Measure a lawn or a lot from above
Type an address, tap round the lawn on a public aerial photo, and read off its square feet, its acres and the feet of edge. Take out the house and the driveway the same way. The answer is rough. It is enough to size a job up, and it is not a survey.
Measure it from above
The address you type is sent to TailGateBid's server, which asks the U.S. Census Bureau's public address service where it is. Our server then fetches the picture from the U.S. Geological Survey, which is sent the point on the map and not the address. TailGateBid does not keep the address or the point. What you trace stays on your device.
With a comma after the street and after the city, and the ZIP if you have it. Like this: 1100 Congress Ave, Austin, TX 78701
Before you rely on it
- The picture is a public aerial photograph from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's aerial photo program, served by the U.S. Geological Survey.
- It can be a few years old. A driveway, an addition or a bed made since then is not in it.
- Trees and shadows hide edges. Where you cannot see an edge, you are guessing it.
- It covers the lower 48 states only.
- It is not a survey, and it shows no property line.
- Measure with a wheel before you quote a job where the size is the price.
- In most places one dot of these photographs is about 2 feet of ground, and nothing smaller than a dot shows.
Take out what is not part of the job: the house, the driveway, a bed. A shape that is taken out is drawn with a broken line and stripes.
The picture goes here once an address is found.
With a keyboard: add a corner, move it with the arrow keys, and add the next. Delete removes the corner you are on.
The size, roughly
The size goes here once a shape is closed.
Carry the size on
Each of these pages has a box for the size. Copy the answer, then type it there.
What you get
Square feet, the same in thousands of square feet, acres, and the feet of edge round what you traced. Each is rounded, and the page tells you to what.
It works for a lawn, a whole lot, a bed, a driveway or a field: anything whose edge you can see from above.
It uses no AI. You tap the corners, and the size is arithmetic done in your own browser.
How to trace it
- Find the placeType the street address with the city and the state. The picture opens about 394 feet across: a house and its yard, with room to spare.
- Get it in viewIf the lot runs off the picture, move the picture or show more ground. What you have traced moves with it.
- Tap the cornersGo round the edge of what you want measured and tap at each corner. A curve takes a few more taps. Tap the first corner again to close the shape.
- Take out what is not the jobPick "Take it out" and trace the house, the driveway or a bed the same way. It is drawn with a broken line, and its size comes off.
- Read the sizeDrag any corner and the answer follows. Copy it, and carry it to the page that prices the job.
One lot, worked through
An example with made-up numbers, not a going rate
Say you tap 6 corners round a lot and the shape comes to 10,729 square feet, and the house you take out comes to 1,548. That leaves 9,181. The edges you traced add up to 575 feet, and one dot of that photograph covers about 2 feet, so being one dot off all the way round would move the answer by about 1,100 square feet. The page rounds to the nearest 1,000 and says about 9,000 square feet: 9 thousand, or 0.21 of an acre, with about 415 feet of edge round the outside.
How rough it is
A picture is made of dots, and nothing smaller than a dot shows. The Geological Survey's picture service calls its collection a mosaic primarily of 0.6 meter resolution, which is about 2 feet of ground to a dot. Its page on the photo program says that became the standard in 2018, with 0.3 meters, about 1 foot, as an option. Where the service says how fine the photo of a spot is, this page uses that figure.
The square feet are rounded to a step no bigger than what one dot of error all the way round would come to: the feet of edge you traced, times the feet under a dot. Feet of edge are rounded to the nearest 5.
That is the picture's share of the error. Yours comes on top: a fingertip is wider than a dot, so zoom in before you tap, and where a tree covers the edge you are guessing it.
The three views
- A yard. The picture is asked for at 120 meters across, which is about 394 feet of ground, and is drawn 768 dots wide: about 0.5 feet to a dot of the picture.
- A big lot. 240 meters, about 788 feet, drawn 1,024 dots wide: about 0.8 feet to a dot.
- A few acres. 480 meters, about 1,577 feet, drawn 1,024 dots wide: about 1.5 feet to a dot.
- In all three the photograph's own dot is the bigger one where it is 2 feet, so that is the figure the rounding uses. The feet across are worked out for the middle of the country, and differ by no more than a foot or two in the far north or south.
Where the picture comes from
The photos are from the National Agriculture Imagery Program, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture runs. They are taken from the air during the growing season, the Geological Survey's page on the program says, when the trees are in leaf. That is why a tree can sit right over the edge you are looking for. A photo may have some cloud in it, too.
The Geological Survey gives them to the public through its own picture service, which describes them as public domain. The picture on this page comes from there.
How old is it? A place is flown again within three years, the same page on the program says. The service keeps the day each photo was taken, and this page asks it for the photo of the address you typed and shows you the month and the year. One place, on one day: on October 12, 2026, the photo the service gave for the Texas State Capitol was from June 2022, more than four years earlier.
What it is not
- It is not a survey. It shows no property line, and a line you draw on it is not one.
- The photos are not placed to the foot. The program asks only that the points it tests fall within 6 meters, about 20 feet, of their true place on the ground: the Geological Survey's page on the program.
- It is not a current picture. It can be a few years old.
- It is not a live map, and it is not a satellite picture. It is a still photograph taken from the air.
- It has no picture of anywhere outside the lower 48 states: none of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Canada.
- We give no figure for how accurate the answer is, because none has been measured. Measure with a wheel before you quote a job where the size is the price.
What is sent, and what is not
The address you type is sent to TailGateBid's server. Our server asks the U.S. Census Bureau's public address service where that address is, and gets back a point on the map. That service works the point out from the range of house numbers along the street, so it is approximate.
Our server then asks the U.S. Geological Survey's picture service for a photo of the ground round that point, and for when that photo was taken. The Geological Survey is sent the point, not the address. Moving the picture or changing the view sends a new point the same way.
TailGateBid does not keep the address or the point: our software writes neither one to a database, to a file or to a log. Nothing is kept in your browser's storage either. Close the page and it is gone.
The corners you tap, the shapes and the answer never leave your device.
Both services are run by the United States government, and what they record about a request is theirs to say. If an address should not be sent to them, do not type it here: every page this tool leads to takes a size typed by hand.
From the size to a price
A size is the first number under a price. Price the mowing from the lawn's square feet, the leaf cleanup from the same lot in the fall, and the snow from the driveway you traced.
A bed's square feet and a depth give the cubic yards of mulch: count them, then price the job. The feet of edge are a first figure for a fence along it: count the posts, rails and pickets, and price it by the foot.
Bid Partner, the AI tool in TailGateBid, can show a public aerial photo of a job's address too: what Bid Partner does.
In TailGateBid a service is charged by something that grows with the job: the square foot, 1,000 square feet, the acre or the foot you just measured.
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Sources
Related
- Lawn mowingFrom a lot's length and width to the hours on the mower and a price for each 1,000 square feet.
- Leaf removalFrom the lot, the crew, the visits and the loads to a price for each 1,000 square feet cleared.
- Snow removalOne push worked into a price, then a season at the number of pushes you choose, checked against a light winter and a heavy one.
- Mulch, soil and gravel calculatorBeds, tree rings and odd areas into cubic yards to order, bags to buy and tons of stone, with lines to put on a quote.
- Fence calculatorThe runs of a wood fence into posts, rails, pickets and bags of concrete, with lines to put on a quote.
By TailGateBid. .
A size traced on a photo is rough. The ground decides: measure it there before you quote a job where the size is the price.