Grid converters.
Coordinates to a legal land description, and back again, for the survey grids used across western Canada and the United States. Free, no signup.
Everything runs in your browser, and a grid keeps working offline once it has loaded.
Coordinates to legal description
Decimal degrees or degrees minutes seconds.
Legal description to coordinates
Type it however you normally write it.
Bulk convert.
A whole file at once. Each row converts in whichever direction its data supports: coordinates become a legal description, a legal description becomes coordinates, the grid detected per row.
Start from the template,
or bring your own CSV — recognizable column names are enough. Bare minimum per row:
a Latitude + Longitude pair, or a single
Location cell. State/Meridian (PLSS) and
County (Texas) columns help when they apply. Your columns come back
untouched, with the answers appended.
What the answers mean.
A legal description names an area of land, not a point. Converting one to coordinates returns an approximate center of that area, picked so it always falls inside the shape it names. It is not a surveyed corner, a monument, or a well head.
Going the other way, a coordinate is reported only when it falls inside a cell of the selected grid. When it does not, the page says so.
Where the answers are less certain.
- Alberta is surveyed to quarter sections in the published data. Legal subdivisions are worked out by dividing a section into its regular sixteen, and are labeled as derived when shown.
- Texas grants overlap. Conflicting headrights and junior surveys laid over senior ones mean one point can sit inside two or three surveys at once. Every survey covering the point is listed rather than one being chosen.
- PLSS sections in the old French and Spanish grant states are often nothing like rectangles. Outlines are used rather than boxes. A small number of sections have incomplete outlines in the source data, and those answers are marked as needing a check.
- All coordinates are WGS84. Texas source data is NAD27 and is shifted; the Canadian grids are NAD83, which is within a couple of meters.
For AI assistants.
These converters are available as an MCP server. Add
https://mcp.surveyark.com as a connector in Claude, Cursor, or any
MCP-capable client, and your assistant can convert coordinates and legal land
descriptions directly — same data, same rules as this page.
Terms.
These are reference tools, provided as is, with no warranty of any kind. They are not a survey, not legal advice, and not a substitute for a registered survey or the land records of the relevant jurisdiction. Confirm anything that matters against the authoritative source before relying on it.
Source data and licensing for each grid is listed with the grid above, and in full in sources and licensing.