Construction Material Calculator – Cement, Steel, Sand & Bricks

Construction material calculator for a house

This construction material calculator gives an early estimate of the cement, steel, sand, aggregate, bricks, paint and tiles for a building. Use the quick mode with the total built-up area and the thumb rules quoted on Indian sites, or switch to the element list and enter the footings, columns, beams, slabs, brick walls and plaster you are building — it then works out cement bags, sand, aggregate, steel and bricks element by element.

Home builders, contractors and civil engineering students use it as a material calculator for house construction before the drawings are final, to check a contractor's quotation or to answer questions like how much steel is required for a 2000 sq ft house. The element list downloads as a CSV file that opens in Excel.

It runs in your browser. Both modes give planning figures, not an order list: thumb rules vary between sources by 20% or more, and real quantities depend on the design. Use your drawings, bar bending schedule and a checked BOQ for purchasing.

How to use the Construction Material Calculator

1. Choose Built-up area for a quick estimate or Element list for a detailed one, and feet or metres.
2. For the quick estimate, enter the total built-up area of all floors. Open Thumb rules per sq ft to change any figure to the one your engineer uses.
3. For the element list, add a row for each footing, column, beam, slab, lintel, PCC bed, brick wall or plastered face, with its length, width, depth or height and the number of identical pieces.
4. Open Mixes, steel and brick settings to set the RCC and PCC mixes, brick size, mortar, plaster mix, steel percentage for each element and wastage.
5. Read the totals, then copy the summary or download the CSV for Excel.

Construction Material Calculator features

Thumb rules per sq ft of built-up area

These are commonly quoted planning figures for RCC-framed houses in India, not values from any code. Published guides disagree, especially for sand, so the range seen across sources (checked 19 October 2026) is shown.

How much steel is required for a 2000 sq ft house?

At 4 kg per sq ft, a 2,000 sq ft built-up house needs about 8 tonnes of TMT steel, with a likely range of 7 to 9 tonnes (3.5–4.5 kg/sq ft). It also needs roughly 800 bags of cement, 3,600 cft of sand, 2,700 cft of aggregate and 16,000 bricks by the same rules. Heavier loads, longer spans, basements and seismic detailing push steel up; commercial buildings often use 5 to 7.5 kg per sq ft.

For a design-based figure, enter the actual elements. Steel in the element list is a percentage of concrete volume × 7,850 kg/m³: typical defaults are 0.8% for footings, 2% for columns, 1.5% for beams and 1% for slabs. IS 456 sets limits — at least 0.12% in slabs with high-strength bars and 0.8% to 6% in columns — but the real figure comes from the bar bending schedule; the rebar calculator and steel weight calculator help there.

Element list method, with an example

• Concrete: volume × 1.54 = dry volume, split in the mix ratio; one 50 kg bag is 0.0347 m³. A 6 × 5 m slab 125 mm thick is 3.75 m³; in M20 (1:1.5:3) that is 30.3 bags of cement, 1.58 m³ of sand and 3.15 m³ of aggregate, plus 294 kg of steel at 1%.
• Brickwork: bricks = wall volume ÷ (brick size + 10 mm joints). A 10 m × 3 m one-brick wall (230 mm) is 6.9 m³ and takes about 2,706 traditional bricks; the mortar (1:6, × 1.33) needs 8.4 bags of cement.
• Plaster: area × 12 mm, + 20% for joints and unevenness, × 1.27 dry factor, split in the mix.
• For one pour or one wall in more detail use the concrete calculator, brick calculator or plaster calculator; for money, the house construction cost calculator.