An on-site measurement is $99 in most markets, though a few price it as low as $75 or as high as $199, and it is not offered in every market. The fee is credited toward your sod order. It is worth booking when your yard has curves, slopes, islands or odd angles that make estimates unreliable. For simple rectangles, measure it yourself with the free Online Sod Calculator, and add five to ten percent for cuts.
Ordering the wrong amount of sod is the most expensive small mistake in this whole process. Order short and you are standing in a half-finished yard waiting on another delivery. Order long and you have paid for grass you cannot use before it dies.
So it is worth knowing what your options are for getting the number right.
The short answer
In most markets, an on-site measurement is $99. A few markets price it differently depending on local crew coverage, from $75 at the low end to $199 at the high end, so check the figure for your area rather than assuming.
On-site measurement is also not offered in every market. Where we do not have crew coverage for it, the Online Sod Calculator and a phone call are the route.
That fee is credited toward your sod order. If you go ahead and buy, the measurement effectively costs you nothing.
What actually happens
Someone comes to your property and measures the area you want sodded. Not a satellite estimate, not a guess from the street. An actual measurement of the actual space, including the parts that make yards hard to calculate.
You get a number you can order against with confidence, and a quote built on it.
When it is genuinely worth booking
Book one if your yard is awkward. Curved beds, islands, slopes, odd angles, and areas broken up by walkways or trees are exactly where homeowner estimates go wrong. Curves in particular tend to get rounded off generously in one direction or the other.
Book one if you are ordering a lot. The bigger the order, the more a small percentage error costs you. On a large yard, being ten percent out is real money in either direction.
Book one if the timing has to be right. If you are working to a date and cannot absorb a second delivery, paying the measurement fee up front to remove that risk is cheap insurance, especially since you get it back.
Book one if you would rather not be the reason it went wrong. That is a perfectly good reason on its own.
When you can skip it
If your yard is a straightforward rectangle, measure it yourself. Multiply length by width. A 20 foot by 50 foot yard is 1,000 square feet. Done.
If it breaks cleanly into rectangles and triangles, measure each section and add them together.
Either way, use the free Online Sod Calculator. It does the pallet math for you and costs nothing.
The rule that saves most of the pain
Whichever route you take, order five to ten percent more than your exact measurement.
You will lose sod to cuts around sprinkler heads, walkways, flower beds and curves. Every yard does. Running short in the last strip of a project is genuinely frustrating, and the fix, another delivery for a small quantity, is far more expensive than the extra you would have ordered.
How many pallets is that?
Once you have your square footage, the next question is how many pallets that comes to. That depends on which farm cuts your order, because pallet sizes are not uniform across the country. Most of our farms cut 450 square foot pallets, Florida farms typically cut 400, and some run 500 or 600.
You do not need to work this out yourself. Once your ZIP code is in, your quote uses the pallet size on file for the farms serving your market. Where a market has farms that disagree, we assume the smallest, so your order cannot come up short.
Booking one
Call 1-866-886-2763 to arrange an on-site measurement, or start with the Online Sod Calculator if your yard is simple.
If you are somewhere in between and not sure which you need, call and describe the yard. We will tell you honestly whether it is worth sending someone out.
The bottom line
$99 in most markets where we offer it, credited toward your order, and worth it precisely when your yard is the kind that makes people guess.
Check your ZIP code to see what is available in your area.