Measuring a lawn with a tape is miserable and inaccurate — lawns have curves, beds, and a driveway cutting through the middle. The faster way is to trace the shape on satellite imagery and let the maths do the rest. This guide uses BeaverPlot, where site measurement is free.

Tip

This one needs no LiDAR. BeaverPlot's room scanning requires an iPhone 12 Pro or later, but measuring a site works on any iPhone — it's reading map imagery, not using a depth sensor.

Measuring a lawn, step by step

Open the site measurer

Go to the Tools tab and tap Measure a Site. The map opens on your current location, so if you're standing at the property you're already looking at it. Otherwise, type the address in the search bar.

Tap around the edge

Tap each corner of the grass. You don't need many points — a typical back lawn is five or six. Curves are fine: place a few taps along the arc and the shape follows. Area and perimeter update as you go, so you can see it converging.

Cut out what isn't lawn

Tap Subtract and trace anything inside the boundary that isn't grass — flower beds, a patio, the pool, a shed. Each one comes off the total. This is the step people skip, and it's usually the difference between a quote that works and one that doesn't.

Save it

Tap Save and give it a name. Saved measurements live under Tools ▸ Saved Sites, so you can come back to a property days later without re-tracing it.

How accurate is it?

Good enough to quote from and order materials against. Not a survey, and we won't pretend otherwise. Two things move the number:

How carefully you trace. More points around a curve is more accurate. A five-tap rectangle over a kidney-shaped lawn isn't.
How current the imagery is. Aerial photography can be a season or two old. If a deck, extension, or new bed went in recently, it may not be in the picture yet — check anything that changed. For a hard surface that isn't in the photo, or one hidden under tree canopy, use Tools ▸ Measure a Surface instead and walk it with the camera.

Good to know

Property boundaries as traced are not legal boundaries. For anything that turns on where the line actually falls — a fence dispute, a permit, a sale — you need a surveyor.

Turning the number into an order

A square footage on its own doesn't buy anything. The point of saving a measurement is that the calculators can read it: open Lawn or Ground Cover, tap Use a saved site, and the area drops in. From there you get sod rolls and pallets, grass seed by species, fertiliser by the bag's nitrogen number, or cubic yards of mulch and topsoil.

Every calculator is free. If you need to hand a client a document, the one-page PDF — your traced boundary over the map, with area and perimeter — is part of Pro.

Get BeaverPlot and measure a lawn in about a minute. Then see how much mulch, topsoil, or gravel you need.

How to Measure Your Lawn Size From Your Phone