At One Place

Brick and block calculator

How many bricks or blocks a wall needs, with mortar quantities.

How it works

Calculates bricks or blocks for a wall from its area and the unit size, including the mortar joint.

The joint is part of the arithmetic, not an afterthought. A standard UK brick is 215 × 102.5 × 65 mm and is laid with a 10 mm joint, so each brick effectively occupies 225 × 75 mm on the face \u2014 which works out at exactly 60 bricks per square metre for a single-skin wall. Ignoring the joint overestimates by around 15%.

A double-skin (one brick thick) wall needs 120 per square metre. Standard concrete blocks at 440 × 215 mm with the same joint work out at about 10 per square metre.

Allow 5% for breakage and cuts, more if the wall has many openings or returns.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged or stored, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected.

Common questions

How many bricks per square metre?
60 for a single-skin wall of standard UK bricks with 10 mm joints, or 120 for a wall one brick thick.
How many concrete blocks per square metre?
About 10, for standard 440 × 215 mm blocks laid with a 10 mm joint.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked