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Never make a second trip to the garden center.
Mulch is sold two ways — by the cubic yard in bulk or by the bag — and beds are measured in square feet and inches. That unit mismatch is why everyone either runs out mid-job or pays for a pallet they never open. This calculator does the conversion both ways: bulk yards for delivery and exact bag counts for the DIY route.
Homeowners use this to avoid the second trip to the garden center; landscapers use it to quote jobs on-site in front of the client. The bulk-yards-to-bags conversion is the money question: above two yards, ordering wrong costs real cash.
2–3 inches is the standard for established beds; 3–4 inches for new installations. More than 4 inches suffocates roots and invites rot — deeper is not better.
Bulk almost always wins above ~2 cubic yards: bulk mulch typically runs $30–50 per yard versus $3–5 per 2 cu ft bag (which works out to $40–67 per yard equivalent). Below a yard, bags avoid delivery fees.
A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet — so 13.5 of the 2 cu ft bags or 9 of the 3 cu ft bags per yard. The calculator shows both counts directly.