Gravel Calculator

Gravel Is Sold by Weight, Not Just Volume

Crushed stone runs close to 1.4 tons per cubic yard for most limestone and granite blends, but pea gravel and river rock sit lighter, often closer to 1.2. Sand-gravel mixes used for paver base can run heavier still. This calculator defaults to 1.4 tons per cubic yard, a reasonable middle-of-the-road figure for crushed stone, but adjust it to match whatever your supplier actually quotes; every quarry publishes its own conversion factor for the specific material you're buying.

How Deep Should a Gravel Base Actually Be?

A compacted driveway base typically runs 4 to 6 inches before any finish layer goes on top, while a decorative walkway or garden path usually only needs 2 to 3 inches. Whatever depth you land on, gravel settles and compacts once it's spread and run over with a plate compactor, so ordering a bit more than the raw math suggests is standard practice rather than cutting the order exactly to the calculator's number.

• Driveway base layer: 4 to 6 inches, compacted
• Walkway or garden path: 2 to 3 inches
• Drainage layer under a patio or shed: 4 inches is common, check your local frost line for anything structural

Base Layer vs. Decorative Top Layer: Do You Need Both?

A functional gravel driveway or path is usually built in layers, not one uniform depth of a single material. A larger, angular crushed stone (sometimes called road base or #3 stone) forms the compacted structural layer, then a smaller, more comfortable-to-walk-on gravel like pea gravel or #57 stone goes on top as the visible finish layer. Running this calculator once per layer, since each has a different depth and sometimes a different density, gives a more accurate total than treating the whole project as one uniform gravel bed.

Edging: The Detail That Keeps Gravel From Migrating

Loose gravel without a physical edge restraint slowly spreads outward with foot traffic, rain runoff, and snow plowing, ending up in the lawn or garden bed next to it within a season or two. Steel, plastic, or paver edging installed along the perimeter before the gravel goes down solves this permanently and is far easier to install before the gravel is in place than after, since digging an edging trench through settled gravel means moving material out of the way twice.