EstimatorKitFree sand calculator
How much sand, and which sand
Choose the sand, give the area and the depth, and this returns cubic yards, short tons and 50 lb bags, plus the bags-against-delivery answer at your own prices. Six different products are sold as sand and the tool says when the one you picked does not suit the job you picked. It also asks how wet the pile is, because damp sand bulks: the same weight fills more yards, so the volume order and the weight order are not the same number.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 6 sand types
- Yards, tons and bags
- Bulking shown separately
- Spec
- ASTM C33 fine aggregate
- Grain
- Washed and angular, 95 to 100 percent through the No. 4 sieve and no more than 10 percent through the No. 100
- Use for
- The bedding course under pavers, fine aggregate in a site-mixed concrete, pipe surrounds and drainage backfill
- Not for
- Mortar. The grain is too coarse to tool a joint and it drags the face off a struck line
1 in screeded flat and never walked on before the pavers go down.
A round pool is the diameter of the wall, not of the ring you cleared for it.
The state sand is delivered in. The weight stays on the dry basis because a bulked pile has no stable one — it is the volume that moves.
All six types sit within a few percent of one another dry, so this field follows the condition of the pile rather than the product name — water moves it much further than grain size does. 2,700 lb per cubic yard is loose delivered weight, typical for washed concrete sand. The table it comes from notes that it moves with moisture; damp sand weighs noticeably more, and 3,200 lb is how far — loose sand with the voids full of water, against 2,700 lb a yard dry — the extra 500 lb is water you pay to haul. Bulking is a separate measurement: 4 to 6 percent moisture adds 20 to 30 percent to the loose volume of a fine aggregate, and the effect falls back to nothing once the sand is soaked through, and how far it goes depends on grain size — a fine mason sand bulks further than a coarse concrete sand.
Add your prices to compare bags against a delivery
Ask the yard for both figures on the same call — the bag price and the yard price come from different counters and rarely get compared.
Concrete sand to place
0.59 cu yd
- Order by weight
- 0.8 tons
- Order by volume, +20%
- 0.71 cu yd
- Bags of 50 lb
- 32
- Area at 1 in
- 192 sq ft
- Tons per cubic yard
- 1.35
Two numbers, one pile. 0.8 tons is what the scale ticket has to say, and it does not care how wet the load is beyond the water it is weighing. 0.71 cu yd is what to ask for if the yard sells by volume, and it is 0.12 yd³ more than the hole holds because damp sand is carrying air it will lose. Buying by weight is how the argument gets avoided, which is why specifications settle fine aggregate by the ton.
Bags or a delivery
At 0.59 yd³ bags are usually the cheaper way. Enter your own prices to compare properly.
A 50 lb bag holds 0.5 cubic feet — the common 50 lb retail bag of gravel or sand — so 54 of them make a cubic yard and weigh 2,700 lb between them. That is the same figure as the dry density above, which is the arithmetic check that the two numbers on this page agree.
How to order the right sand in the right quantity
Product first, quantity second, moisture last — in that order of consequence.
Choose the sand before the quantity
Six products are sold under the one word and they are not interchangeable. The panel names the standard each is graded to, what it belongs in and what it will spoil: concrete sand is washed and coarse, mason sand is washed and fine, play sand is rounded and dust-free, and bank-run fill has the pit's clay still in it. Getting this wrong costs more than getting the volume wrong, because a bad quantity is a second trip and a bad product is a rebuild.
Give the area and let the job set the depth
Pick what the sand is going into and the depth fills itself in — an inch under pavers, two under a pool liner, ten in a sandbox, a foot in a volleyball court. Then measure the rectangle, or the diameter if it is round. If the sand you chose does not suit the job you chose, the tool says so and names the one that does rather than silently multiplying.
Say how wet the pile is and read both order figures
Sand as delivered is damp, and damp sand takes up more room than the same sand dry. The tool therefore answers twice: the tonnage to order if the yard sells by weight, and a larger cubic yardage if it sells by volume, with the bulking allowance shown as its own line. Type in your bag and yard prices to get the bags-against-delivery comparison at the bottom.
Technical specifications
| Sand types | Six: concrete sand to ASTM C33, mason sand to ASTM C144, washed play sand, bagged all-purpose, bank-run fill and #20 pool filter silica |
|---|---|
| Job presets | Paver bedding 1 in, pool base 2 in, shed leveling 2 in, pipe bedding 4 in, sandbox 10 in, volleyball court 12 in — each one checked against the sand you picked |
| Density, dry loose | 2,700 lb per cubic yard, which is 100 lb per cubic foot and 1.35 short tons to the yard |
| Density, soaked | 3,200 lb per cubic yard once the voids are full, so a rained-on six yard load is hauling an extra 3,000 lb of water |
| Bulking allowance | 20% by default and adjustable to 30% for a fine sand — a volume correction, applied to the cubic yards and kept off the tonnage |
| Bag arithmetic | A 50 lb bag holds 0.5 cubic feet, so 54 bags make a cubic yard and weigh 2,700 lb between them |
| Shapes | Rectangle by length and width, or a circle by diameter for a round pool base |
| Prices used | Only the bag price, yard price and delivery fee you type in; none of them is stored, and no price list ships with the page |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between concrete sand and mason sand?
Grain size, set by two different grading standards. Concrete sand is graded to ASTM C33 as fine aggregate: washed, angular, with 95 to 100 percent passing the No. 4 sieve and no more than 10 percent passing the No. 100. Mason sand is graded to ASTM C144 and is noticeably finer, running 95 to 100 percent through the No. 8 and allowing 2 to 15 percent through the No. 100. The consequence is practical rather than academic. The coarser sand drains, stays where it is put and beds a paver; the finer one packs into a thin joint and can be tooled to a face, which is what mortar needs and what a bedding course must never do.
