Fill Requirement & Soil Factors
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Enter the compacted fill you need to size the borrow excavation.
Size a borrow excavation from the fill it has to produce. Enter the compacted fill volume your project needs, plus shrinkage and swell factors, and get the bank volume to excavate and the loose volume your trucks will haul.
Enter the compacted fill you need to size the borrow excavation.
The same soil occupies three different volumes: in the ground at the borrow (bank), in the truck (loose, largest), and compacted in the fill (smallest). Typical shrinkage from bank to compacted fill is 5–15% for granular soils; swell from bank to loose is 20–30%. A 500 yd³ fill at 10% shrinkage needs about 556 bank yd³ — and about 694 loose yd³ ride in the trucks.
Where dry densities are known, the precise version is Bank = Fill × (γd,fill ÷ γd,bank): if the compacted fill spec is 125 pcf dry and the borrow sits at 110 pcf in situ, each fill yard consumes 1.136 bank yards — equivalent to a 12% shrinkage. Moisture conditioning at the pit and haul losses argue for a few percent of margin on top.
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