works, Series 800, within the Manual of Contract Documents for Highway Works; in North America the equivalents are ASTM D2940/D2940M, Standard Specification for Graded Aggregate Material for Bases or Subbases for Highways or Airports, and AASHTO M 147. Cheapest per yard on an undefined product is not a saving, it is a different job.
| The quote as it was given | What it comes to for the whole job | Delivered, per cubic yard |
|---|---|---|
| 62 a cubic yard, delivered, ten-yard minimum | 16 yd³ x 62 = 992 | 62.00 |
| 34 a tonne ex-works, haulage by the mile — 145 the load to this address | 19.6 t x 34 = 666, plus 145 haulage = 811 | 50.71 |
| 890 the load, eight-wheeler, 20 t payload | The load holds 16.3 yd³ at this density — one drop, 890 | 55.63 |
| The same 890 load, but 18 yd³ wanted | Two loads, because 18 will not fit on one — 1,780 | 98.89 |
Each supplier's all-in delivered total against the volume it actually delivers. Run it three times and the three units become three numbers on one scale.
The total quoted or actual delivery cost.
The total volume the cost covers.
Cost per cubic yard
40 $/yd³
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Cost Per Cubic Yard Calculator: 40 currency/yd³ — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- The yard in the denominator is the yard delivered loose, not the yard in place. Crushed base and gravel lose roughly a fifth of their loose volume once compacted, topsoil and mulch settle over a season, and spoil swells coming out of the ground. The rate is honest for comparing two quotes; used to budget a finished depth it buys short.
- A material sold by weight will not compare against this rate without a density, and density moves with moisture. The same pit sand after rain carries several percent water, so a given weight of it delivers less dry material than the same weight off a covered stockpile. Convert a price quoted by weight with an assumed density and the comparison inherits whatever error is in the assumption.
Order the volume that ends up in the ground
The 12.71 cubic yards on the drawing is not what to buy, and the gap is not a single fudge factor. Three separate mechanisms take material, and they behave differently. Compaction is the largest: loose material delivered at its as-tipped density has to end up at the in-place density the specification demands, and the ratio between those two densities is the multiplier. That is not a rule of thumb — it is the target dry density from a Proctor test to ASTM D698 or ASTM D1557, verified in the field by nuclear gauge to ASTM D6938 or by sand cone to ASTM D1556, divided by the loose bulk density from ASTM C29/C29M. It comes out greater than one every time, because the same material takes up more room loose on the verge than it does compacted in the ground, and both halves of it are numbers somebody already has.
Second, the formation absorbs material at full rate wherever it is low, and the area multiplies it fast. A quarter of an inch of extra depth over a thousand square feet is 20.8 cubic feet, which is 0.77 of a cubic yard of concrete or stone that nobody drew and nobody priced. For concrete work the permitted deviation is not a matter of opinion: ACI 117, Specification for Tolerances for Concrete Construction and Materials, is what governs slab thickness tolerance, and ACI 301, Specifications for Structural Concrete, is what invokes it. Third and smallest is handling — what stays welded to the tipper body, what goes off the side of the barrow run, what ends up mixed into the verge under the heap.
So the waste percentage on an order is a composed number, not a habit. Ten per cent is reasonable for clean fill onto a trimmed and blinded formation. It is optimistic for stone going onto a machine-dug subgrade in clay after a wet week, where the low spots alone can take more than the average depth implies. It is generous for a screeded slab in a building where the boundaries are formed and the base is flat. Decide which of the three jobs you are on and build the figure from the mechanisms above, rather than reaching for the number you used last time on a different site.
Ready-mixed concrete has one extra wrinkle worth knowing when the allowance is being set. What is sold is yield — the volume of fresh, compacted concrete the batch actually produces, determined by the density test in ASTM C138/C138M and referenced by ASTM C94/C94M, Standard Specification for Ready-Mixed Concrete; in the United Kingdom the framework is BS EN 206 with BS 8500-2. Air content moves yield, so the ingredients do not simply add up to the yardage. Ordering the exact geometric volume for a pour is how a slab finishes 0.3 of a yard short with an unplanned construction joint across it, and a joint you did not design is far more expensive than the concrete that would have prevented it.
