Drywall Calculator — Sheets & Screws Needed

A drywall job is rarely one clean rectangle: it's a living room wall, a hallway ceiling, a closet, and a stairwell, each a different size, and adding them up by hand is where orders go wrong. This calculator lets you add a row per wall or ceiling section, enter each one as a length × height pair or as a direct area if you already have it from a floor plan, and sums every row into one total square footage automatically.

Sheets are sold in real trade sizes, and this calculator uses the two standard ones: 4×8ft panels (32 square feet each) for most residential work, and 4×12ft panels (48 square feet each) for taller walls or fewer seams. Dividing your total area by the sheet's real area and rounding up gives the sheet count, because a supplier doesn't sell a fraction of a sheet — and a waste allowance (10-15% is the standard range) is added first to cover the trimmed pieces around doors, windows, outlets and odd corners that a raw area total doesn't account for.

The optional screw estimate is intentionally framed as a rule of thumb rather than a precise count: real fastener spacing follows studs spaced 16 inches on-center, with screws roughly every 12 inches along a sheet's edges and every 16 inches in the field, and published trade estimates convert that into a commonly cited range of about 1.5 to 2 screws per square foot. Because this tool only knows your total area — not your actual stud layout, sheet orientation or seam positions — it reports an estimate from that published range rather than pretending to simulate an exact fastener pattern it has no data to draw.

If you're finishing a new build rather than a remodel, this site's concrete calculator and decking calculator cover the footing and framing math for the rest of the structure using the same kind of real trade-convention arithmetic. Everything here runs locally in your browser — the sections you enter are never uploaded or stored.