Paver Sand Calculator: The Bedding Inch and the Joint Sweep
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Sand work is the part of a paver job that the weather picks for you. A screeded bed takes a downpour badly, and joint sand, polymeric especially, has to go in dry and stay dry until you choose to wet it. In a Georgia summer that means watching the afternoon sky, and in a wet winter spell it means the sand pile sits under a tarp until the patio has had two clear days. Order the right quantities of the right two materials and the only thing left to manage is that window.
Four ways a sand order lands wrong
The mistakes on this page repeat, and none of them are arithmetic.
Ordering bedding at base depth. Bedding is exactly 1 inch. Not 2, not 3 to make up for a thin base. A deeper bed lets pavers rock and dip once they are loaded.
Treating joint sand and bedding sand as one order. They share a name and almost nothing else. Bedding arrives by the ton; joints are filled from bags, and the two quantities are nowhere near each other.
Measuring only the paved shape. The bedding has to cover the base, and the base runs 6 inches past every exposed edge, so the bedding area is bigger than the paver area.
Buying play sand because it was on the shelf. Rounded grains roll under load. Bedding and joints both need coarse, angular sand that locks together.
Bedding goes in at one inch and the box does not move
The tool works the same way as the others here: rectangle for a length and width in feet, circle for a diameter, or multiple areas for as many as five pieces when the patio steps around a corner. Depth is in inches from 0.25 to 24, but for bedding there is only one right entry, and it is 1. Pick the material, decide on the tick box marked add 5% extra for compaction and spillage, and read the cubic yards, tons and cubic feet that come back. An email option sits under the result.
If you need bulk sand at some other depth, for a slab bed or a mix, that is what the sand calculator is for. This page keeps the depth conversation at 1 inch because that is what pavers want.
A 20 by 14 patio, bedding and joints figured apart
Take a made-up patio 20 feet by 14 against the house, so the base and bedding grow by 6 inches on the two open ends and the one open side: 21 by 14.5 feet, or 304.5 square feet.
Bedding: 304.5 x 1 / 12 = 25.38 cubic feet, which is 0.94 cubic yards. At 1.35 tons a yard that is 1.27 tons, or 1.33 with the 5% box. Order a ton and a half.
Joints: these are figured from the paved area, 280 square feet, and from bag coverage rather than tonnage. A 50 lb bag covers somewhere between 40 and 75 square feet with joints in the usual 1/8 to 1/4 inch range, so that patio takes roughly 4 to 7 bags. Wide joints, thick pavers or a heavily chamfered edge push you toward the low end of the coverage range, so buy one bag past your count. The bags come from a garden center or a building supply; what this site ships in bulk is the bedding sand.
Put those two side by side. About 2,540 lb of bedding against maybe 300 lb of joint sand: eight times the weight, from two products that sound like the same thing.
Mason sand, washed sand, and the bag for the sweep
For the bedding course, use coarse angular sand. Mason Sand and Washed Sand both suit it, and whichever you pick, keep one material across the whole patio so the bed behaves the same everywhere. Screenings make a firmer bed than sand and give you less room to adjust a paver once it is down, which is a fair trade for a drive and a nuisance on a small patio.
For the joints, the choice is plain sand or polymeric. Fine mason sand sweeps in cheaply and wants topping up every season or two. Polymeric sets in the joint once it is watered, holds longer against ants and weeds, and is unforgiving about moisture going in. Slopes, drives and anything that gets a leaf blower are the case for polymeric. A flat garden path is fine with plain sand. Either way, polymeric belongs in the joints only, never under the pavers.
Screeding, sweeping, and the dry spell in between
Lay 1 inch rails, screed the bed flat, and fill the rail tracks as you set pavers. Leave the bedding uncompacted: the plate compactor goes over the finished paver surface and beds the units into the sand. Work forward off pavers already laid rather than walking the screeded bed.
Sand that is damp to dry screeds cleanly. Soaked sand will not, so keep the pile covered between rain. For joints, wait for a dry surface, sweep the material in, compact, then mist it if the product calls for it. Keep the blower on a low setting near filled joints. If the joints wash out again a season later, the sand is telling you about water: check where the downspouts land and which way the patio actually falls.
Once both figures are set, open the product pages to choose quantity and date, and order the bedding sand alongside the base stone by the ton, sized on the paver base calculator, so they arrive together. Delivery is arranged at checkout by ZIP code, and questions about bulk orders are answered there.
Common questions
Where should the sand be dropped so it is not in the way?
Close to the patio but off the working edge, on a tarp, on ground the truck can reach and leave without crossing your dig. A ton and a half of sand is roughly a yard of volume, about the size of a large garden trailer, so it does not need much room. Put the base stone on the far side of the job and work in toward the patio.
Why does the result show tons and cubic yards when sand is only sold one way?
Because the tool returns all three units for every material. Volume is what your 1 inch bed actually needs; tons are what the load is weighed and sold in. Use the yards figure to picture the pile and the tons figure to order.
Is the 1 inch a loose measurement or a compacted one?
Loose and screeded. Bedding sand is deliberately not compacted before the pavers go on, so the inch you screed is the inch you enter. That is the opposite of the base underneath, where the number is always the compacted thickness.
How do I work out a fire pit circle or a tree ring in the middle of the patio?
Switch to circle mode and measure straight across in feet. If the ring is a hole in the paving, calculate the full patio and the circle separately and subtract the circle, since no bedding goes under an open fire pit.
Can I verify the bedding tonnage myself?
Multiply the bedding area by 1, divide by 12, then divide by 27 for cubic yards, and multiply by 1.35 for tons. The 304.5 square foot example gives 0.94 yards and 1.27 tons whichever way you run it.
Related calculators
One ton of bedding beats 25 bags.
Mason and washed sand delivered free; keep the bags for the polymeric sweep.