Legal descriptions · Metes and bounds · Deed plotting · October 20, 2026

How to Plot Metes and Bounds: Draw a Deed Step by Step

How to plot metes and bounds from a deed: turn each bearing and distance into a line, check that it closes, figure the acreage and catch typos.

How to plot metes and bounds is a skill worth having if your land is described in a deed by courses and distances instead of a lot number. Plotting means drawing each call in the description, one line at a time, from the point of beginning until the shape comes back around. Do it carefully and you get a picture of the parcel, a check on whether the description closes, an area to compare with the deed’s acreage and an early warning of typos that could cause trouble later. You can plot by hand with a protractor, with a spreadsheet using a little trigonometry, or with deed plotting software. This guide walks through all three, with a worked example.

The short answer

1. Split the description into numbered calls, each one a bearing plus a distance, starting at the point of beginning.
2. Convert units so every distance is in the same unit, usually feet.
3. Draw or compute each line. On paper, measure the bearing from north or south with a protractor. By math, find each line’s north-south part (latitude) and east-west part (departure).
4. Check the closure. The last call should land on the starting point. A big gap usually means a misread call.
5. Find the area and compare it with the acreage the deed states.

What you need before you start

• The full legal description, copied from the recorded deed, not the shortened version on a tax bill. Our guide to finding your property’s legal description shows where to get it.
• Any recorded survey or plat the deed mentions, so you can compare your drawing with what a surveyor drew.
• Tools for your method: graph paper, a protractor and an engineer’s scale for hand plotting; a calculator or spreadsheet for the math method; or a deed plotting program.
• A county parcel map for a reality check at the end. Our land map links to free county GIS viewers that open without a login.

Step 1: Break the description into calls

The Bureau of Land Management’s guide to writing land descriptions splits a metes-and-bounds description into three parts: a caption or preamble that names the general location (such as section, township, range, county and state), a body with the details, and clauses that add or take away rights. Plotting happens in the body. BLM lists what a body can contain: a point of commencement, a point of beginning, courses (bearings), distances, calls to monuments or neighboring parcels, a closing call back to the start, the area and a basis of bearings.

Go through the body and number every “thence.” A call might read “thence South 89°54’41” West, a distance of 1325.26 feet to an iron pipe.” Write each one on its own line as bearing, distance and anything it runs to. Watch for these:

• Point of commencement vs point of beginning. When a description starts at a section corner and runs to the parcel, those first calls only get you to the parcel. The drawing of the boundary starts at the point of beginning.
• Curves. A call along a curve gives a radius, a central angle and an arc length instead of one bearing. Note them separately (more below).
• Calls to adjoiners. A line described as running “along the north line of the Smith parcel” may have no distance at all. You will need that neighbor’s deed or a plat to plot it.

Step 2: Read each bearing

Most deeds use quadrant bearings: a starting direction (North or South), an angle of 0 to 90 degrees, and the direction you turn toward (East or West). N 45°30’ E means start facing north and swing 45 degrees 30 minutes toward east. Our post on bearings on a plat map explains the format.

Software and spreadsheets often want an azimuth instead, an angle measured clockwise from north, 0 to 360 degrees. The conversion depends on the quadrant:

• NE: azimuth = the bearing angle.
• SE: azimuth = 180° minus the angle.
• SW: azimuth = 180° plus the angle.
• NW: azimuth = 360° minus the angle.

Check what the bearings are measured from. A metes-and-bounds plotting reference from LegalLandConverter notes that courses are usually tied to true north but sometimes to magnetic north or to a stated basis of bearings, a reference line given a fixed bearing in the description. Old deeds written from compass readings may need a correction for the magnetic declination of that year. See what a basis of bearing is.

Step 3: Put every distance in the same unit

Older descriptions often use chains, rods or links. BLM’s guide gives the relationships: one chain is 100 links, 66 feet and 4 rods (also called poles or perches), which makes a rod 16.5 feet and a link 0.66 foot. Texas descriptions may use varas instead. Convert everything to feet before plotting, and keep a couple of decimal places. Our explainers on the chain and the vara cover the older units.

Step 4a: Plot by hand

1. Pick a scale that fits the parcel on your paper, such as 1 inch = 100 feet, and mark the point of beginning.
2. At that point, draw a light north-south line. Graph paper makes this easy because every vertical line points north.
3. Lay the protractor’s center on the point. Measure the bearing angle from north or from south, toward east or west, exactly as the call reads.
4. Draw the line and mark its length with the scale. That end point is where the next call starts.
5. Repeat for every call. The last line should end on the point of beginning.

A hand plot is good enough to see the shape and catch a flipped direction. It is too rough for an accurate area or a precise closure check.

Step 4b: Plot with latitudes and departures

Surveyors break every line into a north-south part and an east-west part. Jerry Mahun’s open-access surveying text defines them this way:

• Latitude = distance × cosine of the bearing angle. It is positive for a north call and negative for a south call.
• Departure = distance × sine of the bearing angle. It is positive for an east call and negative for a west call.