Whatever the allowance comes to, round it up to the increment the supplier actually sells in rather than to a tidy number. The plant batches in a step it will tell you if asked; the landscape yard sells bulk bags in one fixed size and loose material by the truck. Rounding 13.99 yards down to 13 because it looks neater is how a job ends short by exactly the amount it was always going to be short by.
The same geometry with the allowance carried on the order instead of on the depth — which is the number that gets read down the phone.
SettingsSettings for this calculation
The standard allowance most suppliers and estimating guides assume for ordinary work.
The longest dimension of the area.
The shorter dimension of the area.
How deep the material goes.
Allowance for spillage, compaction and uneven subgrade.
Volume to order (cubic yards)
3.443 cubic yards
Geometry only. The conversion is exact; the accuracy is entirely in your measurements.
- Geometric volume
- 3.13 yd³
- Cubic metres
- 2.63 m³
- Cubic feet
- 92.95 ft³
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Cubic Yard Calculator: 3.44 cubic yards — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
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.
What this calculation does not cover
- The waste box applies a single flat percentage to the whole volume, and that one number is doing the work of spillage, compaction and an uneven subgrade together — there is no separate swell factor, so material that loses depth once it is rolled needs the percentage raised rather than a second allowance.
- Depth enters the sum once and is then spread evenly over the entire footprint, so a base that falls away to one corner, a dished excavation, or a trench with battered sides will swallow more than length times width times depth predicts.
- Clearing the waste field is read as zero rather than as the ten percent it opens on: the answer reverts to the bare geometric volume and the waste-allowance note beneath it disappears with it.
- Weight never enters the calculation — the answer and its breakdown are volume only, in cubic yards, cubic metres and cubic feet, with no density behind them, so a load that fits inside a truck or skip by volume can still sit over its weight limit.
- Length and width are capped at 300 m (roughly 980 ft) and depth at 10 m, so a longer strip or a deep bulk excavation has to be split into sections and the cubic yards added up.
What the buffer costs against what being short costs
The two errors are not symmetrical, and seeing them as money rather than as percentages is what makes that obvious. Ten per cent on a sixteen-yard order is a yard and a half of extra stone, which comes to under ninety at the middle rate in that table — a sum most people would not notice on the job. Coming up two yards short is a second delivery, which means a delivery charge, quite possibly a minimum order, and a day. On a pour it is worse again, because the shortfall is not discovered at the yard but at the far end of a slab with a wet edge going off.
Over-ordering is not free either, and it is less recoverable on bulk material than on sheet goods. Surplus timber is next year's repairs; a surplus half-yard of mulch is a heap somebody now has to move, and surplus ready-mix is a disposal problem with a returned-concrete charge sitting in the supplier's terms of sale. That is the real reason to put a figure on the buffer instead of waving at it: the point is to see the number, weigh it against the cost of a second drop, and then decide deliberately which risk you are carrying.
There is also a third option, which is to carry neither. Most bulk yards will hold a part load against a same-day call if they know in advance that it might come, and ready-mix plants will keep a truck on standby for a price. Both are cheaper than a wasted delivery and both need to be arranged before the first load leaves, not from the middle of a driveway with a shovel in your hand. Ask for it at the point of ordering and it costs a sentence.
The buffer as a figure rather than a percentage, so it can be weighed against what a second minimum-charge delivery would cost.
SettingsSettings for this calculation
The standard allowance most suppliers and estimating guides assume for ordinary work.
The cost for the exact quantity your project needs, with no extra.
The extra percentage to budget for material waste.
Total cost including waste
$5,500
- Waste cost
- $500
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Material Waste Cost Calculator: 5,500 $ (total budget) — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- The waste percentage is applied to one lump-sum figure, so tile that scraps heavily, paint that barely does and fixtures that do not waste at all all carry the same allowance.
- Money comes out, not a shopping list: the total is a straight percentage rather than a count of boxes, sheets or rolls, so it never rounds up to the whole units a supplier actually sells.
