BagsAndYards

About BagsAndYards

BagsAndYards answers one question well: how much material do I need, and what will it cost? Not a volume in cubic feet — the number of bags, gallons, yards, or tons you actually put in a cart.

Last updated: 2026-08-21.

Why this site exists

Most material calculators stop one step too early. They hand you “1.23 cubic yards” and leave you standing in the aisle doing division on your phone, because concrete is sold in 60 and 80 lb bags, mulch in 2 and 3 cubic foot bags, and gravel by the ton. The unit conversion is where people get it wrong and end up short — usually on a Saturday, halfway through a pour.

Every calculator here does the last mile. It converts your dimensions into purchase units, applies a sensible waste factor, rounds the way suppliers actually sell (ready-mix in quarter-yard increments, bags as whole bags), and tells you when a different buying route — bulk delivery instead of bags, a 5-gallon pail instead of four singles — is cheaper.

Who runs it

BagsAndYards is published by Thomas Empl, working independently — not a contractor network, a retailer, or a lead-generation front. There is no newsroom and no sponsored-post desk. I built the calculators because I was tired of re-deriving the same conversions on every home project, then checking them against a bag that said something slightly different on the back.

I am not a licensed engineer or a general contractor, and the site does not pretend otherwise. What I can do is keep the arithmetic honest: cite the data sheet, show the waste factor, lock the rounding in a test, and tell you when hiring a pro is the cheaper outcome. The full position is in the editorial policy.

That independence is the point. Because no supplier pays for placement, a calculator is free to tell you that bags are the wrong call above about a cubic yard, or that hiring a pro is the better value on a big slab — advice a retailer-owned tool has no incentive to give.

How the numbers are sourced

We separate physical constants from prices, because they behave completely differently.

  • Constants — bag yields, coverage rates, unit conversions — come from manufacturer data sheets and extension-service publications, are cited on the page that uses them, and change almost never. An 80 lb bag of standard concrete mix has yielded 0.60 ft³ for decades.
  • Prices are US national-average estimates, labelled with the month they were set, and re-checked quarterly. They are never live, and they are never presented as a quote. Regional variation on ready-mix and gravel delivery is large enough that your number will differ.

Each constant is re-derived independently before it ships — worked back from the source rather than copied from another calculator — and the arithmetic is locked into an automated test suite so a future change can’t quietly break a published answer. The full method is written up in How we calculate.

What we don’t do

  • No sign-ups, no paywalls, no email gates. Every calculator and every guide is free and open. We don’t ask for your address to show you a number.
  • No engineering advice. These are planning estimates. Structural slabs, footings, load-bearing work, and anything requiring a permit need a licensed professional and a local code check — see our terms and disclaimer.
  • No made-up precision. Where a figure is a range, we show the range. Where confidence is low — which is true of every price on the site — we say so.

How it’s funded

The site is supported by display advertising and, where relevant, affiliate or partner links to retailers and contractor-matching services. If you buy or request a quote through one of those links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links are disclosed on the page that carries them and marked in the page’s HTML.

Advertising never influences a calculation, a recommendation, or the order in which options are presented. The formulas are open, the constants are cited, and the arithmetic is checked automatically on every build — you can verify any answer by hand from what’s printed on the page.

Corrections

If a number here looks wrong, please tell us. Estimating errors compound into wasted money and wasted trips, so we treat corrections as urgent: send the page, the inputs you used, and the figure you expected via the contact page (hello@bagsandyards.com). Confirmed corrections are fixed and the page’s “last updated” date is bumped.

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