Gravel Driveway Calculator

Every gravel estimate starts with area: driveway length multiplied by width, in feet, giving square feet. Divide by nine for square yards if your supplier quotes coverage that way, though most crushed stone quarries in the United States price and invoice strictly by the ton, making the square-yard figure a convenience rather than an ordering unit.

Volume comes next. Multiply area in square feet by the depth in feet — a 4-inch layer is 4⁄12, or 0.333 feet — to get cubic feet, then divide by 27 to reach cubic yards, since one cubic yard is three feet cubed. A 40-by-12-foot driveway at 4 inches deep works out to 480 × 0.333 = 160 cubic feet, or about 5.9 cubic yards before any allowance for waste.

Tonnage is the step that trips people up. Crushed stone is not weighed by volume at the scale house; it is weighed by the loaded truck. Converting your cubic yards into tons requires a density figure, and for dry crushed limestone or granite that figure typically runs between 2,700 and 2,900 pounds per cubic yard, with 2,800 lb/cu yd a widely used working average. Multiply cubic yards by density and divide by 2,000 to get tons.

The waste and compaction allowance in this calculator adds a percentage on top of the theoretical volume, and it is not optional in practice. Loose gravel dumped from a truck compacts by roughly 10% to 20% once it is spread, driven on, and rained on, and irregular driveway edges, soft spots, and low areas absorb material that a rectangular calculation never accounts for. A 10% allowance is a reasonable default for a straight, well-graded driveway; 15% to 20% is safer for a long rural drive with soft subgrade or an irregular shape.

The truck-load figure divides your total tonnage by 15 tons, a common capacity for a standard tandem-axle dump truck. Ordering in whole truckloads often lowers your per-ton price meaningfully, because delivery is charged per trip regardless of whether the truck arrives full, so a 12-ton order and a 15-ton order frequently cost nearly the same delivered.

Consider a single-car driveway 40 feet long and 12 feet wide, being surfaced with 4 inches of 3⁄4-inch crushed stone over existing compacted subgrade, with landscape fabric underneath.

Area is 40 × 12 = 480 square feet. At 4 inches deep, base volume is 480 × 0.333 = 160 cubic feet. Adding a 10% waste and compaction allowance brings that to 176 cubic feet, or 176 ÷ 27 = 6.52 cubic yards.

At 2,800 pounds per cubic yard, tonnage is (6.52 × 2,800) ÷ 2,000 = 18,256 ÷ 2,000 = 9.13 tons. That is comfortably under a single 15-ton truckload, so one delivery covers the job with room to spare — a useful fact, since a second trip for two missing tons can cost as much as the material itself.

At $32 per ton, gravel material runs 9.13 × 32 = $292. Landscape fabric across 480 square feet at $0.25 per square foot adds $120. With a $120 delivery fee, the total delivered cost is roughly $532, or about $1.11 per square foot — a fraction of what the same driveway would cost in asphalt or concrete.

If the same driveway were built from bare dirt rather than resurfaced, it would need a three-layer construction: roughly 4 inches of large crushed base rock, 3 to 4 inches of intermediate stone, and 2 to 3 inches of surface gravel, tripling the tonnage to somewhere near 25 to 28 tons and requiring two truckloads. Run the calculator once per layer and add the results when you are building a driveway from scratch.

Crushed stone with angular edges — sometimes sold as #57 stone, 3⁄4-inch clean, or crusher run — locks together under traffic and stays put. Rounded pea gravel and river rock look attractive but roll under tires, migrate toward the edges, and rut badly, which is why experienced contractors reserve them for walkways and drainage rather than driving surfaces.

Crusher run, also called quarry process or QP, is crushed stone mixed with stone dust. The fines fill the voids between the larger pieces and compact into a nearly solid surface, which makes it the preferred base layer for a driveway. A clean stone with no fines drains better but never locks up as tightly, so many driveways use crusher run below and a clean decorative stone on top.

