← Gravel driveway bid calculator
Excavation shops get shopped on a published $4 a square foot installed or $45 a ton dumped Facebook special. Those numbers cannot see the depth or the dirt. Six hundred square feet of 4-inch crusher-run on ready grade you pick up at the quarry is a different job from eleven hundred square feet of 8-inch recycled stone that needs the existing surface excavated, hauled off, fabric, leftover truck tons, and a street apron.
Open the free gravel driveway bid calculatorQuarries sell stone by the ton and often by the load. Convert length times width times finished compacted depth into loose cubic yards, add a compaction allowance (commonly 20 to 30 percent — the stone settles), then multiply by the stone’s tons per yard. You do not buy 1.1 truckloads. You buy two. Leftover tons on the last truck are paid for even if they are not spread. That leftover is how a “600 foot” special quietly becomes a 16-ton invoice.
Ready grade is a site walk. Grade-and-compact is a crew morning. Excavate-and-haul is dump tickets plus roughly twice the dirt hours of a grade. Matching a ready-grade 4-inch special on an 8-inch excavate-and-haul drive is how a sold job becomes a two-day loss after the first dump ticket.
Crusher-run (dense grade) locks together and spreads faster. Clean #57 drains and migrates more. Recycled crushed concrete is often the cheapest quarry invoice. Pea gravel looks finished and lays slower because it will not lock. The calculator prices the same drive four ways so you can see which stone still keeps the margin when the homeowner asks you to “just match the other guy.”
Quarry pickup is your truck. Quarry delivery is a load — leftover tons still need the truck. Geotextile fabric is square yards with overlap. A street apron and a culvert are their own tickets. Slope slows grade and spread, not the drive over.
Load the wage with payroll burden. Add overhead as a share of direct cost. Then take margin as a share of the customer’s price, not a markup on cost. The walk-away number is total cost. A proposed price under that number loses money before you take anything out of it.
This page is a walkthrough of the arithmetic in the gravel driveway bid calculator. It is not a civil specification, a drainage design, or a price you should copy onto a contract.
Charge from compacted depth converted to tons, plus whole truckloads, soil prep, fabric, and a street apron — not a published per-square-foot special. A 600 sq ft 4-inch crusher-run pickup on ready grade is a different job from 1,120 sq ft of 8-inch recycled stone that needs the existing surface excavated and hauled off.
Convert length times width times compacted depth into loose cubic yards, add a compaction allowance (often 20 to 30 percent), then multiply by the stone's tons per yard (about 1.35 to 1.5). Quarries that sell by the load round up to a whole truck. Leftover tons on the last truck are paid for even if they are not spread.
Crusher-run locks together and spreads faster. Pea gravel costs more per ton at the quarry, migrates, and lays slower. Recycled crushed concrete is often the cheapest stone invoice but still needs the same dirt work as virgin stone.
Yes. Ready grade is a site walk. Grade-and-compact is a crew morning. Excavate-and-haul adds dump tickets and roughly twice the dirt hours of a grade. Those hours do not live in a per-foot special.