Cut and Fill Calculator for Earthwork Volumes

What a cut and fill calculation is for

A cut and fill calculation compares the existing ground with the surface you want to build and returns the volume of soil to remove (cut) and to bring in (fill). It is used for site grading, pads and foundation excavation, road alignments, progress measurement in quarries and mines, stockpile inventories and landscaping. The tool builds a triangulated surface (TIN) from points collected with GNSS, a total station or a drone and computes the volumes from that surface.

How to use it

1. Choose the calculation type: fixed design level, sloped design plane, difference between two surveys, or stockpile.
2. Load the point file: CSV, TXT, XYZ, NCN, Excel or DXF with point name, easting, northing and elevation. If the column order differs, fix it under column mapping. For before/after, load the second survey too.
3. Pick the coordinate system. UTM zones (WGS84, ETRS89, SIRGAS) and the Turkish TM and ED50 systems are previewed on the map; local site coordinates are shown on a plain canvas.
4. Enter the design level or the plane parameters. If you leave the design level empty, the balance level, where cut equals fill, is used.
5. Choose the boundary: an automatic outline of the points, or your own polygon from a coordinate list, a map drawing or a closed DXF polyline.
6. Press Calculate Volume. Cut, fill, areas, loose volume and truck loads are listed; the map shows cut in red and fill in blue. Click two points for a cross-section and download a report, CSV or DXF.

From DXF the tool reads POINT, 3D polyline, elevated LWPOLYLINE (contours), 3DFACE vertices and elevated blocks; layers that are not part of the ground can be switched off in the list.

Method: TIN and grid

The points are triangulated with the Delaunay method. Inside a triangle the difference between ground and design surface varies linearly, so each triangle is split along the zero line into cut and fill parts; the volume of a part is its area times its mean difference. For comparison the surface is divided into a regular grid and the difference at each cell centre is multiplied by the cell area. A clear gap between the methods means the grid is coarse or the points are sparse.

For before/after, a common triangulation is built from all points of both surveys; at each vertex the elevation of each surface comes from its own TIN. For stockpiles the base is a horizontal plane through the lowest boundary point or a plane fitted to the boundary points.

Verification

We tested the method on surfaces whose volume is known analytically. Rows one, three, four and five can be reproduced with the synthetic files in the sample menu.

The pyramid gap comes from triangle edges that cannot follow the ridge everywhere and shrinks as points get denser. On site, too, sparsely surveyed slope tops and toes smooth the volume.

Swell factor and truck loads

Excavated soil loosens, so the hauled volume is larger than the in-place volume. The tool multiplies the cut by the swell factor to get the loose volume and divides it by the truck body volume to get the loads; it does the same for the net surplus or shortfall. Take the factor from the geotechnical report or the specification. Compaction of fill is not taken into account.

Accuracy limits

• Results depend on survey density; survey breaklines densely.
• Volumes are computed from plane coordinates. In UTM the scale factor can change areas and volumes by about one part per thousand; in 3° TM zones the effect is smaller.
• For before/after both surveys must share the same horizontal and vertical reference; a systematic elevation offset turns directly into a volume error.
• The map-based estimate relies on a global model with roughly 10-30 m resolution and only gives the order of magnitude.
• For payment certificates and official quantities, results must be checked and approved by the responsible engineer.

Data, libraries and privacy

Libraries: delaunator 5.0.1 (ISC), proj4js 2.9.0 (MIT), Leaflet 1.9.4 (BSD-2-Clause), Leaflet.draw 1.0.4 (MIT), Chart.js 4.4.1 (MIT), SheetJS 0.18.5 (Apache-2.0), Lucide (ISC). The ED50 preview uses the EPSG:1784 (ED50 to WGS 84 (30)) transformation. Map-based elevations come from the open AWS Terrain Tiles data (Mapzen/Tilezen).

Your survey files are processed in the browser and are not uploaded. Map tiles come from Esri and OpenStreetMap, and map-based elevation tiles from the Terrain Tiles bucket on Amazon S3; these requests only contain the tile position and zoom level. Choosing an Excel file loads the reader library from jsDelivr. If you accepted cookies, usage is counted anonymously; no coordinates or file names are sent.

For organisations

Rodosto Teknoloji builds GIS applications for engineering and survey teams, including workflows that link field data, volume calculations and reporting. More about the company is on the Rodosto Teknoloji home page, and project questions can be sent through the contact form.