Earthwork takeoff without the spreadsheet.
Nine free calculators for excavation and grading — grid-method cut and fill, swell and shrink, truck loads, trench volume, machine production. Everything runs in your browser: no sign-up, no tracking, nothing stored.
Cut and Fill Calculator
Grid-method earthwork takeoff: enter existing and proposed elevations, get cut, fill and net volume — plus a printable takeoff sheet.
Soil Swell & Shrink Calculator
Convert between bank, loose and compacted volume using swell and shrink factors, with typical values for common materials built in.
Dirt Truck Load Calculator
How many truck loads your dig actually makes — swell applied, by truck size, with haul time and total trucking hours.
Excavation Cost Calculator
Cost per cubic yard from your own machine, labor, haul and dump numbers — not a national average that misses your market.
Trench Volume & Backfill Calculator
Trench excavation, pipe bedding, backfill and leftover spoil in one pass — sloped or vertical walls.
Building Pad Volume Calculator
Excavation volume for a rectangular pad or footing dig, including over-dig allowance and side slopes.
Fill Compaction Calculator
How much bank or loose material you need to hit a compacted fill volume at a target Proctor density.
Gravel Tonnage Calculator
Tons of gravel, stone or base for any area and depth, using real material densities — plus cost and truck loads.
Excavator Production Calculator
Cycle time, bucket fill and efficiency turned into cubic yards per hour — and the hours your dig will actually take.
Start with cut and fill
The cut and fill calculator is the one most people arrive for. Enter your grid spacing and the cut or fill depth at each grid point, and it returns cut, fill and net volume — with a takeoff sheet you can print and put in the file. It totals positive and negative corners separately inside each cell, so a cell that straddles the daylight line reports both instead of averaging itself away.
The mistake these tools exist to prevent
Cut is measured as bank volume — soil where it lies. Fill is measured as compacted volume — soil after it is placed and rolled. They are not the same cubic yard. A site showing 600 yards of cut and 600 yards of fill is not balanced; at 20% shrinkage it is 150 bank yards short before anyone starts.
That is why swell and shrink sits next to cut and fill here, and why the truck load calculator works off loose yards rather than the bank number your takeoff produced.
Built to be checked, not trusted blindly
Every tool shows its working — intermediate figures, not just an answer — because an estimate you cannot audit is not much use when someone questions the bid. The default swell, shrink, fill and production factors are typical published values to get you moving; replace them with your own soils data or field numbers whenever you have them.