To convert square feet into square yards, divide your square footage by 9. Most municipal paving contracts and large commercial bids use square yards instead of square feet.
If you hire a contractor to pave your home driveway, they will almost certainly give you a bid based on square feet. But the moment you move into commercial lots or municipal roads, the math changes. Civil engineers write blueprints in square yards (often abbreviated as SY).
A yard is 3 feet. Therefore, a square yard is a box that is 3 feet by 3 feet. 3 × 3 = 9. There are 9 square feet inside every square yard.
If you have a 45,000 square foot parking lot, simply divide 45,000 by 9. You are paving 5,000 square yards.
If you are looking at a commercial blueprint and the engineer has specified "5,000 SY of HMA at 4 inches thick," you need to know how many tons of asphalt to order from the plant.
The standard industry formula for converting square yards directly to tons is:
Let's run the math on that 5,000 SY parking lot at 4 inches deep:
Don't forget to add a 5% waste factor. That contractor should order roughly 9,400 tons of asphalt.
Our tonnage calculator automatically outputs square footage, cubic yardage, and tons for any given dimensions.
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