How Long Does it Take To Mow a One Acre Grass Lawn?

Here you’ll be able to compare the time it takes for different mowers to mow 1-acre of lawn.

I was curious how long it would take to mow 1 acre (76% of an american football field) with the different types of lawn mowers – push and riding. So I did the math.

Do these numbers seem really fast? I thought so too. 8.5 minutes to mow 1 acre with a zero turn mower? I don’t think so. But it is correct for my perfect world scenario… The lawn is flat, free of obstacles and preferably 1 long lane the same size as the mower cutting width so you just drive forward as fast as possible.

At home, at your lawn you will probably need to move around obstacles, go up some slopes, turn directions often, speed up slow down etc so the numbers above are simply representative of how much faster one is compared to the other.

Number Crunching

The table below displays the numbers used to calculate the 1 acre mow time. See below the table for specifics.

Mower	Type	Mph	Ft/min	Width (ft)	Acre (mins)
	Walk Behind	3.1	273	1.6	101
	Rear Engine	5	440	2.5	40
	Tractor	7.8	686	3.5	18
	Zero Turn	13	1144	4.5	8.5

Specifics

1 acre = 208.71 ft x 208.71 ft

1 mph = 88 feet per minute

Method

1. Divide the 1 acre area into lanes. One lane is equal to the width of the mower deck/cut width times the length of the 1 acre square (208.71 ft).
2. Multiply the mow speed (speed of walking for the push, or declared max speed for the riding mowers) in mph by 88 to get the speed in feet per minute.
3. Now you can find out how many lanes you can mow in 1 minute. And how many lanes are in the 1 acre square.
4. Divide the lanes in the acre by the lanes you can mow per minute and you have the minutes to mow 1 acre.
5. Voila.

Assumptions

• Lawn is a perfect square with no obstacles.
• The mowing lanes have no overlap and are exactly the size of the mower cutting width.
• Riding mowers go at max rated speed.
• Push mower goes at average walking speed.
• Turn around times after each lane are negligible.