Depth recommendations depend on what the driveway sits on and what drives over it. Resurfacing an existing stable gravel drive typically takes 2 to 3 inches of new material. A new driveway on firm, well-draining subgrade generally needs 4 to 6 inches total. A driveway over clay, over soft or organic soil, or one that will see delivery trucks, RVs, or farm equipment often needs 8 to 12 inches built up in layers, each compacted before the next is spread.

Landscape fabric — properly, a woven geotextile — placed between the subgrade and the first gravel layer prevents the stone from being pressed down into soft soil and prevents soil from pumping up into the stone. On clay or damp sites it can extend the life of a gravel driveway by years and is one of the cheapest improvements available at $0.15 to $0.40 per square foot. On dry, sandy, well-draining subgrade it is often unnecessary.

Slope and crown matter as much as depth. A gravel driveway should be crowned an inch or two higher in the center than at the edges so water sheds sideways rather than running down the driving surface, which is what carves the washboard ruts and channels that make gravel driveways look neglected.

Crushed stone typically prices between $20 and $45 per ton at the quarry in 2026, with the wide range driven almost entirely by geography. Regions with abundant local limestone or granite quarries sit at the low end; areas where stone must be barged or trucked long distances sit well above it. Decorative stone, colored gravel, and washed river rock run $50 to $120 per ton or more.

Delivery is usually a separate line item, typically $60 to $200 per load depending on distance from the quarry, and it is charged per trip. This is why ordering a slightly generous quantity in one delivery almost always beats ordering conservatively and needing a second trip: the second delivery fee can exceed the value of the material it carries.

Spreading is the other cost variable. A homeowner with a rake, a wheelbarrow, and a weekend can spread ten tons across a small driveway, but a skid steer or a contractor with a box blade will do it faster and produce a flatter, better-compacted result. Professional spreading and grading typically runs $40 to $75 per hour or $1 to $2 per square foot depending on the region and site access.

Fully installed gravel driveways — including excavation, geotextile, base and surface layers, spreading, and compaction — generally run $1.50 to $4.00 per square foot in 2026, compared to $4.50 to $8.50 for asphalt and $8 to $18 for poured concrete. That price gap is the reason gravel remains the default surface for rural and long driveways where the total square footage makes paving prohibitive.

Ongoing maintenance is real but modest: most gravel driveways need a fresh 1 to 2 inch top-up every three to five years and periodic regrading to fill ruts and restore the crown. Budgeting roughly a fifth of the original material cost every few years keeps a gravel driveway indefinitely serviceable.

The single most common error is ordering by cubic yards when the supplier sells by the ton, or vice versa, and treating the two numbers as interchangeable. A cubic yard of crushed stone weighs about 1.4 tons, so a homeowner who orders 6 tons believing they will receive 6 cubic yards ends up roughly 30% short of the material the driveway needs.

Forgetting compaction is the second. Gravel delivered loose from the truck sits noticeably higher than the same gravel after it has been spread, rolled, and driven on for a month. If you calculate for a finished compacted depth of 4 inches without adding an allowance, you will finish with closer to 3.4 inches and a driveway that shows subgrade in the wheel tracks by the following spring.

Skipping the base layer on soft ground is a mistake that shows up slowly and then all at once. Surface gravel spread thinly over clay does not create a driveway; it creates a thin veneer of stone that gets pressed into the mud within one wet season. Building in layers with a coarse base is more material up front and far less material replaced over the following decade.

Choosing rounded stone for aesthetics is a frequent regret. Pea gravel photographs beautifully and drives terribly — it will not compact, it migrates constantly, and it requires edging and frequent raking to stay in place. If the look matters, use angular crushed stone as the structural layer and reserve decorative rounded stone for borders and non-driving areas.

Finally, ignoring drainage undoes even a correctly built driveway. Water that runs along a gravel surface rather than off it will find the low point, cut a channel, and take the stone with it. Establishing a crown, cutting shallow swales along the sides, and installing a culvert where the driveway crosses a ditch protect the material investment far more effectively than adding another inch of stone.