How much stone do you need?
Add the walls and your stone's coverage, get tons of stone instantly.
How much stone do I need for a wall?
Find the face area of the wall — length × height — and divide by how many square feet a ton of your stone covers. For thick stacking fieldstone, one supplier gives 25 to 30 square feet of wall face per ton. A 20 ft wall 3 ft high is 60 square feet: 60 ÷ 25 = 2.4 tons.
How many square feet does a ton of wall stone cover?
It varies widely with the stone and the wall. Thinner stones and thinner walls cover more square feet per ton; thick stones laid in a solid, wide wall cover less — published figures range from under 20 to 30 square feet per ton and beyond. Ask your stone yard for the coverage of the stone you pick and enter it in the Coverage field.
How thick should a dry stone wall be?
A freestanding dry-stacked wall is built wider at the base than at the top, so it leans in on itself — and the thicker the wall, the more stone it takes per square foot of face. Retaining walls over about 3 or 4 feet, or walls holding back a slope or driveway, need an engineer.
Is wall stone sold by the ton or the pallet?
Both — natural stone is weighed, and many yards sell it on pallets of a ton or more. Add your yard's pallet weight as your own row in the table to get the number of pallets.
How much extra stone should I get?
Some stone always gets left over because it doesn't fit. Many builders order 5 to 10% extra so they can choose good faces and corner pieces — more for a wall with many corners or a tight pattern.
Worked example: a 30-foot garden wall
A wall 30 ft long and 3.5 ft high shows 105 square feet of face. The only number that really moves the answer is the coverage per ton. At 30 square feet per ton that is 3.5 tons, at 25 it is 4.2 tons, and at 20 it is 5.3 tons, a spread of 1.8 tons from the stone alone. Take the 25 figure and add 10% for selection and corner pieces: 4.2 × 1.10 = 4.62 tons, so ask for about 5.0 tons, or 5 one-ton pallets. The same wall with stone showing on both faces, as a freestanding garden wall does, doubles the face area, so 8.4 tons at the same coverage.
How the calculation works
Tons = face area ÷ coverage per ton, then add the extra. Coverage is the area of wall face one ton of that particular stone builds, so it already contains the stone's thickness and the depth of the wall. That is why it is a supplier figure and not a constant: a ton of thin, flat stone builds a bigger face than a ton of thick blocks. The calculator treats it as a field you can edit. If your yard gives coverage per pallet or per cubic yard instead, convert it to square feet per ton with the yard before entering it.
Common mistakes
- Counting only the visible height. Courses buried below grade, or a base course set in a trench, are stone too.
- Counting one face of a wall that shows on both sides. Entering a wall's length and height gives one face only.
- Mixing ton types. A US (short) ton is 2,000 lb; a metric tonne is 1,000 kg, about 2,205 lb. The 4.2 US tons above equal about 3.8 metric tonnes. Check which one your supplier quotes.
- Using veneer coverage. Thin stone veneer is sold by the square foot of finished face on a backing; wall stone by the ton and is structural. The two are not interchangeable.
Beyond the stone
The stone is only part of the job. A dry-stacked wall is built on a compacted base, and a mortared one on a footing that goes below the local frost depth, so gravel or concrete is a separate order; see the related calculators below. Delivery matters too: a ton of stone is heavy, and a pallet needs a way to get it close to the wall.
Sources: coverage of 25 to 30 square feet of face per ton for thick fieldstone, from a landscape supplier's wall stone guide (Mountain High Landscape Supply); short ton and metric tonne definitions (NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C). Related tools: retaining wall calculator, gravel calculator, concrete calculator and square footage calculator.