Bedding Calculator
Enter your housing’s floor area to estimate how much bedding material you need to start with.
Use the floor area from the chicken calculator, or your own build.
This changes the label on your result, not the depth figure — materials compact and insulate differently in practice, but no source we found publishes a material-specific starting depth for chickens, so the same planning depth is used regardless of what you pick here.
Check the litre volume printed on the bag or bale you're buying — sizes vary a lot by supplier and material, so this figure gives a far more reliable bag count than assuming a standard size.
Bedding needed to start
≈ 7.1 cubic ft
≈ 4 × 50 L bags of wood shavings
Based on a typical starting depth of 10cm (3.9in) of wood shavings — a general husbandry guideline, less standardised than a legal welfare figure. Deep-litter systems are usually topped up rather than fully replaced.
Sources checked: September 2026.
How the bedding amount is worked out
Bedding volume is floor area multiplied by a starting depth. The depth is one planning figure per species: about 12.5 cm for pigs, 10 cm for chickens and ducks, 7.5 cm for goats and sheep, 5 cm for rabbits and 15 cm for horses. Pig depth comes from Iowa State University guidance and goat and sheep depth from Ohio State University; the rabbit figure is the softest-sourced of the set.
Enter the volume printed on the bag or bale you buy — litres in the UK, cubic feet in the US — and the calculator rounds up to a whole number of bags. Bag sizes vary a lot by supplier and material, so this is far more reliable than assuming a standard size.
The material dropdown changes the label on your result but not the depth: no source we found publishes a material-specific starting depth, so we don't pretend otherwise. Deep-litter systems are usually topped up rather than fully replaced, which this starting figure doesn't model.
Common questions
- How much bedding does a pig pen need?
- About 12.5 cm deep to start. A 2.2 m² pen — the legal minimum for four 80 kg pigs in England — needs roughly 275 litres. Our pig bedding guide explains what changes that in practice.
- How deep should bedding be?
- It depends on the species: from about 5 cm for rabbits to 15 cm for horses in this calculator. These are general husbandry starting points rather than legal standards.
- Does the type of bedding change how much I need?
- In practice materials compact and insulate differently, but we haven't found a source that gives a different depth per material, so the calculator uses the same depth whatever you choose.
- How often does bedding need replacing?
- This tool only gives the starting fill. How often you top up or clean out depends on how many animals, the weather and your system.
Related
Want to see what keeping a backyard animal is actually like?
Try My Backyard — a simple interactive simulation. Adopt one, feed it, play with it, keep its bedding clean, and see how it gets on.
Play My Backyard →