Canada land maps · Alberta · Legal descriptions · October 21, 2026

Alberta Legal Land Description: How to Read and Find It

How to read an Alberta legal land description like NE-36-87-18-W4: meridian, range, township, section, quarter and LSD, plus free ways to look one up.

An Alberta legal land description looks like a string of letters and numbers, such as NE-36-87-18-W4, but every part of it points to a fixed square on a grid that covers almost the whole province. Once you know the order (quarter, section, township, range, meridian), you can find any rural parcel on a map in a minute or two. This guide breaks the format down piece by piece, shows how sections and legal subdivisions are numbered, explains how it differs from U.S. township and range, and lists free places to look a description up.

The short answer

• Read it right to left for the big picture. In NE-36-87-18-W4, W4 is the meridian, 18 the range, 87 the township, 36 the section and NE the quarter section.
• Meridians: W4, W5 and W6 mean west of the 4th, 5th or 6th meridian, at 110°, 114° and 118° west longitude.
• Townships are rows six miles tall, numbered from 1 at the Montana border to 126 at the Northwest Territories border. Ranges are columns six miles wide, starting with Range 1 just west of each meridian.
• Each township has 36 sections of about one square mile, split into quarters (NE, NW, SE, SW) or 16 legal subdivisions (LSDs).
• To look one up, use the free Alberta Land Titles map or a county or municipal map, which print the grid.

The parts of the description

Alberta’s rural land is laid out under the Alberta Township Survey system, Alberta’s share of the Dominion Land Survey grid that also covers Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Government of Alberta writes the order as QS-Sec.-Twp.-Rge.-Mer., so a full description works from the smallest unit to the largest:

You will see the same description written several ways. The province’s own example is NE-36-87-18-W4. Land and registry sites often pad the township with zeros, as in NW-24-053-01 W5, and you may also see “W4M” for “west of the fourth meridian” or the parts run together with spaces or slashes. The order stays the same, so read the numbers by position.

Meridians: W4, W5 and W6

Alberta uses three meridians for its rural grid. The 4th meridian sits at 110° west, which is also the boundary with Saskatchewan. The 5th runs at 114° west, passing close to Calgary, and the 6th at 118° west, in the western part of the province. Every range number restarts at each meridian, so “Range 18” means nothing until you know whether it is west of the 4th, 5th or 6th. Leaving the meridian off is the most common reason a description lands in the wrong place.

Townships and ranges

Townships are horizontal rows six miles from south to north. Township 1 starts at the Montana border and the numbers climb to Township 126 at the border with the Northwest Territories. A higher township number means farther north.

Ranges are vertical columns six miles wide between two meridians. Range 1 is the column immediately west of a meridian, and the numbers grow as you move west until you reach the next meridian, where counting starts again at 1.

Where a township row and a range column cross, you get a square roughly six miles by six miles. That square is also called a township, which is why the word does double duty.

How the 36 sections are numbered

Each township square is divided into 36 sections, each about one mile on a side. Section 1 sits in the southeast corner. Numbers run west along the bottom row to Section 6, step up a row and run back east from 7 to 12, and keep snaking back and forth until Section 36 lands in the northeast corner:

North is at the top. If you are used to U.S. maps, note that this is not the same pattern, which is covered below.

Quarter sections and legal subdivisions

A section can be split two ways, and a description will use one or the other:

• Quarter sections: NE, NW, SE and SW, each about half a mile square. A nominal section is 640 acres, so a quarter is nominally 160 acres. Much of Alberta’s farmland is bought, sold and leased by the quarter.
• Legal subdivisions: the section is cut into 16 squares of about a quarter mile each, nominally 40 acres. LSDs are numbered 1 to 16 in the same snaking way as sections, starting with LSD 1 in the southeast corner and ending with LSD 16 in the northeast. They come up when a river or road divides a section, and they are standard for pinpointing well sites and other small leases.

The four LSDs in a quarter line up neatly: the NE quarter holds LSDs 9, 10, 15 and 16, the NW holds 11, 12, 13 and 14, the SW holds 3, 4, 5 and 6, and the SE holds 1, 2, 7 and 8. Not every description has an LSD; many stop at the quarter. Acreages here are nominal. The area on an actual title is often a little different because of road allowances, rivers, and adjustments made when the grid was surveyed.

Worked example: NE-36-87-18-W4

1. W4: start at the 4th meridian, 110° west, along the Saskatchewan border.
2. Range 18: count 18 six-mile columns west of that line.
3. Township 87: count 87 six-mile rows north of the Montana border. That puts you well into northern Alberta.
4. Section 36: inside that township square, go to the northeast corner section.
5. NE: take the northeast quarter of Section 36, a block of about 160 acres.

If the description had been LSD 16-36-87-18-W4 instead, you would take the single 40-acre square in the far northeast corner of that same section.

How it differs from U.S. township and range

Alberta’s grid looks a lot like the U.S. Public Land Survey System, with six-mile townships and one-mile sections, but a few details trip people up:

• Section numbering starts in the opposite corner. In the U.S. system, Section 1 is in the northeast corner of a township and Section 36 in the southeast. In Alberta, Section 1 is in the southeast and Section 36 in the northeast.
• Order of the parts. U.S. descriptions are usually written section, township, range, as in “Section 12, T4N, R3W,” with directions on the township and range. Alberta writes them as a string with the meridian last.
• Reference lines. U.S. surveys count from dozens of principal meridians and baselines, and ranges run both east and west. Alberta counts townships north from the 49th parallel and ranges west from its three meridians.
• Small units. The U.S. splits sections into aliquot parts like “NE 1/4 of the SW 1/4” and uses government lots for odd pieces. Alberta uses numbered LSDs.

If you work on both sides of the border, our guides to reading township and range, quarter sections and acres in a section cover the U.S. side.

How to find a legal land description in Alberta

• Your title or tax notice. A Certificate of Title shows the legal description along with the LINC (Land Identification Number). Rural tax assessment notices usually show it too.
• The free Alberta Land Titles map. Alberta’s online land registry (ALRO) has a map where you can pan to a parcel and click it to see the description without signing in. Our Alberta land title map guide walks through it, and the Alberta land maps page keeps the official links together.
• County and municipal maps. The Government of Alberta points out that county maps, which you can get from the local municipality, show the legal land descriptions. Rural ownership maps print the township and range grid and section numbers over each quarter.
• Converters and GPS apps. Several websites and apps convert between legal land descriptions and latitude and longitude. They are handy in the field, but check the result against an official map before you rely on it.

Town and city lots are different. Urban land in Alberta is usually described by plan, block and lot, not by quarter section, so a house in Calgary or Edmonton will have a plan number rather than a township and range. Our explainer on Canadian parcel IDs covers the LINC and the identifiers other provinces use.

A description is not a survey

The legal land description tells you which block of the grid a parcel sits in. It does not tell you exactly where fences or survey markers are, and real quarter lines are not perfect squares on the ground. Online maps are drawn for registry and planning use and can be off by several metres. Before you build a fence or a shed, settle a lease line or close on land, look at the registered plan and bring in an Alberta land surveyor.

Questions people ask

Related guides

• Alberta land title map: free parcel and LINC lookup
• Canadian parcel IDs: PID, LINC, PIN and ARN
• How to read township and range
• What is a quarter section?
• How to find the legal description of a property