How many kilograms are in 10 liters of soil?

For a bulk material the density depends on packing, so the sum runs along both edges of the band: the lower edge is a loose pour, the upper one is dense packing.

The density comes from FAO, Earth dry loose. Dry loose earth; wet compacted soil is 1.75–1.85, which is a different state.

A liter measures volume, a kilogram measures mass, and density is what ties them together: how many kilograms one liter of this particular substance comes to. The coincidence that makes people treat them as one thing is historical — in 1795 the gram was defined as the mass of one cubic centimeter of water, so a liter of water weighed a kilogram by construction. For anything else the equality breaks.

The extremes of this page make it obvious: one liter of LPG weighs 0.51 kg, while one liter of densely packed sand weighs 2 kg — four times more at the very same volume.

If the substance is not known in advance, start from how many kilograms are in 10 liters — the same volume across every substance at once.

This page starts from a volume and answers in kilograms. The opposite question — how many liters a given mass comes to — is what the kilograms to liters calculator is for. Both read the same density table, so the two pages agree wherever the answer is volume times density.

For soil that means 10 liters weighs 13–15 kg here, and one kilogram of it takes 0.67–0.77 liters there.

This page answers «how much does this much soil weigh». For a bed or a lawn you work in volume rather than mass, and that is the topsoil calculator: length, width, depth — and the answer in cubic yards and tons.

Its density is 1,330 kg per cubic meter, that is 1.33 kg/L, and that value sits inside the band of 1.3–1.5 kg/L this page works with: dry loose earth.