Cut and Fill Calculator to compute your site’s net earthwork balance. Input grading dimensions and soil type to output compacted fill needs, bank cut volume, and haul-off export capacity.
The Three States of Dirt Nobody Warns You About
A cubic yard of soil sitting undisturbed in the ground is not the same volume once you dig it up — and it’s not the same volume again once you compact it back down. These three states (bank, loose, and compacted) are why earthwork projects bleed budget. An estimator who treats a 500 cu yd cut as a 500 cu yd fill is guaranteed to either run short on material or find themselves staring at a pile of surplus earth with no place to put it.
This calculator works through all three states simultaneously. It applies soil-specific swell and shrink factors to your cut and fill geometry, then tells you the adjusted earthwork balance — whether your site will generate a surplus to haul away (EXPORT) or need additional material trucked in (IMPORT).
What the Calculator Is Actually Computing
Four measurements drive everything: cut area, cut depth, fill area, and fill depth. Area × depth gives raw geometric volume for both zones — straightforward enough. The complexity starts when soil behavior enters the picture.
Swell is what happens the moment excavated material leaves the ground. Loosened earth occupies more volume than it did in bank state. Common earth expands about 25%. Dense clay is around 30%. Blasted solid rock swells as much as 50% — which explains why a rock cut that looks modest on a plan sheet fills truck after truck on the job. The Loose Cut Volume output shows this expanded figure, which is what matters when you’re sizing haul trucks or estimating stockpile space.
Shrink works in the opposite direction during placement. When fill is compacted into an embankment, it occupies less volume than the geometric target suggests, because you’re sourcing bank material — not compacted material — from the cut or a borrow pit. To end up with 1,000 cu ft of compacted fill using common earth (10% shrink), you actually need to source about 1,111 cu ft of bank material. The tool calls this the Required Fill Source. That number — not the geometric fill volume — is what gets compared against your available cut volume to determine the true site balance.
The Adjusted Earthwork Balance (the hero figure) is therefore: available bank cut minus required bank source for fill. The Net Geometric Balance shown in Card 3 is the simpler cut-minus-fill without any soil factors applied. These two figures can point in opposite directions on clay-heavy sites, which is where projects get into trouble.
One output worth paying attention to separately: the Cut-to-Fill Ratio in Card 6. The tool calculates a target ratio based on the shrink factor and compares your actual raw ratio against it. For common earth with 10% shrink, that target is approximately 1.11:1 — meaning you need 1.11 cu yd of bank cut for every 1 cu yd of compacted fill. If your ratio falls below target, you’re in a fill deficit regardless of what the geometric balance shows.
Soil Profile Selection — and Where It Breaks the Estimate
The four soil profiles in the calculator use widely accepted industry benchmarks for swell and shrink. But real sites rarely contain just one material. A road cut through a hill might hit sandy topsoil, a clay layer, and weathered rock all within the same cross-section. If you apply a single soil profile to a mixed-material site, the estimate will be off — possibly significantly.
Solid Rock is the extreme case. It carries 50% swell but 0% shrink. The zero shrink means rock used as structural fill compacts to essentially the same volume you placed — no additional source material is needed beyond the geometric fill volume. But the 50% swell means your haul volume is half again larger than the bank volume you excavated. A 200 cu yd rock cut generates 300 cu yd of loose material to move. If you’re filling from that rock cut, plan for stockpile space and factor the loose volume into trucking costs accordingly.
Sand and gravel behaves most predictably — only 12% swell and 12% shrink, which is why sandy sites tend to produce earthwork estimates that hold up closest to final quantities.
Dense clay is where estimates most commonly fail in practice. The 30% swell combined with 20% shrink creates large swings between states. A clay site that looks balanced on paper — say, 1,000 cu yd cut and 1,000 cu yd fill — actually requires 1,250 cu yd of bank material to achieve the fill target, leaving the project 250 cu yd short even before accounting for any geometric measurement errors.
Worked Example: Subdivision Road Grading
A short residential street cut through an existing slope. The survey showed a cut zone of approximately 1,500 sq ft averaging 2.5 ft deep — the calculator defaults, as it happens. Fill was needed in the lower section: 1,000 sq ft at 1.0 ft average depth. Soil profile was common earth.
Running those numbers: bank cut volume comes out to 138.9 cu yd. The geometric fill target is 37.0 cu yd. On paper, that looks like a massive surplus — over 100 cu yd of extra material. And the Net Geometric Balance does show +101.9 cu yd.
But the Required Fill Source for common earth (10% shrink) is 41.2 cu yd — not 37.0. So the Adjusted Balance is 138.9 minus 41.2, landing at +97.7 cu yd EXPORT. The surplus remains large here, so the adjustment doesn’t change the conclusion. On this job, it meant arranging off-site disposal for roughly 98 cu yd — about 7 to 8 standard dump truck loads. Without the loose volume figure (173.6 cu yd), the trucking contractor would have underestimated haul trips by several loads.
The case where the soil adjustment changes the decision entirely is a near-balanced cut-fill site on clay. What looks like a 5 cu yd surplus geometrically can flip to a 30 cu yd deficit once the shrink factor is applied — the difference between redistributing on-site and placing a borrow pit order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do the Adjusted Balance and Geometric Net Balance show different numbers?
The Geometric Net Balance (Card 3) is raw cut minus raw fill with no soil factors — a purely mathematical difference in volumes as measured on the plan. The Adjusted Balance applies shrink to the fill requirement, increasing how much bank material the fill actually demands. On common earth, every cubic yard of fill target requires about 1.11 cu yd of bank source. The adjusted figure is always the operationally relevant one for material procurement and disposal decisions.
My cut depth unit is in inches but my fill depth is in feet — does the calculator handle mixed units?
Yes. Each depth field has its own independent unit selector (ft, in, m, or cm), and each area field independently accepts sq ft or sq m. The calculator converts all inputs to cubic feet internally before applying any conversions to the output unit. You can freely mix units within the same calculation without any manual conversion.
What does “Required Fill Source” mean practically — is it the same as how much fill I need to order?
If your fill material is coming from an on-site cut, Required Fill Source is the minimum bank volume that cut needs to supply. If you’re importing fill from a borrow pit, it’s the bank volume you need to specify on the purchase order — not the compacted volume of the embankment. Ordering the geometric fill volume instead of the source volume is a common procurement error on clay-heavy jobs.
What happens if I enter zero for fill area or fill depth?
If the fill side is zeroed out, the tool treats the job as cut-only. The Required Fill Source becomes zero, the Adjusted Balance equals the full bank cut volume, and the operation shows as EXPORT. The ratio card will display “Cut Only” rather than a numeric ratio. The same logic applies in reverse if cut is zero — it becomes a pure import/fill scenario.
Why does Rock show 0% shrink when other materials shrink during compaction?
Solid rock used as structural fill (riprap, blasted rock embankment) doesn’t compress under compaction equipment the way soil does — the angular pieces interlock rather than densifying. So the volume you place is essentially the volume you get. The challenge with rock is entirely on the haul side: the 50% swell means the loose volume moving through your site is substantially larger than the bank volume you extracted, affecting traffic planning and stockpile sizing.