How many kilograms are in 5 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 5 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 5 liters weighs 6.5–7.5 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.