Cubic yards to short tons
Multiply the cubic yards by what one yard of the material weighs. Crushed stone, loose, weighs about 1.25 short tons a cubic yard, so 10 cubic yards is 10 × 1.25 = 12.5 short tons — 25,000 lb, or 11.34 tonnes. Pick another material above and the page weighs the same yards with its figure.
A short ton is 2,000 lb, the one a quarry's scale ticket in the United States means by "ton". A tonne, or metric ton, is 1,000 kg, about 2,205 lb. The page prints both, side by side, and never "tons" on its own: one popular calculator's help text gives 0.794 "tons" for a bed of gravel that weighs 0.875 short tons — the figure in tonnes — and anyone who orders that many short tons is about 9% short.
What one cubic yard weighs
| Material, loose | lb a yard | Short tons a yard |
|---|---|---|
| Crushed stone | 2,500 | 1.25 |
| Crusher run or paver base | 2,500 | 1.25 |
| Trap rock | 2,680 | 1.34 |
| #57 stone | 2,760 | 1.38 |
| Pea gravel | 2,800 | 1.4 |
| River rock | 2,800 | 1.4 |
| Sand | 2,800 | 1.4 |
| Topsoil | 2,360 | 1.18 |
| Fill dirt | 2,360 | 1.18 |
| Wood mulch | 473 | 0.24 |
The stone figures are the Missouri DOT's tables for crushed stone and trap rock, the Federal Highway Administration's lab tests for #57 stone and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's figure for clean sand; pea gravel and river rock come from suppliers, and crusher run borrows crushed stone's numbers for want of its own. Soil is the NRCS's ideal figure for loam, dry in the ground, and wood mulch the EPA's figure for green wood chips. Every one is a loose figure — stone dumped from a truck, not packed down — and every one is a box under Assumptions, so your supplier's number replaces ours.
Loose, not packed
Compacting stone squeezes the air out of it, and the same weight takes less room. This page weighs the yards as a truck delivers them, loose. If the depth you care about is the finished, compacted layer, the gravel page asks whether it will be compacted and works from the packed figure without counting the compaction twice.
Hauling it
The weight decides how many trips a pickup makes long before the bed is full: 12.5 short tons is 25,000 lb, which at about 1,500 lb a load is 17 loads, where the bed alone would take 5. The truck loads page counts both for any job. We are not connected with any supplier, store or calculator mentioned here.