Why does a cubic yard of damp sand come up short?
Because water holds the grains apart, which is called bulking and it is a volume effect rather than a weight one. Four to six percent moisture — roughly what a stockpile sitting outdoors carries — pushes loose fine aggregate up by twenty to thirty percent in bulk, so a yard of it contains that much less actual sand than a dry yard of the same size. Order five yards damp with no allowance and you place about 4.2 yards worth once it dries and is worked in. The curve turns back on itself at the wet end: soak the sand right through and the grains settle again, the bulking disappears, and what you get instead is a heavy load full of water. That is the reason the tool applies the allowance to the cubic yards and never to the tons.
What sand goes under an above-ground pool?
Mason sand, two inches of it, screeded level and rolled before the liner goes anywhere near it. The requirement is a surface with nothing sharp and no ridges, because everything under a vinyl liner eventually prints through it and a footprint left in soft sand is permanent once the pool is full. Concrete sand is the wrong choice here for the same reason it is right under pavers — the coarse angular grain will not trowel to a smooth face. Build a cove of the same sand about six inches high around the inside of the wall so the liner turns rather than folds, and do the leveling with the sand rather than by digging the low side deeper.
Can I use play sand under pavers or in mortar?
No, and the reason is the shape of the grain rather than the price. Play sand is washed, screened and dust-extracted so it is safe to dig in, and the grains are rounded quartz — which means they roll past one another instead of wedging, so the material never firms up under load and never develops the friction a bedding course relies on. In mortar the same roundness and the missing fines give a mix that is harsh to spread and weak when it sets. It is an excellent sandbox sand and a poor construction one, and paying the extra for washed and screened material and then burying it under pavers wastes both.
How deep should the sand in a sandbox be?
Ten to twelve inches for anything a child will actually dig in. Below about six the shovel hits the bottom on the first afternoon and the box becomes a tray. A four by six foot box at ten inches takes twenty cubic feet, which is forty 50 lb bags or three quarters of a cubic yard, and that is far enough into bag territory that the delivery fee usually decides it. Keep it covered when it is not in use, rake it through occasionally so the damp lower layer comes up, and expect to top it up: sand leaves a sandbox in pockets and shoes at a rate nobody believes until they measure it.
Is sand a base? Can I level a shed on it?
Sand levels, it does not bear. It has no cohesion, so it flows sideways out from under a concentrated load and washes out from under an edge, which is why every specification that uses it puts it in a thin course over something compacted rather than straight onto soil. A shed on two inches of sand over a compacted crushed-stone pad is a normal detail and will sit still; the same shed on eight inches of sand over topsoil will be out of level by the second winter, and the corners go first. Where the load is real, the sand is a leveling layer and the stone under it is the base — the grades that do that job are on the crushed stone page.
Can I put ordinary sand in a pool filter?
No — a sand filter is charged with #20 silica at 0.45 to 0.55 mm and the narrow size range is the whole point. The bed has to pass water at the rate the filter was designed around while trapping particles in the spaces between grains, so a sand with a wide grading blinds off as the fines migrate down and pack, and a sand with anything below the specification passes through the laterals and comes out in the pool. Charge weight is stamped on the tank rather than calculated from area and depth, so a filter is the one sand job on this page that the tool above does not answer.
About the six sands, and the two things water does to a pile
Sand is a category rather than a product, and the word does none of the work of telling the members apart. Two published gradings do most of it: ASTM C33 defines the fine aggregate that goes into concrete and under paving, and ASTM C144 defines the finer, more uniform sand a mason spreads and tools. Everything else on the shelf is separated by whether it has been washed. Washing takes out the silt and clay, and silt is what makes an unwashed sand hold water, shrink as it dries and refuse to develop friction, so a bank-run fill is perfectly good under a driveway subgrade and useless anywhere it has to be screeded or batched. The two most expensive mistakes are the two easiest to make at a counter — using the fine sand where the coarse one belongs, which is the bedding course the paver calculator spells out, and using the coarse one where the fine belongs, which is the joint the mortar calculator batches sand into at two and a quarter to three times the volume of the cement.
Then there is water, which does two opposite things to the same pile and gets blamed for one of them. The first is bulking: a few percent of moisture puts a film around every grain that holds it off its neighbors, and loose fine aggregate swells by twenty to thirty percent in the process. That is why a yard of sand delivered in normal weather contains measurably less sand than a yard out of a covered bin, and why concrete batching plants correct for it rather than ignoring it. The second is weight, and it works the other way: soak the same sand right through, the films collapse, the grains re-settle, the voids fill with water, and the yard that had been light and fluffy now weighs closer to 3,200 lb than 2,700. Between the two effects there is no single honest number for what a cubic yard of sand weighs, which is exactly why the tool above splits the answer into a volume order and a weight order and lets you set both. Buying by the ton sidesteps the argument, and that is the reason a concrete specification calls for fine aggregate by weight and never by the yard.
The buying decision itself is unusually close on sand, because it is one of the few materials a homeowner can plausibly get either way. A 50 lb bag holds half a cubic foot, so 54 of them make a cubic yard and weigh 2,700 lb between them — which is both the arithmetic check on the density above and the reason the crossover exists at all, since somewhere below a yard the point stops being price and becomes whether you want to lift that. The tool takes your bag price, your yard price and your delivery fee and answers with the supplier minimum applied, because the minimum load is usually what decides it on a small job. Where the answer is that sand is the wrong material altogether — a bearing layer, a drainage layer, a surface that has to stay put on a slope — the crushed stone and river rock pages price the alternatives.
Nothing about this load is sent anywhere
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.