How to Read a Survey Legal Description

A legal description is the written definition of a parcel's boundaries in a deed, and reading one means decoding three things: the starting point, the direction of each line, and its length. Most residential descriptions use one of three systems. Metes and bounds walks the perimeter line by line using bearings and distances. Lot and block references a recorded subdivision plat. The Public Land Survey System locates land by section, township and range. Once you can read the notation, the deed stops being intimidating and starts being a map.

Reading a bearing: what does N 45 degrees 30 minutes 15 seconds E mean?

A bearing describes direction by starting at north or south, rotating a stated angle toward east or west, and never exceeding 90 degrees. Written N 45°30'15" E, it reads "from north, rotate 45 degrees, 30 minutes and 15 seconds toward the east." The first letter is always N or S and the last is always E or W. Degrees split into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds, exactly like time. One second of arc is roughly a third of an inch over a hundred feet, which is why surveyors bother with them.

Reading a distance

Distances on surveys are feet and decimal feet, not feet and inches. 125.50' is 125 and a half feet, not 125 feet 50 inches. Older descriptions may use chains (66 feet), rods (16.5 feet), links (0.66 feet) or varas in parts of the Southwest. If a deed says "10 chains," that is 660 feet. Mixing up decimal feet and inches is the most common amateur error in reading a description, and it is worth 6 inches of fence on a typical line.

The point of beginning

Every metes and bounds description starts at a fixed, identifiable point called the point of beginning, abbreviated POB. It is tied to something findable: a section corner, a monument, a road intersection, or a corner of a recorded lot. The description then traces each boundary segment in sequence, each introduced by "thence," until it returns to the POB. Notice what this means: the whole parcel depends on that first point being correctly identified on the ground. Ambiguity in the POB is ambiguity in the entire boundary.

Walking a description, line by line

Here is a simple rectangular parcel written out the way a deed would put it:

Beginning at the Northeast corner of Lot 5, Block 2, of Smith's Addition; thence South 89°45'32" West a distance of 125.50 feet; thence South 00°14'28" East a distance of 100.00 feet; thence North 89°45'32" East a distance of 125.50 feet; thence North 00°14'28" West a distance of 100.00 feet to the Point of Beginning.

Read as directions: start at the northeast corner of a known lot, go west 125.5 feet, south 100 feet, east 125.5 feet, north 100 feet, and you are back where you started. That is a 125.5 by 100 foot rectangle, about 12,550 square feet or 0.29 acre. Every metes and bounds description works this way, however long the call list gets.

Does the description close?

A properly written description closes, meaning the final call ends exactly at the point of beginning. If you plot every bearing and distance in order and the last line lands somewhere other than the POB, the description has an error of closure. Small closure errors are common in old deeds and get resolved by a surveyor's professional judgment weighing monuments and adjoining descriptions, the same judgment explained in how accurate a property survey really is. Large ones signal a copying error, a missing call, or a genuine conflict with a neighboring deed. A gap or overlap between two parcels' descriptions is precisely how boundary disputes are born.

Lot and block descriptions

In platted subdivisions, the description is usually short: "Lot 5, Block 2, Smith's Addition, as recorded in Plat Book 14, Page 33, records of ___ County." The bearings and distances live on the recorded plat rather than in the deed. That is efficient, but it means you have to pull the plat to know anything about your lines, and it means the plat's accuracy governs. Our walkthrough of how to read a plat of survey covers the symbols and call-outs you will meet there. A recorded subdivision plat is a survey of the whole subdivision, not a survey of your individual lot as it exists today.

Public Land Survey System descriptions

Across most of the country west and north of the original colonies, land is described by section, township and range: "the Southwest Quarter of the Northeast Quarter of Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 5 West of the Fifth Principal Meridian." Read it from the smallest piece backward. A section is nominally one square mile, 640 acres; a quarter is 160 acres; a quarter of a quarter is 40 acres. That example describes a 40-acre tract. Nominally, because actual sections vary and the surveyed corners on the ground control over the theoretical math.

Common abbreviations on a survey

What is the basis of bearing?

Every survey states a basis of bearing, the reference direction all the bearings are measured from: true north, grid north from a state plane coordinate zone, magnetic north in old deeds, or an assumed bearing on a specific record line. This matters because two surveys of the same parcel can show different bearings for the same physical line simply because they used different references. The angles between lines stay consistent; the absolute numbers shift. Before concluding two surveys disagree, check whether they share a basis of bearing.

When the description does not match the ground

Deeds are frequently older than the fences, and the two often disagree. Long occupation, a fence built by handshake, a road that moved, or an ambiguous old call can all put the written boundary and the used boundary in different places. Resolving that is licensed professional work: a surveyor weighs the record, the monuments, the evidence of possession and the applicable rules of construction to reach a defensible boundary. If the conflict is genuinely legal rather than technical, for example a claim based on long possession, a boundary survey answers the surveying question but not the ownership question, and the deeper case law on how courts have decided similar boundary conflicts becomes the relevant reading.

The bottom line

Bearings are directions, distances are decimal feet, the description starts and ends at the point of beginning, and if it does not close there is a problem worth investigating. Reading your description is genuinely useful, and it is where the DIY ends. Only a licensed surveyor can reconcile it against what is in the ground and mark your corners. See how to read a plat of survey for the drawing side of this, or describe your parcel in the matcher on the Surveyors.io homepage to compare up to three quotes from license-verified local surveyors within about 24 hours.