The drive
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with your quarry ticket and a crew you have timed. Changing stone, prep, or delivery fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and quarry rates
These start from the stone, prep, and delivery you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a quarry catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a per-foot dump that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Drive area
- Loose cubic yards
- Ordered after compaction
- Tons ordered
- Tons paid (whole trucks)
- Truckloads
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Stone (paid tons)
- Prep, fabric, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per sq ft
- Price per ton
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
A bid link carries your own rates — wage, burden, overhead, and target margin — so the page reopens exactly as you left it. Send it to yourself or your crew. The numbers ride after the #, which is never sent to a server, so copying a link uploads nothing. The customer should get the price, not the link.
Same drive, four stones
| Stone | Hours | Price |
|---|
Where the hours go
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. The starting hours and quarry rates are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a guarantee — time your own crews and replace them.
Hand the customer a proposal
The price above is for you. This is the page you print or save as a PDF and give to the customer — your details, their details, the scope, the deposit split, and a line for them to sign. Your business details are saved on this device so you only type them once; the customer’s details are never saved.
Everything on the printed page is text you typed or a number this calculator worked out. It contains no warranty, lien, or cancellation wording — those depend on your jurisdiction and your contract, and this tool is not the place to invent them.
Common questions
Why does my tonnage never match the customer’s “length × width × depth” math?
Because loose stone settles, and a quarry sells weight, not volume. This page does the three steps a square-footage number skips: it works out loose cubic yards from the pad, adds compaction on top (25% on the crusher-run preset — stone you pay for and then compact away), converts to tons using the stone’s own density, and only then prices it. Crusher run runs about 1.5 tons a cubic yard, clean #57 and recycled about 1.4, pea gravel about 1.35, so the same pad in two different stones is two different tonnages before a single price differs.
Why does the price jump when I add a few feet of driveway?
Trucks. Delivered stone is sold by the load, so tonnage rounds up to whole 16-ton trucks and the leftover tons on the last one are still on your invoice. Crossing from three loads to four adds a $145 truck trip and 0.6 hours whether you needed one ton more or fifteen. That step is the single most common reason a driveway bid built from a smooth per-foot rate loses money on a job only slightly bigger than the last one. Quarry pickup in your own truck has no per-load charge — that time is already in the trip hours.
What does the stone choice actually change?
Price per ton, how fast it spreads, and how much of it you need. Recycled crushed concrete starts cheapest at $22 a ton, crusher run $28, clean #57 stone $36, pea gravel $42. Spread rate moves the other way: crusher run covers about 400 sq ft an hour, recycled 380, clean stone 350, and pea gravel only 280 because it will not lock up and has to be worked. Switching stone refills those starting rates and leaves the wages and margin you typed alone.
Why is “prep” a bigger line than I expect?
Because it is the part the cheap special assumes away. A ready grade is zero dirt-work hours — the assumption behind every per-foot price you are being compared to. Machine grade and compact adds roughly one hour per 800 sq ft. Excavating the existing surface and hauling it off is double that, one hour per 400 sq ft, plus two $95 dump tickets by default. On a real driveway that is often the difference between the brochure number and the bid.
Do I need fabric, an apron, or a culvert?
They are separate ticks because they depend on the site, not the size. Geotextile fabric is priced by the square yard with an overlap allowance on top (10%, or 12% under pea gravel) and is what stops a soft subgrade eating the stone you just placed. A street apron starts at 2.5 hours and $420, a culvert at 3 hours and $380. None of them scale with the driveway, which is why folding them into a per-foot rate misprices both the small job and the large one.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No account and no network requests — the calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your bid is saved in this browser’s local storage so it is still here next visit, and a bid link you copy carries those same numbers in the page’s address rather than sending anything to a server. The optional usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your dimensions, wages, or prices.
What’s the difference between the bid price and the walk-away price?
The bid price already carries your target margin on top of labor, stone, trucking, and overhead. The walk-away price is the total cost underneath it — crew hours, ordered tons, truck loads, fabric, dump tickets, apron and culvert, travel and equipment — the point below which the driveway stops being profitable at all. Typing a number into “Price you’re considering” shows you the margin, or the loss, before you send it.