How many litres of mulch are in a cubic metre?

One cubic metre is exactly 1000 litres. So a bed needing 0.3 cubic metres needs 300 litres, which is six 50-litre bags.

Can mulch touch plant stems?

Keep mulch a few centimetres clear of stems and tree trunks. Piling it against them traps moisture and can cause the bark to rot.

Mulch Coverage Calculator

Name: Mulch Coverage Calculator
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Work out how many bags of mulch, bark or compost a bed needs at a given depth

Calculate how much mulch or bark chip to buy from your bed dimensions and target depth. Shows cubic metres, litres and the number of bags. Runs in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Last updated 1 July 2026 Source: Gera Tools

How deep should mulch be?

A layer of 5 to 8 cm is enough to suppress most weeds and slow moisture loss. Going much deeper wastes material and can starve roots of air near the surface.

Get one useful tool a week

Like this tool? Enter your email and we'll send you one genuinely useful Gera tool a week — plus a link to come back to this one. No spam, one-click unsubscribe any time.

Mulch is sold by volume, in litres or cubic metres, but you plan a bed by its area and a target depth. This calculator converts those dimensions straight into the number of bags to buy.

How it works

area   = length × width
volume = area × (depth in cm / 100)
litres = volume × 1000
bags   = ceil(litres / bag litres)

Because a cubic metre is exactly 1000 litres, the conversion from your measured volume to bagged product is straightforward once you know your bag size.

Worked example

A 4 m × 2 m bed at 7 cm deep, using 50-litre bags:

Area = 8 m²
Volume = 8 × 0.07 = 0.56 m³ = 560 litres
Bags = ceil(560 / 50) = 12 bags

What to watch

Settling. Fresh bark and wood chip settle over a few weeks, so it is fine to lay it a touch thicker than the finished depth you want.

Bulk versus bagged. For large areas, loose delivery by the cubic metre is usually far cheaper than bags — use the cubic-metre figure this tool gives you to compare quotes.