Terms of use
Terms of use for mybuildingcalculators.com: how the calculators may be used, and what their results are not
Effective 17 September 2026. These terms are written in plain language and take a few minutes to read. They cover who runs the site, what you may do with the calculators and their printed results, what the results are not, what you own and what the site owns, blog comments, advertising, and how a problem gets raised. They apply to every page and calculator on the site.
What these terms of use cover
By using any page or calculator on mybuildingcalculators.com you agree to these terms. The site is built and operated by Syed Zulqarnain as an individual, not a company, and there is no other party to the agreement. The terms are short because the site is simple: free browser-based construction calculators, the code tables behind them, and a blog. There are no accounts, no paid tier and nothing to sign.
Read these terms together with the disclaimer, which sets out what the calculators are and are not and carries the warranty and liability wording, and the privacy policy, which covers what the site collects. Where this page and the disclaimer overlap, the disclaimer is the fuller statement and this page points to it rather than repeating it.
How the calculators may be used
You may use every calculator on the site, as often as you like, for personal or professional planning of residential construction work: sizing a joist, counting concrete bags, laying out stair stringers, estimating shingle bundles. Use is free and no account is needed. You may print a result, save it, photograph it, take it to a supplier or bring it to a building department as a working note, and you may use the tools on a job site on a phone.
The one condition on every use is that you treat a result as a reference to be checked, not as a decision already made. Each structural result names the IRC 2021 or AWC DCA 6 table it was read from so you can open the source and confirm the cell yourself; the methodology page explains how the tables are read and how rounding works. Confirming a result against the code edition and amendments your jurisdiction enforces is part of using the calculator, not an extra step.
What calculator results are not
A result from this site is a table lookup or an arithmetic step, shown with its inputs and its source. It is not any of the following, and you agree not to present it as any of the following.
- Not a structural design, an engineering opinion or a stamped calculation. Nobody on this site is a licensed engineer, and no result is reviewed by one.
- Not a permit document or a substitute for plan review by your building department.
- Not a statement of which code edition or amendments apply where you build. The site reproduces the published IRC 2021 and DCA 6-2015 tables; your jurisdiction may enforce a different edition or a local change.
- Not a cost estimate. The site never prices materials or labor, and a quantity from a calculator is not a quote.
- Not a check on the values you typed in. If the species, grade, load, spacing or measurement you entered is wrong, the result is wrong, and only you can see that.
The disclaimer says the same things at greater length and explains why each one matters on a real job.
Use of the site that is not allowed
The site is open to read and use, so this list is short. You agree not to do any of the following.
- Run automated tools that fetch pages, calculator scripts or data files in bulk, mirror the site, or load its pages inside another site or app so they appear to be part of it.
- Copy the calculators, their source code, page copy or design and republish them as your own or as part of another service, with or without changes.
- Remove the source line, the code citation or the notice printed under a result when you reproduce it, or edit a printout so it reads as an engineered or approved design.
- Send anything through the contact form or the blog comments that is spam, advertising, abusive, unlawful or intended to harm the site or its readers.
- Probe, attack or interfere with the site, its hosting or its plugins, or attempt to reach any part of it that is not offered to visitors.
Traffic or accounts that do any of these may be blocked without notice. Reporting a genuine error in a table is the opposite of misuse and is asked for on every results page.
Ownership: the code tables and the site's own work
The span, header and deck tables the calculators read are published building code. The International Residential Code is published by the International Code Council and DCA 6 by the American Wood Council; the site reproduces those tables as adopted code, cell by cell, with the table number cited, and claims no ownership of them. Nothing on this site changes what the published code says, and where the two ever differ the published code governs.
Everything the site adds around the tables is the operator's own work: the calculator code, the verified data files and the way they are arranged, the page copy, the diagrams, the design and the blog posts. You may use all of it on the site freely. You may not take it off the site and reuse it, except for the printed results and short quotations described in the next section. Nothing in these terms gives you a license to the site's code or content beyond that.
Printing, sharing and quoting results
You may print, save and share any result, including the inputs and source line the result prints with, for your own project or to show a supplier, a client, an inspector or a contractor. You may also quote a short passage from a page or post, or share a screenshot of a table, as long as the site is named as the source and the source line and notice stay attached to a result. A link to the page is welcome and needs no permission.
What you may not do is present a printout as an engineered or approved design, strip the citation and disclaimer from it, or reproduce whole pages, whole tables as formatted here, or the calculators themselves elsewhere. If you want to use material from the site in a way this section does not cover, ask through the contact form before you do it.
Blog comments and anything else you submit
Comments are open on blog posts, and the contact form takes error reports and questions. You keep ownership of anything you write. By posting a comment you give the site permission to display it, edit it for length or clarity, and keep or remove it; by sending a report you give permission for it to be used to re-check the calculator it concerns. The privacy policy explains what is stored in each case.
Comments are moderated. Spam, advertising, abuse, personal information about other people and anything unlawful are removed, and repeat posters are blocked. A comment that corrects a table or explains where a result led someone wrong is the most useful thing a reader can leave, and those are kept. You are responsible for what you post; the site is not responsible for what other readers post, and a comment is the view of the person who wrote it, not of the site.
Advertising and links to other sites
The site displays advertisements served by Google AdSense, which pay for hosting and for the time spent verifying tables. Advertisements are chosen by Google and its partners, not by the site, and an advertisement is not a recommendation of the product or service it shows. The privacy policy describes the advertising cookies involved and how to opt out of personalised ads.
Pages link out to the published code, to the American Wood Council, to manufacturer documents and occasionally to other reference sites. Those sites are not controlled by the operator, their content can change after the link was checked, and following a link is your own decision. A link is provided so you can verify a source, not as an endorsement of everything on the page it lands on.
Availability, changes and ending access
The site is run by one person on shared hosting. It may be unavailable, slow or partly broken from time to time, and no promise of uptime is made. Calculators may be added, changed, corrected or removed, code editions may be updated, and a tool you bookmarked may behave differently after a correction, which is the intended result of the error reports the site asks for. Where a change alters a result, the source line printed with the result identifies which table version it now reads.
Access for any visitor, address or automated client may be limited or blocked if it breaches the section above on use that is not allowed, or if it puts the site or its readers at risk. Because there are no accounts, ending access means blocking traffic, nothing more.
Warranties, liability and how disputes are raised
The calculators, the data files and every page are provided as they are, for reference, without any warranty that a result fits your project or that a page is free of error. The disclaimer sets out the no-warranty and limitation-of-liability wording in full and is part of these terms; it is not repeated here so that only one version exists.
If something on the site has caused you a problem, or you believe a result or a page is wrong, raise it through the contact form first, with the calculator, the inputs and the table concerned. Every report is read by the operator, checked against the source, and answered. Working it out that way, directly and in good faith, is the route these terms set for any disagreement before anything else is considered.
Changes to these terms of use
These terms are updated when the site adds something they need to cover, such as a new kind of content, a new service or a change in how the site is run. The effective date at the top of the page identifies the current version, and a change that affects what you may do is noted here so a returning reader can see what moved. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms. Questions about them go through the contact form.