Wall area in. Bricks or blocks with the right wastage, pallets, mortar and cement bags out. Australian sizes, 10mm joint, working shown. Free, no email.
Face area of the wall. Length x height, minus the big openings.
the common AU brick, 230 x 110 x 76. All figures use a 10mm joint.
One leaf, 110mm thick.
The normal allowance: returns, openings, breakage in the pack and a few spares left on site.
Order this many
1,066
bricks, including 10% wastage · about 3 pallets at 400 per pallet
Working: one brick plus its joint covers 0.24 × 0.086 m, which is 0.02064 m² of wall face. 1 ÷ 0.02064 = 48.45 per m² of a single leaf. Then 20 m² × 48.45 = 969 before wastage, plus 10% = 1,066.
Mortar and cement are a range because Australian sources genuinely disagree: 0.24 to 0.5 m³ and 8 to 12.5 bags of cement per 1,000 bricks, depending on the mix, the frog and how fat you run the joints. Sand is roughly three to five times the cement by volume. Your own last job is a better number than any of them.
A guide for ordering, not a setout. Openings, piers, engaged columns and the bond you are laying all move the real count, and the pack label wins over any calculator.
Coming up eighty bricks short on a Thursday afternoon does not cost you eighty bricks. It costs the rest of that day, a run to the yard, and a top-up pack out of a different firing that never quite matches the wall you have already laid. The wastage percentage is not padding. It is the difference between closing the job out and going back.
Every number here shows its working, because a brickie should not have to take a website's word for it. The face size with the joint, the division, the count before wastage. Where the Australian sources genuinely disagree, like mortar per thousand, you get the range instead of a made-up figure.
48.5 for a single skin of the standard Australian brick. The brick is 230 x 110 x 76mm and the joint is 10mm, so each brick takes up 240 x 86mm of wall face, which is 0.02064 m². One divided by that is 48.45, and Boral publishes 48.5 in its own quantity table. Double brick is two independent leaves, so 97 per m², which most brickies round to 100 when they are ordering.
12.5. A standard 190 series block is 390 x 190 x 190mm and with the 10mm joint it covers 400 x 200mm of wall, which is 0.08 m². One divided by 0.08 is 12.5. Along a course that is 2.5 blocks per lineal metre.
5% on a long straight run with barely a cut in it, 10% on a normal job, 15% once you are into piers, arches, raked work or a feature bond. That allowance covers breakage in the pack, the cuts off every return and opening, and leaving a few spares on site. Ordering the exact count and nothing over is how a job stops on a Thursday waiting on a top-up that comes out of a different batch.
Between 0.24 and 0.5 m³ of mortar, and 8 to 12.5 twenty-kilo bags of cement. That is a real range, not a hedge: Australian trade sources disagree, because it depends on the mix, whether the brick has a frog, how fat you run the joints and how much you drop. Your own last job is a better number than any published figure. Mix classes come from AS 3700, and the residential standard is a 1:1:6 cement, lime and sand.
It depends on the state and the value of the job. In NSW you need a contractor licence for residential building or trade work valued at more than $5,000 in labour and materials including GST, issued by Building Commission NSW. In Victoria you must be registered with the Building and Plumbing Commission to hold a contract worth more than $10,000, and you must take out domestic building insurance above $16,000. In Queensland bricklaying and blocklaying is its own QBCC trade contractor licence class. In WA builder registration starts at $20,000 of general building work. Check your own regulator before you sign anything, because the thresholds move.
No. This gets the order into the right ballpark and lets you sanity-check a quote on the phone. The pack label, the setout and the bond decide the real count, and the supplier's pallet quantity varies by range. Use this to plan the supply run, then order off the actual product.
You are not stopping mid-course to take a call, and the retaining wall enquiry you miss rings the next brickie on the list. BackOnTools answers, gets the job details, quotes off your own price list and books it in, then runs the quote, the invoice and the job from the same place. Brickwork lines in the price book on day one, not a plumber's list with the words changed.
