Enter your yard and get the mower size that fits, how long each mow takes, and whether buying a push mower, lawn tractor or zero-turn beats paying a lawn service over five years.
Not sure what your hour is worth? The What's My Time Worth calculator works it out from your pay. Check this week's pump prices on Gas Prices.
| Option | Per mow | Hours / year | Price | 5-year cash cost | 5-year incl. your time | Fit |
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Prices are editable in the table: type what you'd actually pay. Five-year cost = purchase price + yearly service + fuel, before resale value. Lawn service is priced per visit from LawnStarter's 2026 national figures for your lot size (range shown when you tap the row).
Mower makers size their lines by lawn area, and their guides broadly agree. Husqvarna suggests a push mower for up to about a third of an acre, a self-propelled mower up to half an acre, and a riding or zero-turn mower beyond that. Cub Cadet puts the switch to a 42 to 60 inch rider at around an acre, with wide-area walk-behinds in between. John Deere rates its smaller lawn tractors for up to about three and a half acres and its residential zero-turns for four acres and up. The calculator above uses those breakpoints, then adjusts for the two things a size chart ignores: how much you have to mow around, and how steep it is.
Area alone is misleading because a lawn full of trees, beds and a swing set mows far slower than an open rectangle. Every pass around an obstacle overlaps the last one, and every turn costs time. Mower makers handle this with an efficiency factor. Exmark uses 80 percent as representative of real mowing. We drop that to 70 or 60 percent for busier yards. Those two lower figures are our estimate, so pick the setting that looks most like your lawn.
A zero-turn steers with two levers that drive each rear wheel separately, so it can pivot in place and trim tight around a tree in one pass. Residential models top out around 7 mph against about 5.5 for a typical lawn tractor, and that speed is the whole appeal: on an open acre or two, a zero-turn finishes in noticeably less time. A lawn tractor steers with a wheel through the front axle. It is slower and wider-turning, but more stable on gentle slopes, easier for a beginner, and it can tow a cart, aerator or spreader. If your yard is flat and broken up by beds, the zero-turn is usually worth the extra few hundred dollars. If it rolls, or you want to haul mulch, the tractor earns its place.
Rollovers on slopes are the most serious riding-mower hazard. Manufacturers set hard limits: most zero-turn and lawn tractor manuals say 15 degrees (about a 27 percent grade), and John Deere's Z300 residential zero-turns are rated for 13 degrees. Stand-on mowers and steering-wheel zero-turns go a little higher. The Consumer Product Safety Commission advises mowing up and down slopes with a ride-on mower, never across them. A 10 degree slope rises about 1.8 feet for every 10 feet across the ground; a 15 degree slope rises about 2.7 feet. If any part of your lawn is steeper than that, the honest answer is a walk-behind for that section or a service with the right equipment, which is why the calculator flags riding mowers as unsuitable when you choose "steep".
A mowing service is priced per visit, and the bill grows with the lot. LawnStarter's 2026 figures run from about $41 to $61 a visit for a quarter acre up to $99 to $264 for one to two acres. The season length matters as much as the price: Lawn Love counts about 24 weekly mows a year in the Northeast and 26 in the Midwest, but around 45 in the Southeast and Southwest. Every-other-week service costs about 30 percent more per visit, according to HomeGuide, because the grass is longer. Multiply it out over five years and a service on an acre in the South can cost several times the price of a good zero-turn.
The calculation changes when you count your own hours. If you value an hour at $25 and a lawn takes 40 hours a year to mow, that is $1,000 a year of your time. Some people enjoy mowing and should count none of it; others would rather spend that Saturday elsewhere. Set "Count your time" to whichever is true for you. Research led by Ashley Whillans and published in 2017 found that people who spent money to buy back time reported greater life satisfaction, as Harvard Business School summarized. That makes hiring a reasonable choice even when it isn't the cheapest one.
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For one fairly open acre, a 42-inch lawn tractor or zero-turn is the usual pick. A 42-inch zero-turn at a realistic 5.5 mph cuts it in about half an hour; a 21-inch self-propelled mower takes about two hours. Manufacturers generally point riding mowers at lawns of about an acre and up, and walk-behinds at half an acre or less.
A zero-turn is faster and steers around trees and beds more tightly, so it wins on open-to-busy flat lawns of an acre or more. A lawn tractor is steadier on gentle slopes, usually costs less, and can pull a cart or spreader. Both are typically rated for slopes up to about 15 degrees, and some residential zero-turns only 13, so steep yards favour a walk-behind.
Most zero-turn and lawn tractor manuals limit you to 15 degrees, about a 27 percent grade, and some residential zero-turns to 13 degrees. Mow ride-on mowers up and down a slope, never across it, as the CPSC advises. Anything steeper should be mowed with a walk-behind or left to a service with the right equipment.
Over five years, buying is almost always cheaper in cash if you mow yourself, because a service charge of $50 to $100 a visit adds up to several thousand dollars a year in a long season. The gap narrows or flips once you count your own time, which is why the calculator lets you put a value on your hours.
Sources commonly cite 8 to 15 years for a riding mower with yearly service. Hour-based estimates put residential riders around 1,000 to 1,500 engine hours. At the hours this calculator estimates for a typical lawn, a five-year comparison is well inside that life.
With the standard field-capacity formula used by mower makers and university extension services: acres per hour equals speed in mph times deck width in inches times efficiency, divided by 99. We use realistic mowing speeds below each mower's top speed, and 80 percent efficiency for open lawns (Exmark's figure), lower for yards with obstacles.