- Only the purchase price is covered — sales tax, delivery charges and the cost of hauling offcuts away sit outside the two numbers entered.
- Neither a unit price nor a quantity is asked for, so the total rises in a straight line with the cost you type and cannot show a trade discount or price break that a larger order would unlock.
- The allowance stops at 50%, short of the worst cases: diagonal and herringbone layouts, patterned material cut from long stock, or reclaimed stock with unusable sections can scrap more than half of what is bought.
- Anything returned for credit is invisible here; unopened boxes a supplier will take back, less any restocking fee, reduce real spend, while this figure assumes every dollar of the buffer is spent and kept.
The order of the phone call
The reason the same three calls produce comparable answers on the second attempt is that they are made in a sequence, with the quantity already fixed and the unit questions asked before the price question. Anything asked after a price has been given sounds like haggling; the same question asked before it sounds like specification, and gets a straighter answer.
- Name the product and its specification, not the material — the graded mixture to a named standard, the screened topsoil, the composted bark rather than the mixed woodchip.
- Ask for the loose bulk density from the technical datasheet, and the moisture condition it is quoted at.
- Confirm the unit and, if it is weight, which ton: short, metric or long.
- Ask whether the quoted rate is delivered to your address or ex-works, and whether a fuel or haulage surcharge sits on top.
- Ask the minimum order, the part-load or short-load surcharge, and the point at which the rate steps down for a bigger order.
- Ask what vehicle will come, what its payload is, and whether it tips or grabs.
- Describe the access honestly — width, overheads, verge, turning — before they commit a vehicle they cannot get down it.
- Ask the lead time, and the latest cut-off for calling off a top-up load on the same day.
- Ask what the delivery ticket will carry, and whether the load is weighed over a certified weighbridge.
- Only now ask the price, and write it down beside the quantity it was quoted against.
The ticket is the only document you both signed
Everything above is negotiation until the material arrives; the delivery ticket is where the transaction becomes a record. Where the load is sold by weight, the vehicle scale behind that ticket is a legal-for-trade instrument, and in the United States it falls under NIST Handbook 44, Specifications, Tolerances, and Other Technical Requirements for Weighing and Measuring Devices, while how bulk commodities may lawfully be sold — by weight, or by volume in cubic yards for landscape materials — is set out in NIST Handbook 130 and its Uniform Regulation for the Method of Sale of Commodities. In the United Kingdom the Weights and Measures Act 1985 does the same work. Keep every ticket: a query about a short load is argued from tickets, and from nothing else.
When the job is finished, do one piece of arithmetic that almost nobody does. Add the tickets up, convert them to volume at the density you were quoted, and compare that against the finished dimensions you actually built. The difference between the two is your real compaction and handling ratio, for that material, from that yard, laid the way your crew lays it. It is worth more than any published allowance, because it came off your own site — and next time it turns the ordering question from an estimate into a measurement.
Settle these before the second call goes out
The quantity, the density and the vehicle are what make three quotes comparable. Fix them once and the price question answers itself in a couple of minutes.
- The as-drawn volume, with no allowance in it — Finished length, width and compacted depth. Split irregular plans into rectangles and add them; do not average a length across a shape that is not rectangular.
- Loose bulk density, from the datasheet, at a stated moisture condition — The only bridge between a price per tonne and a price per cubic yard. Ask which condition it is quoted in — ASTM C29/C29M and BS EN 1097-3 define both.
- The allowance, composed rather than remembered — Compaction ratio first, then formation tolerance over the whole area, then handling losses. A quarter inch of extra depth over 1,000 sq ft is 0.77 yd³ on its own.
- The vehicle behind any per-load price, and its payload — Dense material weighs out on the axles; bark and woodchip cube out in the body. Work out how many yards the load holds before treating the load as a unit.
- Everything that attaches to the order rather than the yardage — Minimum order, part-load surcharge, delivery or haulage rate, fuel surcharge, standing time. These are what make a cheap rate an expensive delivery.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.