Reading a Paving Bid Priced by the Square Yard
Paving quantities travel in two units on the same job. The bid schedule counts square yards — "SY" on every pay line for hot-mix surfacing, cold milling, base repair and sealcoat — while the drawing you scaled, the slab you are forming and the coverage note on the material ticket are all written in feet. Getting from one to the other is the first arithmetic on any driveway, apron or overlay takeoff.
Where the Two Units Meet on a Job
Pay items counted in SY
Plans dimensioned in feet
Mix tonnage tied to the yard
Unit prices that divide by nine
From Bid Quantity to the Area You Measured
Whether the figure arrives on a contractor's proposal or comes out of your own wheel-measure of the drive, the check takes seconds.
Enter the SY figure from the bid line
Type the pay quantity — 18, 53.33, 1,000 — in the left field and the square footage appears as you type. A comma works as the decimal mark and stray spaces are ignored.
Set it against your tape measurement
If the proposal says 120 SY but the drive taped out at 20 × 45 ft, the bid claims 1,080 ft² against your 900 ft² — a 20 % gap worth raising before you sign.
Flip the direction to build the quantity
Press the swap button (↔) to run ft² → yd² when you are pricing your own takeoff: a 42 × 50 ft sport slab is 2,100 ft², which becomes the 233.33 SY line item.
Drop the number into the takeoff sheet
The copy button hands over the bare figure with no unit and no spaces, which is what an estimating spreadsheet cell wants. Ctrl + C inside a field does the same.
Common Paving Jobs in Square Yards, Square Feet and Material
Typical residential and light commercial items, shown as plan dimensions, both area units, and the material each depth implies — 110 lb per SY per inch for hot mix, and a 4 in pour for concrete.
| Paving item | Plan size | Square feet | Square yards | Material at stated depth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-width driveway | 20 × 24 ft | 480 ft² | 53.33 yd² | 5.9 cu yd concrete at 4 in |
| Double-width driveway | 24 × 40 ft | 960 ft² | 106.67 yd² | 11.7 tons hot mix at 2 in |
| Single parking bay | 9 × 18 ft | 162 ft² | 18 yd² | 1.98 tons hot mix at 2 in |
| Sidewalk run | 4 × 100 ft | 400 ft² | 44.44 yd² | 4.9 cu yd concrete at 4 in |
| Half-court slab | 42 × 50 ft | 2,100 ft² | 233.33 yd² | 25.9 cu yd concrete at 4 in |
| Resurfacing area | 90 × 100 ft | 9,000 ft² | 1,000 yd² | 110 tons hot mix at 2 in |
Read down the two area columns and the ratio never moves: nine square feet to every square yard, so a bid quantity that looks small beside a square-foot measurement is usually the very same job written the other way round. The bottom row is the anchor worth memorising — 1,000 SY is 9,000 ft², and at a 2 in lift that is roughly 110 tons of mix on the delivery ticket.
What Helps When You Are Checking Numbers
Walk a whole bid schedule in one box
Both fields stay editable and track each other live, so you can run down every SY line on a proposal without clearing or re-selecting anything.
Turn a field measurement back into SY
The swap control reverses to ft² → yd², the direction an estimator needs after taping the site and before writing the pay quantity.
Any area unit an imported spec throws at you
Searchable dropdowns on both sides carry square metres, hectares and the rest — handy when a paver or geotextile data sheet lists coverage in metric.
Figures clean enough for an estimate cell
Results carry up to eight decimals with spaced thousands on screen, while the copy button strips all of that back to a plain number.
Paving Quantity and Pricing Questions
Why do paving bids and DOT pay items count square yards?
Highway agencies settled on the square yard long before anyone estimated on a computer, and it keeps schedule numbers human-sized: a mile of 24 ft lane is 14,080 SY instead of 126,720 ft². Surfacing and milling are also sold as area at a specified depth, so the item is priced per SY with the lift thickness written into its description.
A contractor quoted $38 per square yard — what is that per square foot?
Divide by 9: $38 per SY is $4.22 per ft². It works the other way too, so a rival offer of $4.25 per ft² is $38.25 per SY and the two bids sit within pennies of each other. Only compare once both are in the same unit, and confirm each price covers the same depth, base prep and haul-off.
How many tons of asphalt does a 500 SY overlay take at 2 inches?
About 55 tons. At roughly 110 lb per square yard per inch of compacted depth, a 2 in lift works out to 220 lb per SY, so 500 × 220 = 110,000 lb = 55 tons. Order a little over: mix density shifts with the aggregate and the plant, and edges always swallow more than the flat area suggests.
How do I get cubic yards of concrete from a slab measured in square feet?
Multiply the square footage by the depth in feet, then divide by 27. A 4 in slab is 0.3333 ft deep, so a 480 ft² driveway needs 480 × 0.3333 ÷ 27 = 5.93 cu yd, and most crews order 6.25 to cover subgrade dips. Useful shortcut: at 4 in, one square yard of slab is 0.111 cu yd of concrete.
Are sealcoat and striping priced by the square yard as well?
Sealcoat is: coverage specs are written in gallons per square yard, commonly near 0.15 gal/SY per coat, so a 1,000 SY drive takes roughly 150 gallons for one coat before dilution and sand are figured in. Striping is the exception — lines are measured in linear feet and stalls, arrows and legends are priced per each, so none of it converts from an area figure.
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