How Metes and Bounds Legal Descriptions Work

Metes and bounds is the oldest system of land description used in the United States, predating the rectangular Public Land Survey System by well over a century. It describes a parcel by tracing its boundary one course at a time, using bearings and distances (or sometimes natural or artificial monuments) to move from corner to corner until the boundary closes back at the starting point.

The Basic Structure

Every metes and bounds description has three parts: a point of commencement (POC), a point of beginning (POB), and a series of calls that traverse the boundary. The POC ties the parcel to a known corner — usually a section corner or quarter corner from the Public Land Survey System. From there, one or more introductory calls lead to the POB, which is where the actual parcel boundary begins. Each subsequent "thence" call gives a direction (bearing) and a distance until the boundary returns to the POB and closes.

Reading Bearings

Bearings in legal descriptions are expressed in quadrant notation: a starting cardinal direction (N or S), an angular deviation in degrees, minutes, and seconds, and a closing cardinal direction (E or W). For example, North 45°30'00" East means "start facing north, rotate 45 degrees 30 minutes toward the east." The full range in any quadrant is 0° to 90°, so a bearing of N 0°00'00" E is due north and N 90°00'00" E is due east (the same as S 90°00'00" E).

Older descriptions sometimes use whole-word directions such as "Northerly" or "South 89 degrees West." Some also include parenthetical record values — historical bearings from an earlier survey — in the form 516.927 feet (formerly North 89°56' East, 797 feet). The parenthetical is a historical annotation and should not be used in any computation.

Distances

Distances are almost always expressed in feet in U.S. descriptions, though older deeds occasionally use chains (one chain = 66 feet) or links (one link = 0.66 feet). Modern descriptions typically carry distances to three decimal places for survey-grade accuracy.

Closure

A closed polygon is the mathematical proof that a metes and bounds description is internally consistent. When you traverse all the calls — converting each bearing and distance to a northing/easting offset and summing them — the final accumulated position should return exactly to the starting point. In practice, small rounding errors and original survey measurement errors produce a misclosure, expressed in feet. A well-written description for a simple parcel typically closes to within 0.01–0.10 feet. Large misclosures often signal a transcription error, a missing call, or a bearing that was recorded incorrectly.

Easement descriptions and right-of-way strips are an important exception: they describe a path from one point to another, not a closed polygon, so a non-zero misclosure is expected and correct.

Monuments vs. Calls

When a description calls for a monument — a set iron pin, a found railroad spike, a concrete monument — that physical object controls over the computed bearing and distance. Courts have consistently held that found monuments rank above distances, which rank above bearings, which rank above area. When automated software plots a description, it uses the bearing and distance; a licensed surveyor on the ground reconciles any conflict with found monuments as part of the fieldwork.

Why Automation Matters

Even a modestly complex parcel can have 20–40 individual calls, each of which must be converted from DMS notation to decimal degrees, projected into a local coordinate system, and accumulated into a traverse. A single transcription error — a minutes value read as 59 instead of 39, for example — can shift a corner by hundreds of feet. Automated parsing and closure checking catches these errors before they propagate into a CAD file or a recorded plat.