Measure Lawn Square Footage
How to measure lawn square footage and driveway area from a map, plus a manual rectangle calculator that adds several areas together.
The method most operators use to measure property from satellite imagery: read the lengths off an aerial view, break the shape into rectangles, add them up. The calculator below does the adding up. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
There is no live map on this page. Drawing on real satellite imagery needs a mapping provider and a billed key held on a server, and that is not built yet. This page is the method, a worked example and a manual calculator - nothing here traces your address for you.
Add up as many rectangles as the yard needs
Front lawn, side strip, back lawn, driveway - one row each. Anything that is not a rectangle is two rectangles.
0.06 acres, at 43,560 square feet to the acre.
2 areas added together. Take the house footprint, the driveway and the beds out if you are measuring what gets mowed.
How to read a property off an aerial image
Four steps, and the three things that make the answer wrong.
Find the scale before you find the lawn
Every satellite view has a scale bar in a corner. That bar is the only thing turning pixels into feet, so read it first and zoom to a level where it reads in a round number. If you skip this step you will measure a confident, precise, completely wrong number.
Break the shape into rectangles
Almost no lot is one clean rectangle, and almost every lot is three or four. A front lawn, a strip down the side, a back lawn with the deck cut out of one corner. Measure each piece, put it in its own row above, and let the total do the work. A curved bed edge is close enough to a rectangle at this level of accuracy - you are pricing a job, not registering a title.
Subtract what you are not working on
The lot area and the mowable area are different numbers, and the gap between them is usually large. Take out the house footprint, the driveway, the patio or deck, the pool and the planted beds. A quarter-acre lot is 10,890 square feet on paper and frequently under 6,000 square feet of grass.
Then distrust it in three specific places
Tree canopy hides lawn from above, so a shaded back yard always measures small - and it is also the part of the yard that takes longest to mow. Imagery ages: the picture you are looking at might predate an extension, a new patio or a fence that changed the run. And an aerial view flattens slope, so a banked lawn measures smaller than it walks. On open, flat, sunny ground a satellite measurement is good enough to quote from. Anywhere else it is a first number that deserves a look in person.
What a live map would add
Tracing the actual outline instead of approximating it with rectangles, and doing it from the address rather than by eye.
Not on this page. It needs a mapping provider and a key held server-side.
What rectangles are fine for
Driveways, patios, decks, fence runs and any lawn that is roughly square. Most residential quoting, in other words.
What still needs a visit
Steep ground, heavy tree cover, anything behind a locked gate, and any surface whose material you cannot identify from above.
Measuring, honestly answered
Starting with the one about whether this page does what its name suggests.
No, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. A live satellite measuring tool needs a mapping provider, a billed API key and a server to keep that key secret, and none of that is wired up here yet. What this page gives you is the method, a worked diagram and a manual calculator you can drive with numbers you take off any map or measuring wheel. When the live map ships it will live on this URL.
Open any satellite view of the address, find the scale bar, and use it to read off the length and width of the mowable area in feet. Break anything that is not a rectangle into rectangles - front lawn, side strip, back lawn - and add them together. That is exactly what the calculator on this page does. Subtract the house footprint, the driveway, the deck and any beds, because you are not mowing those.
Accurate enough to quote from on open, flat ground, and unreliable everywhere else. Tree canopy hides lawn, so a shaded back yard measures small. Imagery can be years old, so a new extension or a new patio will not be there. And an aerial image flattens slope, so a banked lawn measures smaller than it mows. Treat a satellite figure as good for a first number and check anything unusual on site.
43,560 square feet, which is a definition rather than an approximation. A quarter-acre lot is 10,890 square feet in total, though the mowable part of one is usually far less once the house, the driveway and the beds come out. The calculator on this page shows the acre figure alongside the square footage so you can sanity-check a number against the lot size you were told.
You can use the square footage to price a job, yes - a lawn size calculator is only ever the first half of the sum. What it will not do is tell you about the gate width, the slope, the dog, or the fifteen trees you have to mow around. Those change the time far more than a few hundred square feet either way, so measure first and then adjust with what you can see.
Turn a measurement into a priced job
Square footage is the input. Servetic holds the rates that turn it into an estimate, sends it, schedules it and invoices it - with per-square-foot and per-linear-foot services sitting on the same price list.