The Ground Rules, in Plain Language

Welcome to dirt-calculator.com (“the site”). By accessing or using the site — including the dirt volume & cost calculator, the material and compaction references, and the guide library — you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with any part of these terms, please stop using the site.

You must be at least 13 years old to use the site. There is no registration, subscription, or account of any kind — acceptance happens simply by using the tools.

Dirt Calculator operates dirt-calculator.com, an independent publisher of free earthwork calculators and material guides. We are not a soil yard, aggregate supplier, hauling company, or excavation contractor; we sell no products, take no orders, and receive no payment from any supplier whose prices appear in an estimate. The site is funded by clearly separated advertising.

Because we sell nothing, nothing on the site is a product listing, a delivered price quote, or an offer to contract — including the cost estimates the calculator produces from the prices and ZIP code you enter.

The service consists of free, browser-based tools and reading material:

• Dirt Volume & Cost Calculator — six shapes: rectangle, slope/wedge, circle, triangle, ring, and road-trench trapezoid, with multi-area totals
• Material library — eleven fills, topsoils, and amendments with tons-per-yard densities
• Compaction buffer presets — 10–25% shrinkage allowances matched to soil behavior
• Truckload, bag, and cost outputs — delivery-truck counts, retail bag equivalents, and total cost from your $/cu-yd price
• ZIP-based delivery estimate — regional per-load fee ranges for planning
• Guides and reference tables — depth coverage, density data, and earthwork practice

The service is provided free of charge, as-is, and without any commitment to availability. Features may be added, changed, or retired at any time. There is no paid tier — no feature of the site is withheld behind a payment, now or later.

Every result is computed from the inputs you provide — the shape dimensions, depths, material, buffer, truck size, prices, and ZIP code. The calculator applies published volume geometry and density figures exactly; it cannot check that the inputs describe the ground you actually have. A tool fed a paced-off length or a guessed depth produces an exact answer to the wrong question.

We reserve the right to suspend access for conduct that threatens the site’s availability or integrity — and only for that reason.

The site is a small, independently operated service. Keep your use within the spirit of a public workshop: personal, professional, and educational use is welcome and encouraged — including using results in customer-facing estimates, provided you stand behind them as your own work.

What is not acceptable is anything that degrades the site for everyone else: automated scraping at scale, load testing without permission, attempts to compromise the hosting, or republishing the tools wholesale as someone else’s product. Brief quotations of the guides with a link back are fine; wholesale copying is not.

Nothing on dirt-calculator.com constitutes professional engineering, excavation, landscaping, or legal advice, nor a substitute for the judgment of a licensed grading or excavation contractor, a geotechnical or civil engineer, or your local building department. The calculator produces planning estimates from published geometry and densities; it does not evaluate your soil’s bearing, your slope’s stability, your drainage path, or your jurisdiction’s fill and grading rules.

Decisions about structural fill, compaction specifications, finished grades, and drainage remain professional decisions. And before any digging begins — whatever the tonnage — contact 811 to have buried utilities located and marked; a cubic-yard total tells you how much to order, not where it is safe to excavate. For any work governed by a permit or a specification, consult the authority having jurisdiction and treat the calculator’s output as the strong hypothesis that the site verifies, not a stamp that replaces verification.

The calculator is built for planning and learning: totaling yards before requesting quotes, comparing supplier bids against a defensible volume, sanity-checking a hauler’s load count, and understanding how depth, shape, and compaction move the numbers.

It is not built — and not warranted — as the basis for a permit submission, a stamped grading plan, or a guarantee that the ordered load finishes the job. Field conditions the tool cannot see (soft subgrade, over-excavation, moisture-driven shrinkage beyond the buffer, access limits that force smaller trucks) are precisely the risks a site check and a qualified contractor exist for. See the full disclaimer for the complete picture.

The site displays advertising and may reference third-party resources — material suppliers, hauling marketplaces, trade publications. We do not control third-party content and are not responsible for its accuracy or availability; links are provided for convenience, not endorsement.

Advertisements are clearly separated from tool output — never inside a results panel, never styled to look like a calculation, and never presented as a recommendation from the calculator. Advertising partners operate under their own privacy policies; see the Privacy Policy for details on what is and is not collected.

The site’s text, guides, calculator, diagrams, code, and visual design are the property of Dirt Calculator and are protected by copyright and other laws. You may use the tool freely and quote the guides briefly with attribution and a link; you may not republish, resell, or rebrand the site’s content or embed the calculator as your own product without written permission.

The underlying volume mathematics — area geometry, density conversion, compaction allowance — is published earthwork practice and belongs to no one. All third-party names, product names, and trademarks mentioned on the site are the property of their respective owners and are referenced for identification and educational purposes only; no affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement is claimed or implied.

The site and all content, tools, and results are provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, availability, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the calculator will be uninterrupted or error-free, that an ordered quantity will finish the job after compaction and settlement, or that a cost estimate will match any supplier’s ticket.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, this disclaimer applies to every use of the site, whether you are a homeowner planning a purchase, a contractor preparing a bid, or an inspector forming an opinion.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Dirt Calculator and its operators will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of — or inability to use — the site. This includes, without limitation: ordering shortfalls or surplus material; settlement, shrinkage, or compaction beyond the buffer you selected; delivery fees, wait-time charges, or logistics costs differing from estimates; property damage from grading, excavation, or hauling; strikes of buried utilities where locates were not requested; injuries from equipment or trench work; failed inspections; and losses arising from reliance on calculator output without verification.

Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid to use the site — which, because the site is free, means zero. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Dirt Calculator and its operators from claims, damages, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your misuse of the site, your violation of these terms, or your publication or use of calculator output in a manner these terms do not authorize — for example, presenting a planning estimate as an engineered grading plan.

The calculator runs entirely in your browser: dimensions, material picks, ZIP code, and results are never transmitted to or stored on our servers. What little the site does process — server logs, aggregate analytics, local storage preferences — is described in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

We may update these terms as the toolset evolves — for example, if new shapes or export features are added. The current version is always published on this page with a dated revision note, and material changes are described in plain language. Continued use of the site after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms; if a change troubles you, stop by the contact page and tell us why — the answer may be another revision.

These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the site operator is established, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Because the service is free and provided as-is, disputes will in the first instance be addressed informally — write to us, describe the issue, and we will work with you toward a fair resolution before any formal process begins.