If you've worked in more than one state, you've probably noticed that legal descriptions don't all look the same. In some states, a property is “the NE¼ of the SW¼ of Section 22, T4N, R9E.” In others, it's “beginning at an iron pin on the south side of Maple Road, thence S 42°15' E 210.5 feet to a stone, thence along the creek...” Those aren't just different writing styles. They're two entirely different systems for dividing and describing land, and the choice between them wasn't random — it was driven by when and how each region was settled, and it had real economic consequences that outlived the surveyors who ran the lines.
Metes and Bounds: Describe What's There
Metes and bounds is the older system, inherited from English common law. A description is built from a starting point of beginning (often a monument — a tree, a rock, a stake, or a found iron pin) and a sequence of courses and distances that trace the parcel's boundary back to that starting point: bearing, distance, bearing, distance, until the boundary closes.
Because it's built from whatever's physically on the ground, metes and bounds naturally follows existing features — property lines already in use, rivers, ridgelines, old fences, roads. It doesn't assume a grid exists. It doesn't assume anything except that a surveyor walked the boundary and recorded what they found.
Metes and bounds is the primary system in the original 13 colonies and the states carved out of them before the federal government adopted a standardized alternative: Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Texas and Hawaii are also non-PLSS, though for different reasons — Texas retained its own land system from its time as an independent republic (which is also why Texas deeds still reference varasinstead of feet), and Hawaii's land division descends from the Great Māhele of 1848, not English common law.
PLSS: Survey First, Settle Second
The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) was created by the Land Ordinance of 1785, and it inverted the order of operations entirely. Instead of surveying land after people had already claimed and occupied it, the federal government surveyed a rectangular grid of townships and sections across its western territories before any settlement happened, then sold the land off that grid — sight unseen, by lot number, at public auction.
We covered the mechanics of that grid in detail in our guide to reading aliquot descriptions: townships six miles square, divided into 36 one-mile sections, each subdivisible into halves and quarters down to whatever parcel size a buyer wanted. A PLSS description doesn't reference anything physically found on the ground — it references coordinates in an abstract grid tied back to a principal meridian and baseline. Two surveyors working from the same description, decades apart, should locate the same corner.
PLSS covers roughly 30 states — most of the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Mountain West, the Pacific states, and parts of the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and most of Louisiana, where it overlays an earlier French long-lot arpent system along the rivers). Everywhere else — the colonial states and the handful carved from them — stayed metes and bounds.
Roughly, where each system applies
Non-PLSS (metes and bounds)
The 13 original colonies, plus Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Texas, and Hawaii — 20 states total, generally the oldest-settled parts of the country.
PLSS (public-land states)
The remaining 30 states, settled or organized as federal territory after 1785 — the Midwest, the South beyond the original colonies, the Great Plains, the Mountain West, and the Pacific coast.
Pros and Cons, Side by Side
| Aspect | Metes and Bounds | PLSS |
|---|---|---|
| Basis | Physical monuments and existing boundaries | Abstract grid from a principal meridian |
| Fits natural features | Yes — follows rivers, ridgelines, existing lines | No — straight lines regardless of terrain |
| Description length | Long, unique to each parcel | Short, standardized (e.g. "NE¼ SW¼ Sec. 22") |
| Stability over time | Monuments decay, move, or disappear | Grid persists even if a corner monument is lost |
| Survey-ahead-of-sale | Not typically — survey follows occupation | Yes — surveyed before settlement or sale |
| Boundary disputes | Common — gaps, overlaps, ambiguous calls | Less common — self-consistent grid |
| Title research | Requires deep chain-of-title research | Simpler — description alone often locates parcel |
| Cost to establish | Lower upfront (survey only what's claimed) | Higher upfront (survey the whole territory first) |
Neither system is strictly “better” — they solve different problems. Metes and bounds is cheap and flexible when land is already occupied and boundaries already exist informally; it just needs a surveyor to record what's there. PLSS is expensive and rigid up front, but it produces land that can be sold, subdivided, and financed at scale before a single fence post goes in the ground — which is exactly what a young federal government needed in 1785.
