Sod & Turf Calculator — a pallet does not cover what it is sold as

Pieces, pallets and waste for a lawn — and the number the farm pages skip: a pallet does not cover the square footage it is sold as, because there is no standard piece size to divide by.

Lawn area	—
Area per piece	—
Pieces, no waste	—
Pieces with waste	—
Pallet: sold as vs actually covers	—
If you ordered by the advertised area	—
Pallets to order	—
Delivered	—
Left over after the job	—
Weight per pallet, soil only	—

Piece size — there is no standard one. Turfgrass Producers International, Guideline Specifications to Turfgrass Sodding (rev. 9/30/2006), Sec. IV.B.3 “Pad Size”: individual pieces are cut to the supplier’s standard width and length. Only the tolerances are standardised — ±0.5 in on width, ±5% on length. The Canadian Landscape Standard (CSLA/CNLA, 2016) cl. 8.2.1.5 defers the same way, at ±2% on width and ±5% on length. Treat the TPI document carefully: the NBS publication index lists it Withdrawn, and it now circulates mainly as grower reprints, which is exactly how variants drift. The Grass Outlet, a Texas grower, says it in plain words — there is no universal standard for sod sizes, because each farm cuts to its own equipment.

The 16 × 24 in slab. Dominant in the warm-season south, and attested by growers rather than by any standard: Sod Solutions (lawn-101/square-feet-per-pallet), NG Turf (Georgia), Super-Sod (Texas), LGI Sod and King Sod (Florida), Houston Grass and King Ranch Turfgrass (Texas). 16 × 24 in = 384 in² = 2.6667 ft², exactly. This page computes from the dimensions you enter and never uses a published per-piece figure: Sod Solutions rounds to 2.66, and The Grass Outlet prints “approximately 2.75 square feet” for the same slab, which is 3% wrong. The northern format is a different product — Cornell Cooperative Extension (Suffolk County), Calculating Amount of Sod Required to Cover an Area, gives 18 in × 5 ft rolls at 7.5 ft² each, 600 ft² to a pallet.

Pallet coverage is a sales figure. It is rounded, and it does not always reconcile with the piece count. Houston Grass and King Ranch both sell 165 slabs as “450 sq ft”; 165 × 2.6667 = 440 ft². NG Turf sells 189 as 504 ft², which is exact. King Sod sells 150 as 400 ft² (exact), 170 as 450 ft² (453.3 actual) and 190 as 500 ft² (506.7 actual). LGI sells 188 as 500 ft² (501.3 actual). The error runs both ways and it is not small enough to ignore. Count pieces.

Pad thickness — two live specifications disagree. The TPI quality definitions cap the soil portion of the pad at one-half inch (printed there as 15 mm; ½ in is 12.7 mm, so the metric column is 18% high). UFGS 32 92 23 Sodding (Apr 2006, Change 1 08/21), para 2.1.1, specifies 19 mm / ¾ in within a tolerance of 6 mm / ¼ in, excluding top growth and thatch. That is a US federal guide specification: it binds Department of Defense work by contract, it is not a building code, and it does not apply to your yard. ¾ − ¼ = ½ exactly, so the thinnest pad UFGS will accept is precisely the TPI maximum. The Canadian Landscape Standard cl. 8.2.1 item 6 gives 15 mm (0.6 in) ± 6 mm, “or by special order”. Wider public specs print a band rather than a number: SUDAS 9020, approximately ½ to 1 in; City of New Orleans 32 92 23 (v01-2021), one-half inch (15 mm) to one inch (25 mm); the EPA sodding BMP fact sheet, 0.5 to 2 in. Warm-season sod is commonly cut thicker than cool-season bluegrass. UK and Australian growers quote 30–35 mm for a turf roll, but that figure appears to include grass and thatch, so it is not comparable and this page will not convert between the two.

Rules of thumb, not specifications. The waste percentages are estimates; no standard sets them. So is the 1,500 kg/m³ (94 lb/ft³) moist screened topsoil density behind the weight row. The weight shown is the soil layer alone — a delivered pad also carries thatch, blades and water, so the ticket will read higher than this. Sod is perishable: order it for the day you can lay it, not the day it is cheapest. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.