Fill Dirt Calculator

Enter your dimensions above and the calculator returns the answer in the units suppliers actually sell in — cubic yards, cubic feet, tons and bags.

Typical fill dirt depth by application

Fill dirt is unscreened subsoil sold by the cubic yard for raising grades; it is structural fill, not growing medium, and needs a topsoil layer on top if anything is going to grow.

What the numbers assume

The result uses a bulk density of 95 lb per cubic foot and a default waste allowance of 10%. Both are typical values, not measurements of your material — bagged products and different aggregate sources vary by 10% or more. Change the waste field if your subgrade is uneven or you are pouring against forms with complex edges.

Fill settles — sometimes 20% or more in the first year. Fill in shallow lifts and compact each one, or you will be topping it up again next spring.

Costs shown are material only, based on a national average price you can edit. They exclude delivery, short-form fees, equipment rental and labour.

Fill dirt is subsoil doing a job that has nothing to do with growing

Fill dirt is not soil in the sense a gardener means. It is the mineral layer that gets stripped off a site before the topsoil is saved — low in organic matter, usually unscreened, and arriving with clay lumps and the occasional rock in it. The number that matters here is density: 95 lb per cubic foot, heavier than the 90 lb per cubic foot of topsoil, because there is almost no light organic material in it. Heavy material that compacts and holds a shape is exactly what you want under a pad and exactly what you do not want around plant roots.

The right jobs are structural. Lifting the low corner of a yard that pools after every rain. Building a pad for a shed, a hot tub, or an above-ground pool. Backfilling a removed stump, an old sandbox, or the trench left by a foundation repair. Building up the base of a raised bed that will be capped with real soil. In every one of those, what you are buying is volume and stability. Fertility is somebody else's product.

Settlement is the reason fill has a reputation

Loose fill settles 10 to 20 percent in its first year. That is not a bad batch; it is what mineral subsoil does as water moves through it, as fine clay particles migrate into the gaps between coarser ones, and as the weight above squeezes air out of the voids. A pile that measures 200 cubic feet today can be under 180 by next spring, and the surface drops with it.

That drop is the dip people blame on whoever did the work. It is avoidable with one habit: place fill in lifts no deeper than 6 inches, and compact each lift before the next one goes down. A plate compactor handles a small pad, a ride-on roller or the machine's own bucket handles a big one, and each lift should be damp while it is compacted — not muddy, because mud pumps rather than tightens. Fill placed that way settles a fraction of what a single dumped pile does, and the grade you rake stays the grade you get.

One safety rule overrides the compaction schedule: never run a jumping jack or a plate compactor over a buried utility line, a septic field, or a drain tile. Hand-tamp within a couple of feet of anything buried, or leave that strip uncompacted and accept a small dip there later. Locating services are free in most states, and the call is cheaper than a repaired gas line.

Working the job out in yards, pounds, and truck loads

Raise 1,000 sq ft by 4 inches. Volume is 1,000 × 4 ÷ 12 = 333 cubic feet. Divide by 27: 12.3 cubic yards of solid, in-place fill.

The calculator then adds 10 percent waste, giving 13.6 cubic yards. That allowance is not settlement — it covers spillage, an uneven subgrade, and the fact that a delivered "yard" is never measured to the shovelful. Settlement is a separate allowance, and if the finished height has to be exact, add it on top: 12.3 × 1.2 = 14.8, so order about 15 cubic yards. That is more than a cubic yard above the calculator's number, and it is the difference between a pad that still slopes away from the shed in year two and one that does not.

Weight tells you how it arrives. Fill runs about 2,565 lb per cubic yard, or 1.28 tons. The 13.6-yard order is 34,900 lb — 17.4 tons — which is more than one 10-yard dump truck can legally carry at about 13 tons loaded. In practice that is two deliveries, and on a short load many yards charge a minimum or a trip fee that makes the second drop cost nearly as much as the first. Rounding up to a full second load is often cheaper than adding two yards later.

The $22 per cubic yard the calculator starts from is a national average for unscreened fill, and it is an editable field — type your local yard's number, because fill is the most regional material on this site and the spread between a quarry 20 minutes away and one two hours away is larger than any other line in the data file.

Where the truck can physically get to

Access decides the order size before the arithmetic does. A 10-yard dump truck is roughly 13 tons of vehicle and load. It needs a gate it fits through, a surface that will take the weight, and a spot to raise the bed — which means clear overhead lines and about 20 feet of vertical clearance as the box comes up. It cannot spread material; it dumps a pile, and everything after that is a wheelbarrow, a shovel, or a machine you rented.

Walk the route before ordering. Can the truck back in off the road, or will the driver have to dump on the street and leave you moving 17 tons by hand? Is the driveway asphalt, pavers, or gravel, and has it ever carried a loaded truck in summer heat? Is there a low cable, a tree limb, or a basketball hoop over the drop point? If the answer to any of these is bad, order fewer yards per delivery, use bagged material for the last few feet of grade, or plan on a conveyor or a powered wheelbarrow — all cheaper than repairing a cracked driveway or a torn-up lawn.

The topsoil cap is part of the job, not an optional finish

You cannot grow grass on fill dirt. The organic content is too low and the compacted surface is too tight for roots to push into, which is why every guide to using fill ends with the same instruction: cap it with 4 to 6 inches of screened topsoil before you seed or lay sod. That cap is a second material, a second delivery, and a second cost.

Fill runs $15 to $30 per cubic yard nationally against $28 to $45 for screened topsoil, so it is roughly 30 to 40 percent cheaper — but it does not replace topsoil in a planting area. It buys height. Topsoil buys the layer the roots actually live in. Price the cap with the topsoil calculator before you decide how deep the fill goes, because the cap depth is fixed by what you are planting, and the fill depth is whatever is left over.

When fill is the wrong answer

Three cases. If the area is a garden bed or a lawn that only needs a freshening, you want topsoil or a compost blend with mulch over the top, which the mulch calculator prices as a separate layer. If the problem is drainage rather than height, you want open-graded gravel that water moves through, and the gravel calculator will price it — fill puddled with water becomes a bog, not a fix. If the low spot is a single wheel rut or a small dip, a couple of yards of screened topsoil costs less than the minimum charge on a dump truck and can be spread with a rake.

For anything that has to hold a structure — a shed, a pool, a driveway sub-base — the sequence is fill first, compacted in lifts, then the surface material. The paver base calculator covers the layer that goes on top of a properly built fill base, and the methodology page explains how the waste and density figures in the calculator were chosen.

Fill dirt is the cheapest way to buy height and the most expensive way to buy patience. Order the volume the job needs, place it in lifts you actually compact, cap it with soil that will grow something, and the grade will still be where you left it in five years. Skip the lifts and no amount of topsoil will hide the dip — it will just make it green.