Take your square footage, multiply by depth in inches, then divide by 324 to get cubic yards — and multiply by 1.5 for tons of crushed stone. 300 sq ft at 3 inches works out to about 2.8 cubic yards, or roughly 4.2 tons.
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Stone Square Footage Calculator Guide
Plans, listings, and landscape drawings all speak in square feet — but stone sells in tons. The translation between the two runs through one number: 324. Square feet times depth in inches, divided by 324, equals cubic yards; multiply by density and you have tons. This calculator is built square-footage-first for exactly that workflow, so a figure lifted straight off a site plan becomes an order without any unit gymnastics.
The 324 rule also works cleanly in your head. 500 sq ft at 2 inches? 1,000 ÷ 324, call it 3.1 yards. Multiply by 1.5 and you are at 4.6 tons of crushed stone before you have found a pencil.
How Many Tons of Stone per Square Foot of Coverage?
Here is the full grid for crushed stone at 1.5 tons per cubic yard — find your area, pick your depth, read off the tons:
| Area | 2 in deep | 3 in deep | 4 in deep |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 sq ft | 0.9 tons | 1.4 tons | 1.9 tons |
| 250 sq ft | 2.3 tons | 3.5 tons | 4.6 tons |
| 500 sq ft | 4.6 tons | 6.9 tons | 9.3 tons |
| 1,000 sq ft | 9.3 tons | 13.9 tons | 18.5 tons |
Notice how steeply depth drives the bill. The jump from 2 to 4 inches doubles every figure in the row — which is why nailing down your intended depth is worth more than refining the area measurement by a few feet.
Getting an Accurate Square-Foot Figure
Pull dimensions from documents when you can: plat maps, builder plans, and even online satellite measuring tools give driveway and patio footprints faster than a tape measure, and usually within a few percent. Measure by hand only what the documents miss, and always subtract structures — a 400 sq ft courtyard with a 60 sq ft planting island needs stone for 340.
Watch for the two classic square-footage traps. First, plans show finished surfaces, not over-dig: excavated bases typically extend 6 inches past the finished edge on each side, which adds real area on small projects. Second, sloped ground carries more surface than its footprint — a bank dropping 3 feet over a 10-foot run holds about 4% more area than the plan view shows, and steeper slopes more.
If your area refuses to be a clean number of square feet, the stone area calculator walks through decomposing irregular shapes, and the stone coverage calculator answers the mirror-image question — how far the tons you already have will stretch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many square feet does a ton of stone cover?
One ton of crushed stone covers about 216 square feet at 1 inch, 108 at 2 inches, 72 at 3 inches, and 54 at 4 inches. Coverage and depth trade off exactly: double one and you halve the other.
Where does the number 324 come from?
A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet, and 27 × 12 = 324. Dividing square feet × depth-in-inches by 324 skips the inches-to-feet conversion entirely, which is where most hand calculations go wrong.
Does the material change square feet per ton?
Yes — lighter stone covers more. A ton of pea gravel at 1.35 tons per cubic yard covers about 120 square feet at 2 inches, while a ton of dense crusher run at 1.55 covers only about 105.
How much stone for 1,000 square feet?
At 3 inches deep, 1,000 square feet needs about 9.3 cubic yards, which is roughly 13.9 tons of crushed stone. That is a full tri-axle delivery, so get a single-load quote rather than per-ton pricing.