Sod Calculator

Enter the lawn you're quoting and get the pallets to order, the cost of the sod, and the installed price to check your number against.

Lawn area

Length (ft)

Width (ft)

The order

Extra for cuts (%)

Pallet size

Cut

Enter the lawn's length and width above, one section at a time, to see the pallets to order.

A lawn is rarely one rectangle. Trace the area on satellite imagery and order pallets for the lawn you will actually lay.

US national prices, checked 29 October 2026. They are the market's range, not your price.

How Much Sod Do I Need?

The lawn's area, plus 5 to 10% for cuts, divided by the pallet size and rounded up. A 1,000 sq ft lawn with 10% extra is 1,100 sq ft: 3 pallets of 450, or 413 slabs.

What a farm sells
Unit	Covers
Slab, 16 × 24 in	2.67 sq ft
Mini roll, 18 × 40 in	5 sq ft
Large roll, 2 × 5 ft	10 sq ft
Pallet	400, 450, 500 sq ft
Extra to order	5–10%

Southern farms cut slabs for bermuda, zoysia, St. Augustine and centipede; northern farms cut rolls for bluegrass and fescue. Ask yours which it sells and how big its pallets are.

What a Sod Job Costs, Line by Line

Installed, sod sells for $0.85 to $1.75 a sq ft, sod and laying together; prep and delivery are on top. Build your quote from four lines, then read the total against that range.

Sod
What the farm charges: $0.30 to $0.80 a sq ft on average, $0.60 nationally. Farms sell whole pallets, so price the pallets you order, not the lawn.
Delivery
Per load from the farm; Fixr puts it at $50 to $100, more from far away. A pallet weighs a ton or more, so check the drop spot can take a forklift or a truck.
Prep
Removing the old turf, grading and amending the soil. Fixr says to expect about $1 a sq ft more.
Laying and the margin
Your crew's hours to lay, roll and water, at your hourly cost, with your margin on top.

Order for the Day You Lay

A slab pallet weighs 2,000 pounds or more, and the sod on it is alive. Stacked, it heats from the middle; University of Tennessee Extension puts the window at 24 to 48 hours from harvest.

So the order has to be right the first time: the right pallet count on the morning the crew starts, prep done the day before. That is why the measurement matters more on a sod job than on a mow.

Measure the Lawn Before You Call the Farm

A backyard with a curved bed and a patio is no rectangle, and a length-times-width guess can miss by a pallet.

In SurfaceMeasure's Lawn mode you search the address, trace the lawn in sections, cut out the house, drive and beds, and pick Sod on the result card for the installed range before you price the job. Or work it by hand with the lawn square footage calculator.

Sod Questions

Part pallets, leftovers, and seed or sod.

Sometimes, for pickup. Some suppliers sell pieces for small patch jobs, collected at the farm; The Grass Outlet's online calculator takes whole pallets only. For delivery it can go the other way: LawnStarter notes some suppliers want 2 to 6 pallets before they will deliver. Ask the farm before you quote a small job.

Use it on the job: Penn State fills gaps by cutting a piece from a leftover scrap to fit tight. It won't keep. Until it is laid, Penn State unrolls it turf side up in a cool, shady spot, and Clemson wets it often so the edges don't dry out.

Seed is cheaper and slower. LawnStarter puts seeding at $0.09 to $0.15 a sq ft and 2 to 4 months to a usable lawn, against 2 to 4 weeks for sod. Penn State calls sod usually the most expensive way to establish a cool-season lawn and the quickest, and it can go down almost any time the ground isn't frozen. Quote sod when the customer needs the lawn now.