The Economic Development Angle
This is the part that goes beyond survey mechanics. The Land Ordinance of 1785 wasn't written by surveyors — it was written by a cash-strapped Continental Congress that needed a way to convert western land into revenue to pay down Revolutionary War debt. A standardized grid meant the government could sell land by section and quarter-section at public auction, sight unseen, without commissioning an individual survey for every buyer. That single decision turned land into a fast, liquid, sellable commodity years before settlers ever arrived.
Metes and bounds couldn't do that. Every parcel needed its own custom survey, tied to physical monuments that could move, rot, burn, or simply be misremembered by the next generation. That made metes-and-bounds land slower and more expensive to transact and far more prone to boundary litigation — two neighbors relying on the same 80-year-old deed calling for “a white oak, since fallen” is a recipe for a lawsuit, not a closing.
This isn't just historical trivia — economists have measured it directly. A widely cited study by economists Gary Libecap and Dean Lueck compared adjoining survey regions in Ohio: the metes-and-bounds Virginia Military District against the neighboring PLSS-surveyed Congress Lands, both settled around the same time by similar populations. The PLSS-surveyed side showed higher land values, fewer boundary disputes, and lower transaction costs for land transfer — the grid itself, not soil quality or climate, was the variable that moved the numbers. Clear, standardized descriptions meant lenders could rely on land as collateral with less legal risk, land could change hands faster, and disputes that would have gone to court in a metes-and-bounds county simply didn't arise as often.
At the national scale, that effect compounds. PLSS states were, almost by definition, the states opened to rapid federal land sale and settlement in the 19th century — the Homestead Act's 160-acre allotment is literally a PLSS quarter-quarter section. The system didn't just describe the Midwest and the West; it was the administrative machinery that let the federal government give away and sell that land fast enough to populate it within a few generations. Metes-and-bounds states, by contrast, developed at whatever pace informal occupation and individual survey allowed — generally slower, and with a much longer tail of title disputes that, in some colonial-era counties, are still occasionally litigated today.
What This Means for Surveyors Today
If your work spans both kinds of states, the practical differences show up immediately:
- Retracement in metes-and-bounds states leans heavily on deed research, found monuments, and often the testimony or history of adjoining landowners — the boundary is wherever the original survey put it, and your job is reconstructing that intent from evidence.
- Retracement in PLSS states starts from section corners and the original General Land Office (GLO) plats — the grid is the authority, and your job is finding or re-establishing the corners that define it, including proportioning irregular sections along township boundaries.
- Title research burden is typically heavier in metes-and-bounds jurisdictions, where chain of title can run through overlapping or ambiguous historical descriptions.
- ALTA/NSPS survey work follows the same national standardregardless of system, but the underlying evidence you're reconciling — monuments and calls versus grid and GLO records — is fundamentally different.
Neither system is going away. Re-surveying every metes-and-bounds county onto a PLSS-style grid would be enormously disruptive to existing titles, and PLSS states have their own irregular sections and lost corners to sort out. Understanding which system you're working in — and why it ended up that way — is part of reading the ground correctly before you ever set up an instrument.
Quick Reference
- Metes and bounds — describes land from physical monuments and boundary courses; older, flexible, survey-after-occupation
- PLSS — describes land from an abstract township/section/aliquot grid; standardized, survey-before-sale
- 20 states are non-PLSS (the original 13 colonies plus ME, VT, KY, TN, WV, TX, HI)
- 30 states use PLSS, established by the Land Ordinance of 1785
- PLSS was explicitly a fiscal and economic development tool — standardized land was faster to sell, finance, and settle
- Research has tied PLSS-style survey grids to measurably higher land values and lower boundary litigation compared to adjoining metes-and-bounds areas