About

Who we are

Topsoil Cost Calculator is an independent landscaping-planning site at topsoilcostcalculator.com. We are not a soil yard, a sod farm, or a contractor. We do not sell materials and we do not take a cut of anyone’s delivery ticket. The site exists so a homeowner or a small crew can size an order before they call a supplier.

Editorial and technical questions go to [email protected]. That inbox is read by the people who maintain the calculators. We can correct a formula, a depth recommendation, or a broken example. We cannot quote a live load for your street — that still belongs to a local yard that has seen the pile.

Why the site exists

Most topsoil calculators do one of two unhelpful things. They jump to a second page after you hit Calculate, or they only report bag counts as if every job is a trip to a garden center. Real orders are in cubic yards and tons. Sod is in rolls and pallets. Sand is often sold by the ton. We keep the math on one screen, show a simple 2.5D soil bed so depth is visible, and print the formula in HTML so you do not have to trust a black box.

The first tools are topsoil, sod, and sand. The guides are longer explanations of the same math: how deep a new lawn should be, when bags lose to a dump truck, and how screened topsoil differs from fill dirt.

How the numbers are produced

Volume uses NIST unit conversion: 1 cubic yard = 27 cubic feet, so coverage is 324 square feet at 1 inch¹. Cubic yards = area in square feet × depth in inches ÷ 324. One cubic yard is treated as 1.35 tons (about 2,700 pounds) for moist screened topsoil and dry sand — a planning factor, not NRCS oven-dry bulk density². Sod uses 10 square feet per roll (rounded up) and 450 square feet per pallet as a common grower cut, shown to one decimal¹⁷. Bags are treated as 2 cubic feet and rounded up. A 10% waste toggle increases the order quantity, not the measured area.

Those constants are documented on the tool pages and exercised by automated tests in the repository. The homepage default — a 20 × 25 foot rectangle at 4 inches — is 6.2 cubic yards and 8.4 tons. If a page ever disagrees with that example, the page is wrong.

How content is updated

Calculator copy, price bands, and guides are revised when a formula, a packaging default, or a planning range changes. Price tables are industry reference bands (for example screened topsoil at $15–25 per yard). They are not invoices. They cite Angi, HomeGuide, and Lawn Love national tables listed on the sources page. When we change a constant — bag ceiling, sand priced by the ton, sod waste split from lawn area — we update the matching guide and the citation list in the same release.

We do not publish contractor directories, and we do not rewrite vendor catalogs. If a guide mentions Texas, California, or Florida, it is to explain climate and haul patterns, not to rank suppliers.

What we will not do

We will not invent a live price for your zip code. We will not tell you a load is “certified” without a lab. We will not hide affiliate buttons inside the calculator results. If advertising appears on the site in the future, it will be labeled and kept off empty or legal-only templates. The privacy policy describes analytics and any ad cookies; the disclaimer states that results are estimates.

Using the tools well

Measure the planting surface, not the lot line. Use screened topsoil for the living layer and fill dirt only to raise grade. Confirm pallet size with the sod farm. If you want the long form of a calculator FAQ, start from the guides index rather than a random search snippet. If a ticket is in tons and you thought in yards, read how many cubic yards are in a ton before you pay. Then call the yard with one number you can defend.