Five formulas cover almost every container, tank and package you'll ever measure. Pick the shape, enter its dimensions in meters, and the volume appears in m³, liters, cubic feet and US gallons simultaneously — no unit gymnastics afterward.
Boxes and cubes: multiply through
A box is length × width × height — a 2 × 1.5 × 1 m box holds 3 m³, i.e. 3,000 liters. The cube collapses that to s³. This is also the "cubic footage" of moving trucks and freight, where measuring the inside matters: wall thickness quietly eats capacity.
Cylinders: circles with height
πr²h is a circle's area swept upward. A water tank of radius 0.5 m and height 2 m holds ≈ 1.571 m³ — about 1,571 liters or 415 gallons. Pipes, drums, silos, and glasses all answer to this one. (The circle-area part alone lives in the circle calculator.)
Spheres and cones: the beautiful fractions
A sphere holds (4/3)πr³ — and exactly two-thirds of the cylinder that snugly contains it, a fact Archimedes had carved on his tombstone. A cone holds exactly one-third of its enclosing cylinder. Cubic scaling makes both dramatic: doubling a balloon's radius gives 8× the air.
Real-world volume, with materials attached
When the volume is going to be filled — with concrete, gravel or mulch — the material calculators go one step further and count bags and truckloads: see the concrete and gravel calculators. Unit conversions beyond the four shown here (cubic yards, milliliters) chain naturally through liters.
Enter dimensions in meters; conversions use exact factors (1 m³ = 1,000 L).