Mowing the lawn is either a task you love or you heat. If you fall into the latter category, mowing the lawn can be extra annoying and often is a task someone else has left you.
If you want to make your time really efficient, so you can slot in this mowing session easily into your day, and you can plan around it, it can be helpful to know exactly how long it may take you to mow a certain yardage of lawn.
In this case, we are going to look at a whole acre. An acre is a pretty large area, almost as big as a football field, so in this case you may really want to figure out how long it could take, rather than starting it in the dark.
Moreover someone may actually pay you to mow a whole acre, so you can change them per hour based upon how long it could take on average.
Whatever reason you want to know how long it takes to mow an acre of grass, we are going to find out in this article. To learn this and more find out below.
What Affects Mowing Speed?
To understand how to correctly judge the time it would take to mow an acre of grass, there are a few things we need to consider, and some assumptions we should run with.
From this we can provide you both a general estimate as well as a formula for you to work out your own situation with accuracy.
Type of Lawn Mower
Perhaps the largest variable that will affect time is the type of lawn mower you own.
A push lawn mower can only go as fast as you can push it and has the smallest width, we can assume this would take more mowing lanes and generally be slower.
A rear engine lawn mower is quicker than walking speed and has a much wider mower.
A tractor mower has more width and a higher speed which can mow pretty quickly.
A zero turn mower is the most professional, used for a community field or national park. They have a really wide mower and go much faster than the rest.
Width Of Mower
Of course, if your mower has a larger width, as the width of many mowers varies a lot, the more you can mow in one lap of a lane. This could easily range from 1 to 5 feet or potentially more.
The more width on your mower, the less lanes, the less turns, so on.
Miles Per Hour
Most mowers with an engine, usually seated, are much faster than your push lawn mower. A push lawn mower can only go as fast as you can manually push it, while the inclusion of an engine will often speed things up a lot
Assumptions
- Lawn has no obstacles on it but is an open lawn
- The mowing lanes don’t overlap but are near exactly the same length of the mower’s width
- All mowers are going at max speed reachable
- Lawn itself is square or rectangular in shape
- Turn times when changing lanes are equal and not huge
The Formula
So you likely have an acre of land in front of you waiting to be mowed. Here’s how you can figure out with accuracy how long it will take to mow it.
Firstly, figure out the area of your acre by measuring it, then work out the width of your mower. One lane’s width should be equal to the width of your mower.
You should be able to divide the width of your acre by the width of your mower, which should divide your acre into a number of mowing lanes. The wider your mower the less lanes, and vice versa.
Next, figure out how fast your mower can go, in MpH – with a push mower just figure out your average walking speed. Multiply your MpH by 88 to find out what speed this is in feet per minute.
Now you can figure out how many lanes you can mow per minute. If your lane is 200 ft and you have a 250 fpm mower, it may take under a minute per lane.
With this feet per minute number you can figure out how long it will take to do the whole acre.
Simply divide the previously attained number of lanes you can mow per minute by how many lanes you have, and this will tell you approximately how many minutes to mow an acre.
Width of acre / Width of mower = Z (number of lanes)
Mph of mower x 88 = Y (feet per minute)
Y (fpm) x Z (no. of lanes) = minutes to mow an acre.
Example
Assuming we’re working with a square, the length of the square acre is around 208.71 ft. Let’s say you are using a push mower that is 1.5 ft wide you will need around 140 lanes.
A push mower goes around 273 ft per minute. It’ll take about 195 minutes.
Average Time To Mow An Acre
If you want a quick answer, with a push mower it could take up to two hours to mow an acre manually. With an engine based mower you’re looking at 8 – 40 minutes to mow an acre.
Here’s some averages based on specific mower types.
| Mower Type | Mph | Fpm | Width (ft) | Minutes per acre |
| Manual | Approx 3 | Approx 264 | 1.5 | Approx 190 |
| Rear Engine | 5 | 440 | 2.5 | 40 |
| Tractor | 7.8 | 686 | 3.5 | 18-20 |
| Zero Turn | 13 | 1144 | 4.5 | 8-10 |
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, in general terms mowing an acre will take around 1 – 2 hours.
You can specifically work out approximately how long you could be mowing for if you have more knowledge of the type of mower you are using and exact width and length of the acre you are mowing.
We hope this article has helped you work out how long you may be mowing for.
