Brick Calculator
Calculate how many bricks you need for a wall, from its area and brick size, accounting for waste.
How we calculate it
Bricks = ceil((Wall length × Wall height) / (Brick length × Brick height) × (1 + Waste factor)).
Understanding your estimate
Order too few bricks and the job stalls halfway through a course while someone drives back to the yard. Order comfortably more than you need and the leftover pallet sits against the fence for a project that may never happen. Counting bricks for a wall is simple multiplication, but two decisions built into this calculator, what counts as a brick's face and how the waste gets rounded, are what keep you from landing on either extreme.
A garden wall, worked out
Take the calculator's own imperial defaults: a wall 10 ft long and 8 ft tall, built with a modular brick measuring 8 in by 2.67 in, and the standard 10% waste factor.
- Wall area: 10 ft × 8 ft = 80 ft².
- Brick face area: 8 in × 2.67 in = 21.36 in², or about 0.148 ft².
- Raw brick count: 80 ÷ 0.148 ≈ 539.3, which puts roughly 6.75 bricks on every square foot of wall, close to the "about 7" a mason would tell you off the top of their head.
- Add the default 10% waste factor before rounding: 539.3 × 1.10 ≈ 593.3.
- Round up to a whole brick: 594. Not 593, this calculator never rounds a purchase quantity down.
Why the default brick already includes the mortar joint
8 inches by 2.67 inches isn't a rounded-off guess. It's the modular brick's standard nominal face size under ASTM C216, and it already has a 3/8 in mortar joint built into it. The physical brick you'd pick up off the pallet measures smaller, 7⅝ in by 2¼ in; the joint is what completes it to the nominal 8 by 2⅔ once it's laid in a wall. Type in your own brick's dimensions if it's a different size, but the default assumes a wall built with joints, the way one actually goes together, not bricks stacked edge to edge with nothing between them.
Why the brick's depth never enters the math
The form asks for the brick's length and height, never how far it reaches into the wall. That's deliberate. For a single wythe, a wall one brick thick, only the face you can see determines how many bricks cover it. The Tile Calculator works the same way, no thickness field either, because tile thickness doesn't change how many tiles cover a floor. The Retaining Wall Calculator does collect a block depth, but only to echo it back on the results panel; it doesn't feed that calculator's block count either. Depth matters for ordering mortar or figuring out how a wall ties into a footing. It doesn't change how many bricks make up its face.
Why there's no bond pattern preset here
The Tile Calculator lets you pick straight or diagonal, and that choice quietly swaps the waste factor's default between 10% and 15% before you ever touch the field. Brick doesn't get that treatment. Running bond, stack bond, herringbone, none of it changes the waste factor here, because the spec behind this calculator never asked for a pattern preset. The waste field defaults to a flat 10% instead, the same number used across the concrete, mulch, gravel, tile, flooring, and insulation calculators in this catalog. That's not us skipping a step for brick specifically, it's us not inventing a preset the spec didn't call for. If your project has a pattern that genuinely eats more brick, raise the percentage yourself.
What this calculator assumes about your wall
It takes one length and one height and treats the whole rectangle as solid brick. It doesn't ask about a doorway, a window, or a gap for a gate, so if your wall has openings, measure the brick that's actually going up, not the overall footprint, before typing in a length and height. The formula can't tell a wall with a window cut into it from one without. Only the numbers you give it can.