Pick your grass and climate, enter your lawn size, and get a full nitrogen feeding program: how much to feed, when to feed, and exactly how many pounds of your fertilizer to spread.
About this tool: how lawn fertilizer rates workThe Rest of the Lawn
Inches a week for your grass, season and soil, turned into days a week, minutes per zone, and cycle-and-soak splits that stop runoff.
Open the calculatorPounds of seed for a new lawn or an overseed, the window to sow it in, and how to water it through the first month.
Open the calculatorWhether the lawn needs lime at all, and how many bags of which kind if it does, worked out without a soil test.
Open the calculatorRecommendations are in pounds of actual nitrogen per 1,000 sq ft, because 5 lb of 26-0-3 and 5 lb of 10-0-4 are not the same feed. One application is 0.5 to 1.0 lb N, and the program above is built to stay inside that: a lawn that wants little nitrogen gets fewer feedings rather than weaker ones, because a lighter pass than that is more than a spreader can lay down evenly.
Pounds of product for 1 lb of N = 100 ÷ the first number. So 26-0-3 needs 3.8 lb per 1,000 sq ft, and 10-0-4 needs 10 lb for the same job. Halve it for a half-pound feeding.
| Grass | Typical annual N |
|---|---|
| Fine fescue | 1 to 2 lb |
| Centipede | 1 to 2 lb |
| Buffalograss | 1 to 2 lb |
| Tall fescue | 2 to 4 lb |
| Kentucky bluegrass | 2 to 4 lb |
| Perennial ryegrass | 2 to 4 lb |
| Zoysia | 2 to 4 lb |
| St. Augustine | 2 to 5 lb |
| Bermuda | 3 to 6 lb |
Leaving clippings returns a meaningful share of that. Slow-release nitrogen lets you safely apply a higher single rate; straight urea is easy to overdo.
Cool-season grass does its best work in autumn: early September and again late October. Heavy nitrogen in summer heat forces growth under stress. Warm-season is the mirror: late spring through summer, stopping a month before frost. Never feed dormant grass.
Established lawns rarely need it, and many states restrict it on turf because of runoff. Apply only on a soil test shortfall or at seeding.