How land is surveyed, state by state

The legal description on your deed or division order is the first real obstacle most mineral owners hit, and it is written in whichever system happened to be running when your land was first granted. Get the system wrong and the acreage will be wrong, which means the valuation will be wrong.

The three systems

The rectangular survey, or PLSS

The grid. Land is divided into six mile square townships, each holding 36 sections of roughly 640 acres, and each section is halved and quartered down to whatever size you own. A description reads like the northeast quarter of the southwest quarter of Section 14, Township 12 North, Range 8 West.

Every rectangular survey counts outward from a principal meridian and its base line. There are 36 named principal meridians, conventionally counted as 37 because the Fourth Principal Meridian gets counted twice. The critical consequence: township and range numbers repeat under every meridian. A T2N-R5E exists under a dozen different origins and means a dozen different pieces of ground, which is why the meridian call is not optional in a state that has more than one.

Metes and bounds

Directions and distances from a starting point, running the boundary around and back to where it began, historically calling to trees, stones, creeks and the neighbor's line. The eastern states never entered the federal grid, so this is what you get in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and most of Kentucky. It describes the land precisely at the moment it was written and then decays as the trees rot and the creeks move.

Texas, which is neither

Texas kept its own public domain at annexation and never entered the federal survey. Land is described by original survey and abstract number, on foundations laid by Spanish and Mexican grants, and out west by railroad blocks that look like a grid but are not one.

Which system your state uses

The ones worth knowing about before they cost you

• Ohio has the most fragmented survey history in the country. A township in the Western Reserve or the Military District is five miles square, not six, and the Virginia Military District has no sections at all.
• Louisiana runs sections, French arpent long lots and confirmed private claims on the same plat, and townships there routinely carry far more than 36 sections. It is also the state where a severed mineral interest can expire after ten years of nonuse.
• Utah numbers everything off one of two origins, and the Uinta Basin sits exactly where they overlap.
• Mississippi has five principal meridians, more than any other state we work in, and a Section 16 is very often school trust land rather than private minerals.
• Alaska can name a section that has never been monumented, because much of the state carries the grid as a protraction diagram rather than a real survey.
• Texas assigns abstract numbers per county, so the same abstract number points at different land in nearly every county in the state.

Related

• The interactive section, township and range map, for the states on the grid
• How to find out if you own mineral rights
• Depth severance, where ownership is cut by depth instead of by boundary
• The Duhig rule and fixed versus floating NPRI
• Free well and production records for twenty states
• The mineral glossary

Compiled from BLM, state land offices, state archives and statute, current as of 2026-08. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a licensed surveyor. Nothing here is a boundary opinion.