About BuilderTally

BuilderTally is a set of material calculators for building and landscaping jobs. Enter the dimensions of what you are building and get the quantity to order — tons of asphalt, yards of topsoil, blocks for a wall, sheets of plywood.

The calculators are free, need no account, and run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Where the numbers come from

Every calculator rests on constants: how much a cubic foot of compacted asphalt weighs, how many blocks a bag of mortar lays, how much seed a lawn needs. Get one of those wrong and the answer is confidently, invisibly incorrect — the arithmetic still works, and someone still buys the wrong amount of material.

So each constant on this site comes from a primary source: a manufacturer's published data sheet, an industry association, a federal standard, or a university extension service. The source is named on the page that uses it, with a link and the sentence it came from, so you can check the number rather than trust us.

Where we could not find a source, we say so instead of filling the gap. Several figures that competing calculators publish freely — a recommended waste factor for lumber, an overseeding rate per grass species — appear nowhere in the primary literature we could verify. On those pages you will find the input handed back to you, along with an explanation of why we are not printing a number we cannot stand behind.

What these calculators are not

These are estimating tools. They tell you roughly how much material a job takes so you can order and budget. They are not structural design, and they do not replace an engineer, your local building code, or the specifications for your particular job.

That distinction matters most on the retaining wall and rebar pages, where the difference between an estimate and a design is the difference between a tidy garden wall and one that fails. Those pages say so where it counts.

Contact

Found a number that looks wrong, or a source that has been superseded? That is the most useful message you can send us: info@buildertally.com.