Earthwork is a main part in the construction process. In order to solve time -consuming, laborious problems and low accuracy of earthwork calculation in construction process by traditional methods, a method for earthwork calculation based on tilt photography was proposed. Firstly, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tilt photography was used to collect point cloud data of terrain. Then, after point cloud simplification, it established the terrain surface model for different construction periods through Poisson surface reconstruction method. Finally, the volume difference between the two models was calculated as the volume of earthwork after Boolean operations, forming a complete path from data acquisition to model establishment and then to earthwork calculation, and the method was verified and applied through the engineering example. The results showed that the proposed method can meet the accuracy requirements of earthwork in practical engineering applications, providing reference for fast and accurate calculation of earthwork quantity.