Enter your area and depth, pick your material, and get the answer in tons and cubic yards — the two numbers a quarry or a dump truck driver will actually ask you for. Built around the material names used at Western Kentucky quarries.
Works for driveways, pads, ditch lines, flower beds, arenas, and fill. Answers are in loose (as‑delivered) volume.
Dense-grade rock loses roughly a fifth of its loose volume once it's rolled. If the depth you entered is the finished, packed depth, leave this on. Turn it off for clean stone, rip rap, and decorative rock, which don't compact meaningfully.
Estimates only. Tonnage is calculated from typical loose unit weights for Western Kentucky limestone products; actual weight varies by quarry, gradation, and how wet the stockpile is when it's loaded. Order from your supplier's scale ticket, not from a web page. Depth entered is treated as the finished depth of that material.
Kentucky quarries use number sizes, not descriptions, and the wrong number is an expensive mistake. Here's what each one is for, in plain terms.
1" top size with about 50% fines. The default driveway rock in this part of the state. The dust is the point — it fills the voids and locks the stone together so the surface holds a crown and sheds water.
Dense-grade surfacing blend. Fines mixed through a smaller stone. Packs tight and smooth, which makes it a good final topping over an established base.
1½" top size with roughly 25% fines. Bigger and stronger than DGA. This is what goes down when the ground is soft or the traffic is heavy.
1" and ¾", washed clean with no fines. Water runs straight through. Excellent drainage, but it never locks up — it stays loose underfoot and moves under tires.
½" clean stone. The small one. Fine enough to walk on comfortably and to screed flat.
Sized by top dimension: Class I is 6", Class II is 9", Class III is 12". Channel liner #2 runs around 6". Heavy stone that stays where you put it when water moves.
Red gravel, straight out of a local pit. Unscreened, so it comes with everything in it — mixed stone sizes, sand, and fines. The chert is hard and won’t crush down to powder the way limestone does under heavy traffic, and the fines let it pack.
Smooth and rounded. Washed river stone in ¾" or ⅜". Best-looking rock on this page and the worst-behaving underfoot — rounded stone never locks together, so it moves under tires and shifts when you walk on it.
Class I sand is limestone dust that packs hard — barn stalls and riding arenas. Washed sand stays loose. Topsoil is for growing; fill dirt is for volume and gets compacted in lifts.
Too thin and the rock disappears into the mud by spring. Too thick and you've bought tons you didn't need. Reasonable starting depths:
| What you're building | Material | Depth |
|---|---|---|
| New gravel driveway over firm ground | DGA or CSB | 4"–6" |
| New driveway over soft or wet ground | #2 base, then DGA on top | 4"–6" + 3"–4" |
| Driveway or building pad, pit gravel | Pit run chert | 4"–6" |
| Topping an existing lane | DGA or #610 | 2"–3" |
| Parking or equipment pad | CSB | 6"–8" |
| Base under a concrete slab | #57 | 4" |
| French drain / drain tile | #57 or #67 | Fill the trench |
| Ditch line armoring | Rip rap Class I or II | 12"–18" |
| Landscape bed | River gravel or red rock | 2"–3" |
| New topsoil for seeding | Screened topsoil | 3"–6" |
One thing the calculator can't see: what's under your rock. If a driveway is rutting every spring, the problem is almost never the amount of stone on top — it's drainage, or a base that was never there. Adding depth to a lane that holds water is an expensive way to make mud deeper.
For most Western Kentucky crushed limestone, figure roughly 1.35 tons per cubic yard for clean stone like #57 or #67, and about 1.5 tons per cubic yard for dense-grade material like DGA or crusher run, which carries fines that fill the voids and add weight. Wet stone out of a rained-on stockpile runs heavier. These are the numbers this calculator uses.
A 100 ft × 12 ft driveway is 1,200 square feet. At 4 inches of DGA that's about 15 cubic yards loose, or about 22 tons of loose material. If that 4 inches is the finished, packed depth, add the compaction allowance and a little overage and you're closer to 28 tons. Run your own numbers above — width matters more than people expect, and most driveways are wider than the 10 feet they get estimated at.
Fines. DGA (crusher run) has stone dust mixed all the way through it, so it packs into a hard surface and holds a crown. #57 is washed clean with no dust at all, so water drains straight through but the stone never locks together. Use DGA where you drive, #57 where you need water to move.
If you're measuring the finished depth you want after it's rolled, yes — dense-grade rock gives up roughly 20% of its loose volume when it compacts. Clean stone, rip rap, and decorative gravel don't compact meaningfully, so leave the allowance off for those. The calculator handles this in the fine-tuning panel.
Both work, and around here people use both. Pit run chert is unscreened gravel dug from a local pit — hard stone that resists crushing under heavy traffic, with sand and fines already in it so it packs. Crusher run is quarried limestone crushed to size with the dust left in. Limestone locks up tighter and gives a smoother finished surface; chert holds up better under repeated heavy loads but can ride rougher. Availability and haul distance from the pit or quarry usually decide it before anything else does.
Either. Quarries in this area will sell you the material and deliver it, and you can spread it yourself. Most people call us when the job needs more than a tailgate spread — when the lane needs to be shaped and crowned first, when the old rock needs reclaiming instead of burying, or when the real problem turns out to be drainage.
Western Kentucky is served by several quarries and river terminals — Arcosa Aggregates has a yard at Grand Rivers, and there are other producers and haulers across McCracken, Marshall, Livingston, and Graves counties. Product naming follows Kentucky Transportation Cabinet sizes, which is why you'll hear numbers like 57, 67, 9, and 610 rather than descriptions.
Knowing the tonnage is the easy half. Getting a driveway to shed water for five years instead of five months is shape, compaction, and drainage — and that's the part we do. Text a photo of the job and a pin drop, and you'll get a real number back.