With quadrant bearings the sine and cosine always come out positive, so you add the sign from the letters yourself. With azimuths the signs come out on their own. Add the latitudes and departures one call at a time and you get a running north and east coordinate for every corner, starting from 0, 0 at the point of beginning. Those coordinates are your plot.

A worked example

Here is a made-up, four-call description to show the arithmetic (it is not a real parcel):

• Call 1: N 12°30’ E, 310.00 ft → latitude +302.65, departure +67.10
• Call 2: S 79°15’ E, 425.00 ft → latitude −79.27, departure +417.54
• Call 3: S 08°45’ W, 352.00 ft → latitude −347.90, departure −53.55
• Call 4: N 73°53’ W, 448.70 ft → latitude +124.56, departure −431.07

The latitudes add up to +0.03 foot and the departures to +0.02 foot, so the last call stops about 0.04 foot from where it began. The corners land at roughly (N 302.65, E 67.10), (N 223.38, E 484.64) and (N −124.52, E 431.09) before returning to the start. In a spreadsheet that is one row per call with columns for bearing, distance, latitude, departure, running north and running east.

Step 5: Check whether it closes

On a closed boundary, the north-south parts should cancel out and so should the east-west parts. Whatever is left over is the misclosure. The straight-line gap, called the linear closure, is the square root of (latitude error² + departure error²). Dividing the total length of all the lines by that gap gives the precision. In the example, 1,535.70 feet of lines with a 0.04-foot gap works out to about 1 in 37,700.

How close is close enough? Mahun notes that it depends on the purpose of the survey: traditional first-order surveys require 1 in 100,000, while Wisconsin requires at least 1 in 3,000 for a property survey. Rounded old deeds may not do that well, but a gap of many feet almost always means a misread call. Common culprits:

• A flipped direction letter. If call 2 in the example were entered as N 79°15’ E instead of S 79°15’ E, the plot would miss by about 158.5 feet, straight north-south, which is twice that call’s latitude. A gap equal to twice one call’s north-south or east-west part points right at the culprit.
• Swapped digits in a distance or angle, such as 352 entered as 325.
• A skipped call, often one tucked into a long sentence about a monument.
• Mixed units, such as one distance left in chains.
• A curve plotted as a straight line using the arc length.

If you check everything and the error is still large, the description itself may contain a mistake. That is worth knowing before you buy, sell or build. A surveyor or title company can tell you whether a corrective deed is needed.

Step 6: Figure the area and compare it with the deed

Once you have coordinates for every corner, the coordinate method gives the area of any boundary with straight sides. As Mahun’s area chapter lays it out: list the corners in order around the outside, repeat the first one at the end, multiply each north value by the next east value and each east value by the next north value, add up each set, subtract one total from the other, halve it and drop any minus sign. It only works if the outline does not cross itself.

For the example, that gives about 144,170 square feet. Divide by 43,560 square feet per acre and you get about 3.31 acres. The BLM guide notes that a description usually ends with an area statement, most often in acres, so compare yours with it. A close match is reassuring. A big difference means a call is wrong or the deed’s acreage was only an estimate. Our guide to how to find acreage of property covers other ways to check.

What to do with curves

BLM’s sample description includes a call along a curve with a central angle of 42°57’00”, a radius of 419.43 feet and an arc distance of 314.42 feet. You cannot plot that with one bearing. If the description or plat gives a chord bearing and chord distance, plot the chord as a straight line for the closure check. Plotters differ here: GISGP’s free plotter skips curves and asks for the chord instead, while LegalLandConverter’s reference lists curves as one of the call types it handles. The area between the chord and the arc then has to be added or subtracted, which is why many people let software handle curved parcels.

Step 7: Put the plot on a real map

A plot on paper floats in space until you tie the point of beginning to a real location. Online deed plotters let you enter the starting point as latitude and longitude in decimal degrees; LegalLandConverter notes that the fifth decimal place is roughly a meter. Some plotters can export the drawing as a KML file, which you can open next to your county’s parcel layer, as our guide to seeing property lines on Google Earth explains.

Expect some offset between your plot and the county map. The county’s lines are approximate, and your starting point is only as good as the corner you picked. Our explainer on the accuracy of county GIS lines goes into the reasons.

What a plot can and cannot do

Plotting a deed is a smart check before buying land, settling an estate or talking with a neighbor about a line. It can show that a description closes, roughly where the boundary runs and whether the acreage makes sense. It cannot set a boundary. Only a licensed land surveyor can find the monuments, weigh conflicting evidence and mark the line on the ground. When the stakes are real, use your plot to ask better questions, then hire one. For the basics behind all of this, start with what metes and bounds means.

Questions people ask

Related guides

• What is metes and bounds?
• What is a point of beginning?
• What is a bearing on a plat map?
• How to find your property’s legal description
• How to find acreage of property