Excavation Cut and Fill Calculator

Every site I've walked with an estimate that turned out wrong, the problem was almost never the math on the plan. It was that nobody accounted for the fact that dirt doesn't stay the same volume once you dig it up, and it doesn't stay the same volume once you compact it back down either. A cubic yard in the ground is not a cubic yard in the truck, and it's not a cubic yard once it's been rolled into a fill either. That gap is where budgets and schedules quietly go sideways.

The calculator on this page handles both halves of the problem. Enter your cut area and depth, and your fill area and target compacted depth, and it tells you whether your site has extra material to haul away or a shortfall that needs to be brought in, accounting for swell and shrinkage along the way.

Why Bank, Loose, and Compacted Volume Are Three Different Numbers

This is the concept that trips up almost everyone who hasn't dealt with earthwork before, so it's worth slowing down on.

Bank measure is the volume of soil while it's still in its natural, undisturbed state in the ground. This is what you'd calculate from a survey or a set of plans, just length times width times depth.

Loose measure is the volume of that same soil once it's been excavated and is sitting in a pile or a truck bed. Digging soil up breaks apart its natural structure and introduces air pockets, so it takes up more space than it did in the ground. This increase is called swell, and it's usually expressed as a percentage. Sand and gravel might swell 15 to 20%, ordinary earth often swells 25 to 30%, and dense clay or blasted rock can swell 30 to 40% or more.

Compacted measure is the volume of soil after it's been placed as fill and properly compacted with equipment. Compaction squeezes the material back down, often to a volume even smaller than its original bank measure, because the compaction process packs particles tighter than they sat naturally. This decrease from bank to compacted volume is called shrinkage, and it typically runs 10 to 15% for granular material and 15 to 25% for clay or silt heavy soils.

So the same yard of dirt might measure differently at every stage: one bank yard, becomes roughly 1.25 to 1.3 loose yards once dug up, and if used as fill, might compact down to something close to 0.85 to 0.9 of its original bank volume. None of that is intuitive until you've been burned by it once.

Working Through a Real Example

Say you're excavating a foundation area 60 feet by 30 feet, 3 feet deep. That's 5,400 cubic feet, or exactly 200 bank cubic yards, before any adjustment.

With a swell factor of 25%, that same 200 bank yards becomes 250 loose cubic yards once it's actually dug up and sitting in trucks. If you're pricing out hauling by the load, that loose figure, not the bank figure, is what determines your truck count.

Now say part of that site needs fill elsewhere, a pad area 60 feet by 30 feet, compacted to 1.5 feet deep. That's 2,700 cubic feet, or 100 compacted cubic yards of finished fill needed.

But you don't need exactly 100 bank yards of source material to get there, because that material will shrink once compacted. With a 15% shrinkage factor, you actually need about 115 bank cubic yards of source material to end up with 100 compacted cubic yards in place.

So in this example: 200 bank yards of cut, minus 115 bank yards consumed by the fill, leaves a surplus of 85 bank yards that needs to be hauled off site. That's the number that actually matters for planning trucks, disposal fees, or whether you have anywhere on site to stockpile it.

Why This Matters for Budgets and Schedules

Getting swell and shrinkage wrong doesn't just throw off a number on paper, it throws off real logistics. Underestimate swell, and you'll order too few trucks or too small a stockpile area, and end up scrambling mid job. Underestimate shrinkage on the fill side, and you'll come up short on your final grade after compaction, sometimes not discovered until the compaction testing comes back and the pad is sitting an inch and a half low. Overestimate either one, and you're paying for trucks or import material you didn't actually need.

Where Swell and Shrinkage Numbers Actually Come From

The percentages in this calculator are reasonable starting points, but real soil is not uniform, and the honest answer is that swell and shrinkage vary by specific soil type, moisture content, and compaction effort. If you have geotechnical data for your site, or your compaction testing contractor has already established factors for the specific material you're working with, use those numbers instead of the defaults. For anything bid or budgeted seriously, this calculator is a planning tool, not a substitute for a geotechnical report.

Who This Calculator Helps

Estimators pricing out earthwork scope before a bid goes out.

Site superintendents trying to figure out if a stockpile needs to grow or get hauled off partway through a job.

Field inspectors and engineers sanity checking contractor quantities against what the plans call for.

Anyone managing a smaller project, like a driveway regrade or a pad for a shed or garage, who wants to know roughly how many truck loads they're actually looking at.

Try It Above

Fill in your cut and fill dimensions, adjust the swell and shrinkage percentages if you have better numbers for your soil, and add your truck capacity if you want a load count. If your project involves multiple cut or fill areas at different depths, run each section through separately and add the results together for your overall site balance.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Earthworks Volume Calculator, when the volume comes from an elevation grid rather than sections.
• Void Ratio, Porosity and Unit Weight Converter, to move between bulk and compacted density for the haul figures.
• Terzaghi Bearing Capacity Calculator for Shallow Foundations, once the excavation is open and the ground has to carry something.
• USCS Soil Classification Tool, to classify the material you are moving.
• ASTM D2487, the classification standard the material descriptions follow.