woman with open arms in the green cereal field.
How big is 20 acres and what does 20 acres look like? If you’re tired of living in a subdivision and you’re considering buying a home on a bigger lot out in the country, you’ll have to first decide how many acres you want that lot to be.
If you’ve decided on 20 acres but you’re still not sure exactly how large that is, don’t worry because we’re going to give you some examples that will help you get some idea of how big 20 acres is by visualizing what it would look like.
We can start by letting you know that one acre is 43,560 square feet, which means 10 acres of land is 435,600 square feet, or 48,400 square yards.
How Big Is 20 Acres? (What Does 20 Acres Look Like?)
Knowing that 10 acres covers 435,600 square feet and that 20 acres is double that amount might be difficult to visualize in your mind. It’s easy to think, “my piece of land has 20 acres on it,” but it’s quite another to visualize in your head what that would look like once you purchase the lot.
Let’s start by familiarizing you with two units of measurements, and they are a furlong and a chain. Here is a brief description of each of them:
- A furlong tells you the distance of one-eighth of a mile using customary units for the U.S. For example, a furlong is 10 chains, 220 yards, 660 feet, or 201 meters.
- A chain is another unit of measure based on U.S. imperial units. A chain is equal to 22 yards or 66 feet. Therefore, a chain at 22 yards is shorter than a furlong, which is 220 yards.
These are good measurements to know because you will sometimes see these terms mentioned when you’re trying to visualize what a certain number of acres looks like.
Think of a furlong as being 10 chains long (a chain is 22 yards or 66 feet, while a furlong is 220 yards or 660 feet). You can also think of it in terms of a statute mile, which is 5280 feet or 80 chains.
Finally, if 10 acres is equal to 435,600 square feet, then 20 acres is the equivalent of 871,200 square feet, and that’s a lot of land!
Giving You Some Practical Examples
If you’re trying to visualize in your head how big 20 acres is, there are some examples that you might find easy to relate to. To make it a little easier for you to visualize, below are five examples that might help.
- 20 Acres = 26 U.S. Football Fields
This includes the entire football field from one end zone to the other. If you measure this, you’ll find that a U.S. football field is roughly 1.32 acres. So, 20 acres is roughly the size of 26 football fields.
That’s a lot of land stretching out far and wide, but it’s easier to visualize 26 football fields than it is a certain number of yards, furlongs, chains, or meters.
- 20 Acres = 300 Tennis Courts
Approximately 15 tennis courts will fit on a single acre of land, which means that 20 acres is the equivalent of 300 tennis courts. The USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York, which hosts the U.S. Open, is huge yet has only 22 tennis courts.
Four of those are show courts while 12 are designated as practice courts. This means that if you owned 20 acres of land, you would have enough space to do several U.S. Opens or other tennis competitions and still have a lot of land left over.
- 20 Acres = 360 2400-Square-Foot Homes
A 2400-square-foot home is quite large, but you can fit 180 homes of this size on 10 acres of land, which means that 360 homes in this size will fit on 20 acres.
Considering that 2400 square feet is extremely roomy, imagine how much room you’d have if you placed 360 homes of that size on your property! You could do that easily if you had 20 acres of land.
- 20 Acres = 3120 Parking Spaces
It’s been discovered that roughly 156 parking spaces can fit on an acre of land. This means that 10 acres is equal to 1560 parking spaces and 20 acres is equal to 3120 parking spaces.
If you want to compare that to other large parking areas, consider this: Universal Studios has 9051 parking spaces, Disney World has 11,391 parking spaces, and Disneyland has 10,000 parking spaces. So 20 acres’ worth of space isn’t too shabby!
- 20 Acres = 31,680 Potatoes
Twenty acres of land is equal to 31,680 5-inch potatoes that are lined up one by one on the ground. Just one acre can hold 1584 potatoes, which means that 20 acres could hold more than 31,000 potatoes in a row!
Some Ways to Utilize 20 Acres
Twenty acres of land is also the equivalent of 185 basketball courts and is 0.03125 square miles. If you had 400 feet of property on one side of the lot, it would be equal to a lot that is 400 feet by 2178 feet.
One thing is certain: if you purchase a lot with 20 acres on it, you will have a lot of acreage left over even if you build a large home on it and add a spacious swimming pool as well. If you’re a hunter, you may be able to hunt on some of the land, depending on where it is located.
You can also open a business, especially if you want to start an organic farm or set up numerous greenhouses in order to grow and sell plants and trees.
If you felt especially generous, you could always give back to your neighborhood and start a community housing project, or you could set up a small business on the property and go from there.
This means that you’ll have to check the zoning laws in that area, but the more out in the country you are, the more likely it is that the zoning laws will be very lax and not restrictive at all.
When you think of it in these ways, visualizing 20 acres is not at all difficult. When you buy land out in the country, you’ll experience a certain amount of seclusion and freedom you likely have never experienced.
When you buy a lot this big, you can do a lot of things that you just couldn’t do if you lived in the city or even the suburbs.
Regardless of what you plan to do with the land, it’s a good idea to check local zoning laws to make sure what you want to do with the land is legal and appropriate.
Conclusion
Owning 20 acres is certainly exciting, and once you can visualize just how much space that is, it makes it even more exciting to see yourself being able to do your own thing on your property.
Fortunately, out-of-the-way properties generally have low per-acre prices, so you should be able to purchase a 20-acre lot without breaking the bank.
You can find these properties almost anywhere, and buying one brings you one step closer to owning your own 20-acre lot of paradise.
