About Build Tally

Build Tally is a collection of free material calculators for construction and home improvement — concrete, masonry, landscaping materials, interior finishes, roofing and framing — that run entirely inside your web browser. No accounts, no limits, and nothing you type is uploaded.

Why we built it

Estimating material is arithmetic anybody can do, and almost everybody gets wrong at least once. The reason is rarely the multiplication — it is the units. Thickness in inches against length in feet. Twenty-seven cubic feet in a cubic yard, not nine. Gravel sold by the ton but mulch by the yard. A roof that is 12% bigger than the building it sits on. Every one of those conversions is a place to lose money, either by ordering short and paying for a second delivery, or by ordering long and paying for material that goes to waste.

Each calculator here takes the measurements you actually have, in whatever units you have them, and returns the number you will put on the order: cubic yards, tons, bags, boxes, bundles, squares, rolls or pieces — with a waste allowance you can adjust.

How the numbers are worked out

Every calculation is standard construction arithmetic, done in the open: area × depth for volume, volume ÷ 27 for cubic yards, volume × density for weight, area ÷ coverage for bags and boxes, footprint × slope factor for roof area. Where a figure depends on a product — bag yield, box coverage, mix density, shingle bundles per square — the calculator lets you enter the value from the product you are actually buying rather than assuming an industry average.

What these calculators are not

They are estimators, not engineering software. Joist and beam spans, footing depths, rebar schedules, retaining wall design, ledger attachment and stair geometry limits are all governed by your local building code, and several of those are safety-critical. Use Build Tally to price and order a job, and take structural figures from your building department, a published span table, or a qualified engineer. Most decks, stairs, retaining walls and structural work also need a permit.

Who is behind it

Build Tally is built and maintained by Faizan Ali, who builds free browser-based tools and writes about making technical information easier to find. The calculators are plain JavaScript with no third-party dependencies, which is why they load instantly and work with the connection switched off.

Contact

Questions, corrections or requests for a calculator we do not have yet: see the contact page. If you think one of our figures is wrong, please tell us — we would rather fix it than defend it.