Sand Calculator

A Complete Guide to Buying Sand

Sand looks like the simplest material in the yard, a pile of small rocks, and it is sold in more grades with more confusing names than almost anything else there. The differences are particle size, shape and cleanliness, and each grade exists because some job failed with the wrong one. This guide maps grades to jobs and explains the depth numbers the calculator starts from.

Grades and Their Jobs

Concrete sand, also called bedding sand, is coarse and angular, with a range of particle sizes that lock together under compaction: it is the correct screed layer under pavers and slabs. Masonry sand is finer and washed clean, made to disappear into mortar joints and to cushion pool liners without pebbles. Play sand is masonry sand taken one step further, washed and screened for softness, and priced for the bag. Jointing sand is a fine, dry graded sand for sweeping into paver joints, and its polymeric upgrade adds a binder that sets with water. Fill sand is the unscreened cheap grade for trenches and bulk fill where nobody will ever see or touch it. Substituting downward, fine for coarse, is the classic error: under pavers it slows drainage and compacts into a layer that feels like cake rather than stone.

Depth Standards Worth Knowing

Paver bedding is 1 inch, screeded loose and never more: a thicker sand layer under pavers behaves like a mattress and the surface ripples under traffic. Pool bases use 1.5 to 2 inches. Sandbox fill is 4 to 6 inches. Under a concrete slab, a 1 to 2 inch sand layer sometimes levels the gravel, though many builders pour on compacted stone directly. Mortar and masonry work does not use area depth at all: follow the mix quantities on the cement bag. When a sand layer is a leveling course, its job is to be uniform, not thick, and the calculator depth field should get the real, modest number.

Bulk, Bags and the Wet Sand Problem

Under half a ton, bags are rational: clean, storable, and no minimum delivery. Over that, bulk pricing wins by a factor of four or more, and landscape yards will load a pickup or trailer in minutes. One caution about bulk: sand sitting in an outdoor pile is wet sand, and a ton of wet sand contains meaningfully less sand and more water than a ton of dry. For precision work like paver bedding, the difference rarely matters; for weight limited hauling it matters in the other direction, because wet sand is heavier per yard on your trailer. Either way, order by volume when you can specify it: yards are yards in any weather.

Handling and Storage

Sand keeps forever if it stays clean. Dump bulk loads on a tarp or hard surface, not on soil, where the bottom three inches become a soil blend. Cover a pile that will sit through rain if you plan to use it as bedding, since saturated sand screeds poorly. Bagged sand stores anywhere dry. Leftovers are genuinely useful: keep a bag for paver joint top ups, icy steps if your conscience allows, and weight in a truck bed in winter. It is the only building material whose surplus nobody regrets.

Screeding: How the Bedding Layer Is Actually Laid

Since bedding is the most common sand job, here is the technique the 1 inch figure assumes. Two parallel rails, usually 1 inch outside diameter pipe, are set on the compacted gravel at finished grade, loose concrete sand is dumped between them and struck off with a straight board riding the rails, and the rails are lifted and their grooves filled by hand. The screeded bed is then left strictly alone: no walking on it, no kneeling boards, because every footprint prints through the pavers above. Work in sections sized to the pavers you can lay before the bed dries or gets rained on. If rain does hit a screeded bed, let it dry and re screed rather than laying on soup. That discipline, more than the sand itself, is the difference between a patio that stays table flat and one that develops the gentle waves homeowners blame on settling.