Measuring · Guide
Cubic Yards, Cubic Feet and Liters: Garden Volume Without the Headache
Landscape materials are sold in cubic yards, bags are labeled in cubic feet or liters, and your bed is measured in feet and inches. Here is how the units fit together.
The first time you phone a landscape supplier, they ask “How many yards?” It is a fair question, and a confusing one if you have only ever bought soil in bags. A “yard” in this trade is a cubic yard, a measure of volume, and it has nothing to do with the yard behind your house.
This guide explains the unit, shows how to get from your measurements to cubic yards, and gives you some ways to picture the amount before it arrives.
What a cubic yard is
A yard is 3 feet. A cubic yard is a cube 3 feet long, 3 feet wide and 3 feet high.
That number, 27, is the one to remember. It catches people out because a yard is 3 feet, so it feels as though a cubic yard should be 3 cubic feet. It is three times three times three.
To picture it: a cubic yard is roughly the volume of a standard shipping pallet stacked two feet high. It is a pile you could not get your arms around, and it looks smaller on the driveway than it will feel in the wheelbarrow.
The conversions you will actually use
| From | To | Multiply by |
|---|---|---|
| Cubic yards | Cubic feet | 27 |
| Cubic feet | Cubic yards | 0.037 (or divide by 27) |
| Cubic yards | Cubic meters | 0.765 |
| Cubic meters | Cubic yards | 1.308 |
| Cubic feet | Liters | 28.3 |
| Liters | Cubic feet | 0.0353 |
| Cubic meters | Liters | 1,000 |
| Cubic yards | Liters | 765 |
Two of these come up constantly. Bags in the US are labeled in cubic feet, so you divide by 27 to compare them with a bulk price. Bags elsewhere are labeled in liters, and 1,000 liters make a cubic meter.
From a bed to a volume
Volume is area multiplied by depth. The only trap is that the area is in feet and the depth is in inches, and you cannot multiply the two directly.
The long way, which shows what is happening:
The short way, which combines the two steps:
The 324 is just 12 × 27. It is also the number of square feet a cubic yard covers at 1 inch deep, which makes it easy to remember.
Example. A bed 20 feet by 6 feet, mulched 3 inches deep:
- Area: 20 × 6 = 120 sq ft
- Volume: 120 × 3 ÷ 324 = 1.11 cubic yards
In metric, the sum is kinder:
A bed of 12 square meters covered 8 cm deep takes 12 × 8 ÷ 100 = 0.96 cubic meters, or 960 liters.
How much a cubic yard covers
This is the table most people want. It works for any loose material, because it is pure geometry.
| Depth | One cubic yard covers | One cubic meter covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 in (2.5 cm) | 324 sq ft | 40 m² |
| 2 in (5 cm) | 162 sq ft | 20 m² |
| 3 in (7.5 cm) | 108 sq ft | 13 m² |
| 4 in (10 cm) | 81 sq ft | 10 m² |
| 6 in (15 cm) | 54 sq ft | 6.7 m² |
| 12 in (30 cm) | 27 sq ft | 3.3 m² |
The last row is worth a second look. A cubic yard fills just 27 square feet to a depth of one foot. A single 4 × 8 foot raised bed, 12 inches deep, takes 32 cubic feet, which is more than a yard. Filling beds uses material far faster than spreading it.
A yard in wheelbarrows, buckets and truck beds
Numbers on a page do not tell you how long the job will take. These do.
| Container | Holds about | One cubic yard is |
|---|---|---|
| 5 gallon bucket | 0.67 cu ft | 40 buckets |
| Garden wheelbarrow | 3 cu ft | 9 loads |
| Contractor wheelbarrow | 6 cu ft | 4 to 5 loads |
| Garden cart | 4 to 10 cu ft | 3 to 7 loads |
| Compact pickup bed, level full | about 1 cu yd | one full bed |
| Full-size pickup, 6.5 ft bed, level full | about 1.5 to 2 cu yd | half to two thirds of the bed |
| Full-size pickup, 8 ft bed, level full | about 2 to 2.5 cu yd | less than half the bed |
Wheelbarrow sizes are for a level load. People heap mulch and under-fill with gravel, because of the weight, so real counts vary.
Two warnings about the truck rows. First, they describe what fits, not what the truck can carry. A bed that holds two yards by volume can carry two yards of mulch, but two yards of gravel weighs over five thousand pounds, far more than a half-ton truck is rated for. Volume fills the bed. Weight breaks the springs. Our guide to material weights and hauling covers this in detail.
Second, bed sizes vary a good deal between models. Measure yours: length × width × depth of the box in feet, divided by 27.
Why some things are sold by the ton instead
Mulch, soil and compost are sold by volume. Gravel, stone and sand are usually sold by weight, in tons. The reason is practical. Quarries load trucks over a scale, and stone is dense and uniform enough that weight is a reliable measure.
To convert, you need the density of the material, which is its weight per cubic yard:
Most gravel and crushed stone runs between 1.3 and 1.5 tons per cubic yard. So 2 cubic yards of crushed stone is about 2.7 tons. The gravel calculator does this conversion for seven common materials and lets you enter your supplier’s own figure.
Never convert mulch or soil to tons unless the supplier asks you to. Their weight changes so much with moisture that a ton of wet topsoil can be half the volume of a ton of dry.
Bags to yards and back
When comparing a bag price with a bulk price, convert the bags to cubic yards.
| Bag size | Bags per cubic yard |
|---|---|
| 0.5 cu ft | 54 |
| 0.75 cu ft | 36 |
| 1 cu ft | 27 |
| 1.5 cu ft | 18 |
| 2 cu ft | 13.5 |
| 3 cu ft | 9 |
| 25 L | 31 |
| 50 L | 15 |
| 70 L | 11 |
Some bags, especially topsoil and stone, are labeled by weight alone, such as “40 lb”. Weight tells you nothing reliable about volume. A 40 pound bag of topsoil is usually about 0.75 cubic feet, and a 50 pound bag of gravel is about 0.5 cubic feet, but check the small print for a volume before you count on it.
Common slips
- Dividing by 3 or 9 instead of 27. Cubic feet to cubic yards is always 27.
- Forgetting to convert inches. 120 square feet times 3 is not 360 cubic feet. Divide by 12.
- Confusing square and cubic. Square yards measure area, for carpet and sod. Cubic yards measure volume, for anything in a pile.
- Assuming “a yard” means the same everywhere. A few suppliers sell by the “scoop” or “bucket”, meaning one loader bucket, which may be half a yard or three quarters. Ask what their unit is.
- Mixing up US and metric tons. A US ton is 2,000 pounds. A metric tonne is 1,000 kilograms, about 2,205 pounds. The difference is 10%.
With the area and depth in hand, any of the calculators on this site will do these conversions for you and round the answer to what a supplier will actually load.
Written and checked by Bertha
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