To mark Valentine’s Day, LawnStarter ranked the average size of lawns in every city in America. The city with the largest lawns is Carney, Maryland with an average acreage of 1.140, while the city with the smallest lawns is Hoboken, New Jersey with an average acreage of 0.011. Photo by Tim Mossholder, Unsplash.

News Release

AUSTIN, TEXAS — To mark Valentine’s Day, LawnStarter ranked the average size of lawns for cities in America.

To create the ranking, the organization compared the 2,000 largest U.S. cities based on the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s average yard size of single-family homes.

The city with the largest lawns is Carney, Md., with an average acreage of 1.140, while the city with the smallest lawns is Hoboken, N.J. with an average acreage of 0.011.

Each of the 10 cities with smallest lawns is in a major urban area, with only Atlantic City at No. 9 having a population under 50,000. Nine of the 15 smallest are in New Jersey — Hoboken; Union City, No. 2; Camden, No. 4; West New York, No. 5; Atlantic City, No. 9; Bayonne, No. 10; Newark, No. 11; Jersey City, No. 12 and Kearney, No. 15 — with two in Pennsylvania — Philadelphia, No.6 and Chester, No. 13. It seems New Jerseyites are left in the lurch when it comes to lawns.

Other cramped states are Delaware, Rhode Island and Vermont, which find all of their cities save Dover, Cranston and Middletown in the smaller half of LawnStarter’s rankings.

Large bodies of water seem to signal smaller lawns, with all the smaller cities except Winchester, Nev., in a state bordering an ocean or Great Lake.

On the roomier side of things, Texas and North Carolina both had 15 cities in the top 150 largest yards. Another pattern seemed to be smaller cities had bigger yards: Every city in the top 30 largest lawns except No. 11, Rocky Mount, N.C., had a population under 50,000.

Still, even the larger yards were smaller than usual. Of the 2,000 yards, only the top 150 were larger than the national average of half an acre.