Volume from dimensions
Length by width by depth, in place. That makes it a bank measurement — feed it into the panel below to get loose or compacted.
Bank, loose and compacted
Enter what you know and read the other two. Excavation is quoted bank, trucking hauls loose, and embankment is paid compacted. Set the truck to what yours actually holds — bed sizes and legal weights differ everywhere.
The factors above are starting points, not gospel — they move with moisture, with how the material is worked, and with the compaction you're being held to. If there's a geotech report, its numbers beat these. Blasted rock is the odd one: it takes up more room placed than it did in the ground, so its shrink is negative.
One pile of dirt, three numbers
Excavation is measured bank — in place, undisturbed, exactly as the surveyor found it. The moment a bucket touches it, it bulks up: voids open between the particles and the same material now takes more room. That is loose, and it is what fills the truck.
Place it, wet it, roll it, and it packs down tighter than it ever was in the ground. That is compacted, and it is how fill gets paid. So a cut yard, a hauled yard and a fill yard are three different quantities from one excavation, and using the wrong one is how a job loses money quietly.
Swell decides the trucking
Swell is the gain from bank to loose. Common earth runs around 25 percent, so 1,000 bank yards becomes 1,250 loose yards in the trucks. If you bid the haul off the bank quantity you have under-counted the loads by a fifth, whatever your trucks hold — at 16 yards a load that is 78 trips instead of 63, and you are eating fifteen of them.
Shrinkage decides the borrow
Shrinkage is the loss from bank to compacted, and it runs the other way. To build 1,000 compacted yards of embankment at 10 percent shrinkage you need 1,000 ÷ 0.90 = 1,111 bank yards of material. Balance a site on raw cut-and-fill numbers without it and you arrive eleven percent short of dirt, which is when the borrow trucks show up unbudgeted.
Typical factors
Starting points only. Moisture moves them, how the material gets worked moves them, and the compaction you're held to moves them. When there's a geotech report, its numbers win.
| Material | Swell % | Shrink % | 1,000 BCY hauls | 1,000 BCY builds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topsoil | 25 | 10 | 1,250 LCY | 900 CCY |
| Common earth / loam | 25 | 10 | 1,250 LCY | 900 CCY |
| Sand | 12 | 10 | 1,120 LCY | 900 CCY |
| Sand & gravel | 14 | 10 | 1,140 LCY | 900 CCY |
| Clay — dry | 30 | 20 | 1,300 LCY | 800 CCY |
| Clay — wet | 35 | 25 | 1,350 LCY | 750 CCY |
| Rock — blasted | 55 | -25 | 1,550 LCY | 1,250 CCY |
A worked example
A building pad needs 4 feet of cut over 120 by 90 feet. That is 120 × 90 × 4 = 43,200 cubic feet, or 43,200 ÷ 27 = 1,600 bank yards. The material is dry clay: 30 percent swell, 20 percent shrink.
- Haul: 1,600 × 1.30 = 2,080 loose yards — at 16 yards a load, 130 trips instead of 100.
- Fill it makes: 1,600 × 0.80 = 1,280 compacted yards.
So if the same job needs 1,500 compacted yards of embankment elsewhere on the site, that cut does not cover it. You are 220 yards short compacted, which is 275 bank yards of borrow — and nobody notices until the grade stakes say so.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between bank, loose and compacted cubic yards?
Bank is the material sitting undisturbed in the ground, which is how excavation is measured and paid. Loose is the same material after digging, once it has bulked up — that is what rides in the truck. Compacted is what is left after it is placed and rolled, which is how embankment is measured. One pile of dirt, three different numbers.
How do you calculate swell?
Multiply the bank volume by one plus the swell percentage. A thousand bank yards of common earth at 25 percent swell is 1,250 loose yards, which is what decides how many truckloads you are paying for.
How much cut does it take to make a yard of fill?
More than a yard. Divide the compacted volume by one minus the shrinkage. At 10 percent shrinkage, a thousand compacted yards of embankment needs about 1,111 bank yards of cut or borrow to build it.
Why does blasted rock have negative shrinkage?
Because broken rock never knits back together. Placed and compacted it still occupies more room than the solid ledge it came out of, so instead of losing volume it gains it. That is why a rock cut usually leaves you with material to get rid of rather than a shortfall.
How many cubic yards are in a dump truck?
Ask your hauler, because it is not one number. Bed size varies by truck and legal gross weight varies by state and axle configuration, and the two rarely agree — heavy wet material tops out the scale long before it fills the bed, so what the bed holds is not what you get to move. Whatever your trucks actually run is the figure to put in the calculator.
Now price it
Quantities are the first half. The second half is the production rate, the crew, the haul cost and the markup that turns those yards into a number you can hand a GC. DirtIQ does takeoff and pricing from your own cost library, built for excavation and site utility contractors.
See what DirtIQ does