EstimatorKitFree gravel calculator
Gravel for a driveway, in tons and yards
Give the run, the width and the depth you want each course to finish at, and this returns the tonnage to order and the cubic yards it equals. It builds the drive the way a drive is built — a compacted base under a wearing course — and it spreads each of those deeper than you asked, because loose stone gives up about a fifth of its depth under a plate. The two depths sit side by side so you can see exactly where the extra material went.
- 100% free
- No signup
- Tons and cubic yards
- Base and top course
- Compaction never hidden
6 in total over gravelly or sandy ground that already drains.
A drive that flares out at the road is two shapes, not one: run the straight section, note the tons, then run the flare and add them.
Enter the depth you want when the roller comes off, not the depth you plan to dump. Zero removes a course.
Defaults are 20% and 2,800 lb/cu yd — loose delivered weight, typical for 3/4 in road gravel. Both move with moisture and grading; a wet load is heavier, so overwrite them with your yard’s numbers.
Order this much gravel
19.4 tons
- Same load, by volume
- 13.9 cu yd
- Surface
- 600 sq ft
- Excavate to
- 6 in
- Tons per cubic yard
- 1.4
| Course | Spread loose | Finishes at | Tons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base course | 5 in | 4 in | 13 |
| Top course | 2.5 in | 2 in | 6.48 |
The two depth columns are the whole point. Spreading 7.5 in of loose stone is what leaves 6 in behind the plate; order to the finished figure instead and the drive comes out 1.5 in shy with no material left to fix it.
Run it in 2 lifts. A plate compactor reaches about 4 in down, so a single deep dump gives you a compacted crust over stone that is still loose underneath — which is the version that ruts in the first wet spring.
How to work out gravel for a driveway
The middle step is where a short order comes from.
Measure the drive at its working width
Take the width where vehicles actually run, not the width of the cleared strip — most drives are graveled a foot or two narrower than the gap between the trees. A drive that flares at the road or opens into a turnaround is more than one shape: run the straight section, note the tonnage, then run the flare as a circle and add the two together.
Set each course to its finished depth
Give the base course and the top course the depths you want when the roller comes off. A new drive on firm ground is normally 4 in of base under 2 in of surface stone; on clay it doubles, and a resurface is a top course only with the base depth set to zero. The calculator turns those finished depths into the deeper loose depths you actually spread.
Order the tons, then place it in lifts
Read the tonnage, because that is how the scale ticket comes out, and check the cubic yards against it if your yard quotes by volume instead. The last line tells you how many passes the job needs — a plate compactor only reaches about four inches down, so an eleven-inch build-up has to go in three lifts to end up compacted the whole way through.
Technical specifications
| Courses | Base and top priced separately, each with its own finished depth; set either to zero |
|---|---|
| Compaction default | 20%, editable — 4 in finished is spread at 5 in loose |
| Density default | 2,800 lb per cubic yard, editable, giving 1.4 tons per yard |
| Lift limit used | 4 in of compacted stone per pass, so an 11 in build-up reports 3 lifts |
| Preset profiles | Firm subgrade 4+2 in, clay 8+3 in, resurface 0+3 in, parking pad 4+0 in |
| Plan shapes | Straight run by length and width, or a circular turnaround by diameter |
| Answer given in | Short tons first, cubic yards second, plus the excavation depth |
| Stored on our servers | Nothing — the drive dimensions never leave the tab |
Frequently asked questions
How many tons of gravel does a 12 by 60 ft driveway need?
About 23 tons for a full 6 in profile — 15.6 tons of base and 7.8 tons of surface stone. The arithmetic: 720 sq ft, 4 in of finished base spread at 5 in loose is 300 cubic feet, and 2 in of finished top spread at 2.5 in is another 150, which is 16.7 cubic yards or 23.3 tons at 2,800 lb per yard. Order it to the finished depths instead and you get 18.7 tons, which is 4.7 tons short of a drive that reaches grade.
How much does gravel compact?
Roughly a fifth of its loose depth, so plan on spreading five inches to keep four. The figure moves with the material and the machine — a dense-graded stone with fines in it settles more than a washed one, a ride-on roller pulls more out of a lift than a plate compactor, and a lift dumped too thick barely densifies below the top few inches. Twenty percent is the default here and the field is editable, so if your yard or your compactor tells you different, put their number in.
