How to measure the area of your lawn

By Jon Trappe

Something that affects a majority of lawn management decisions but is relatively unknown for most people is how big of a lawn they have. Lawn area affects how much fertilizer, seed, or pesticides would need to be purchased and applied appropriately. In some cases, there are even legal restrictions on how much fertilizer or pesticides can be applied per 1000 square feet, for example, and it is critical for the environment and for the health of the lawn that these application rates follow best management practices. We are going to walk through how to measure the area of a lawn but this can also be useful for measuring landscapes or garden beds as well. 

How to go about measuring your lawn

The best way is to actually go out and measure the dimensions of your lawn with a measuring tape or wheel. This typically involves breaking the lawn areas into smaller squares, rectangles, or triangles, measuring, then adding up the smaller sections into a total area in number of square feet. This is the most accurate method, but it can be time consuming for larger or more irregular landscape designs.

Fortunately, there are a number of online tools to help estimate your lawn area using aerial imagery. These estimations can be susceptible to user error or limitations from the imagery, but in general they can be accurate enough for most lawn management decisions. Many online tools or web pages are free, but may require creating an account to save the information. These tools can be quite accurate, but they will only be effective for recent imagery or less obstructed overhead views, so they are not all created equal.

Google Earth is a relatively popular web-based platform with a fairly easy to use tool for estimating areas. I am going to walk through how to use Google Earth for estimating lawn areas based on two areas of lawn that are outside Alderman Hall at the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus. These areas are irregularly shaped like most yards and will hopefully help you measure your own lawn. You can use the Google Earth mobile app but a larger tablet or computer screen might be easier.

Begin by zooming into the area you would like to measure. You can enter the street address for faster navigation. Begin measuring area by selecting the ruler icon to measure distance or area. Outline the area you wish to measure by dropping pins on the outside of the area you are measuring. It should highlight the area in yellow and automatically add up the area. When I finished outlining this area, I needed to change the units from square meters (m²) to square feet (ft²) using the drop down menu. 

This first lawn area totaled 1,326 ft² and was fairly straightforward to outline and measure. If you would like to save your work or simultaneously add separate areas for measuring, you will need to sign in or create a Google account. Otherwise, you can just manually write down the area for the first section and measure other areas of the lawn to be totaled separately after clicking the "X" on the measure tool and starting the process over. 

 For this north section of lawn, it will be a bit more complicated to measure the area because some of the lawn is obscured by trees in the “2D” view. By switching to “3D” view in the lower righthand corner of the page, you will be able to easily pan the view around the obscured portion of lawn to more accurately drop pins in the area you wish to measure. You can pan while still adding pins to the area you wish to measure. 

This north section of lawn measured 6,426 ft². By adding the two sections of lawn, the total area is 7,752 ft². You will want to round up to the nearest 100 ft²; in this case, we rounded up to 7,800 ft². In general, it is a good idea to slightly over-estimate the area considering the Google Earth measurement tool and others like it are rough estimates.

Other tips regarding lawn measurements

Now that you know the area of your lawn, you can use this as a reference when purchasing fertilizer, seed, or pesticides. You can check out the March 2026 Lawn Care Newsletter for tips on how to calculate the amount of a product that would be needed based on area. We typically recommend purchasing 10-20% more seed or pesticides than what would be needed, just in case areas need to be seeded or treated again.