How Do I Calculate The Square Footage Of My Lawn?

There are a couple of reasons someone might wonder, "What's the square footage of my yard?" Maybe you're preparing to properly fertilize your lawn and need to make sure you're buying enough fertilizer to cover all your grass. Maybe you're preparing to sell your home and need measurements of everything, or you're making plans to add a pool and want to know how much room you have to work with. Maybe you're just curious. Whatever the reason may be for measuring yard size, modern technology makes it shockingly easy, though the old-school methods for measuring area are also still perfectly viable.

If you're someone who likes to do things the old-fashioned way, you can try walking your yard leaving no space between your steps to approximate how many feet wide and long it is. But unless your shoes are exactly 12 inches long, you might end up having to do some complicated calculations to convert the number of steps you took into an accurate measurement of square footage.

There are a few basic tools for measuring area that can help you measure yard size. You can use an extra-long tape measure, assuming you have a partner to help by holding the other end in place. Take measurements of the length and width of the yard and multiply them together to get the square footage. (So a lawn that's 20 feet wide by 10 feet long is 200 square feet.) If your lawn isn't a perfect square or rectangle, you'll need to break it into sections to measure the square footage of each section and add the numbers together when you're finished. Then you can convert square feet to square yards if you need to do so.

A measuring wheel can also be used to determine the square footage of your lawn. It's a simple wheel with a long handle attached. As you roll the wheel across your lawn, a counter on the side keeps track of how many feet it has gone. Using a measuring wheel is ideal if your yard is hilly or has uneven terrain or if you don't have someone to hold the other end of a tape measure in place.

While tape measures and measuring wheels have been around for centuries, a laser distance meter is a relatively new way to measure your lawn's square footage. These are handheld devices that can measure distances of more than 100 feet with the press of a button. Stand at one edge of your yard and point the laser at any vertical object on the opposite edge of the lawn and the meter will tell you exactly how many feet away it is.

As if pointing a laser at the other side of your lawn wasn't easy enough, the internet has provided an even easier way to measure yard size. Now you don't even have to be at home to measure your lawn.

There are a number of online tools for measuring yard square footage, available both as websites and as mobile apps. Type in your address to pull up an overhead map of your property from satellite images. Depending on what site you use, it should be simple to draw around your lawn space and get a fairly accurate measurement of its square footage. This method is ideal for measuring an oddly shaped yard. You can use the marking tools to carefully outline any places where the house juts into the lawn, for example.