Is gravel sold by the ton or by the cubic yard?
By the ton across most of the United States, because the truck crosses a scale and the ticket is a weight. Some yards, particularly in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, quote by the cubic yard instead. This page gives you both from the same measurement, and the conversion between them is the density: at 2,800 lb per cubic yard a yard is 1.4 tons, so a five-yard quote and a seven-ton quote are the same load.
How deep should a gravel driveway be?
Six inches over ground that already drains, and ten to twelve where it does not. The depth is a response to the subgrade rather than to the traffic: sand and gravelly soil carry load themselves and need little more than a wearing course, while clay pumps up through stone under a wet wheel and wants a deep base with woven geotextile beneath it. Delivery trucks and RVs push the same drive toward the top of that range.
Can I just add gravel on top of an existing driveway?
Yes, and two or three inches is the usual top-up — but grade it before you spread. Fresh stone dropped into ruts follows the ruts, so the surface you get back is the surface you had with more material in it. Drag the existing drive with a box blade or a landscape rake first, fill the low spots, then spread the new course over a flat profile. Every resurface also raises the finished level, which is why old drives end up sitting proud of the lawn on either side.
Do I need landscape fabric under a gravel driveway?
Only over soft or clay subgrade, and it has to be a woven stabilization geotextile rather than the non-woven weed cloth sold in garden aisles. Its job is separation: without it the first wet winter pushes fines up into the stone and drops stone down into the mud, and the base thins by an inch or two a year without anything visible happening on the surface. Over firm, free-draining ground it earns nothing.
How many cubic yards are in a ton of gravel?
About 0.71 cubic yards, the inverse of the 1.4 tons per yard above. It is worth carrying that number in your head at the counter, because a supplier who quotes tons and a neighbor who talks in yards will otherwise sound like they are describing different orders. A pickup with a half-ton payload rating cannot legally carry a cubic yard of it.
About compaction, and why a gravel order comes up short
A gravel drive is not one layer of stone, and treating it as one is where most estimates go wrong before any arithmetic starts. Underneath there is a base course — a graded material with fines in it that locks together and carries the wheel load — and on top a wearing course that sheds water and takes the abrasion. They are different products at different depths, and pricing the whole thing as a single six-inch pour of “gravel” gets you a number that is right in total and wrong in both halves. If you want to choose the actual products by their size numbers, that is the job of the crushed stone calculator, which prices #57, #411 and screenings at their own densities.
The second half of the problem is compaction, and it is the reason this page exists rather than just a volume conversion. Freshly tipped aggregate is about a fifth air that a compactor takes out: order four inches of stone, spread four inches, run the plate, and you have a drive that finishes at three and a bit with nothing left in the pile to make up the difference. Every calculator that asks for one depth and returns one tonnage has quietly assumed you meant the loose depth, which is not what anyone means when they say they want a four-inch base. Depth also has to arrive in lifts: a plate compactor densifies about four inches beneath itself, so a foot of base dumped in one go gives you a compacted crust over stone that is still loose, and that is the drive that ruts in the first wet spring.
The last thing worth knowing is that the tonnage depends on a density nobody can quote you exactly. Weight per cubic yard moves with moisture, with how the pit graded the load and with what rock it is — trap and granite run heavier than limestone, and a load that sat in the rain overnight weighs more than the same stone dry. The default here is 2,800 lb per cubic yard, which is a fair figure for three-quarter-inch road gravel, but it is an editable field rather than a fact, and the number on your supplier’s own sheet beats it. Stone is far from the only material this applies to: soil settles rather than compacts, which the topsoil calculator handles at its own rate, and hot mix is denser again on the asphalt calculator. For decorative work where nothing is meant to lock together at all, the pea gravel and river rock pages drop the compaction step entirely, because round washed stone has nothing to compact into.
Where your driveway measurements go
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Nothing you type — measurements, quantities, the prices your supplier quoted you — is uploaded, logged or kept, which is also why the calculators carry on working on a site with no signal.
The dimensions of your property are the kind of thing worth not handing over. Nothing on this page asks for an address, a phone number or a delivery postcode, and there is no quote button here to pass a lead to a stone yard.