The straight passes are perhaps twenty minutes with a 46 cm deck. Everything else is what makes it an afternoon.
The arithmetic, and what it covers
An area divided by an effective strip gives a distance to walk. A 46 cm deck with a realistic overlap clears something closer to 40 cm a pass, so 500 square metres is around 1 250 metres of walking. At an unhurried mowing pace that is roughly twenty minutes of actual cutting.
That figure is a floor, and it is the same arithmetic that sits behind the stated-area number on the listing. It assumes the machine never stops, the lawn is one rectangle, and there is no edge.
What the arithmetic leaves out
Turns. Every pass ends in a turn, and a 500 m² rectangle at 40 cm a pass has a lot of ends. On a heavy self-propelled machine a turn is several seconds each time.
Obstacles. A bed, a tree, a washing line post and a trampoline each convert a straight pass into two short ones plus a circuit. This is why two gardens of identical area take very different times.
The catcher. A full bag on long grass is a stop, a walk to the heap and a walk back. Four or five of those is a quarter of an hour, and on a first cut of the season it is more.
The edge. No mower cuts to a wall, and the strip along every hard boundary is a separate job with shears or a strimmer. On a small garden the edge is a larger proportion of the work than the middle.
What actually shortens it
A wider deck, if the ground is open enough to use it. Mulching rather than collecting, which removes the stops entirely. And mowing more often, because the machine moves faster through short grass and the catcher fills more slowly.
How this site handles it
No page here publishes a mowing time, because it is a property of a garden rather than of a machine. What the mower pages publish is deck width, mass, drive and catcher volume — the four things that decide how the afternoon actually goes — each as the maker states it.
Wherever this page and the maker’s own documentation disagree, the documentation wins. Every cutting width, cutting height, stated area, pack capacity, flow rate, head, sound level and application rate on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And the distinction this page keeps: a stated area is a supposition about your lawn, not a property of the machine. No standards body defines it, no test produces it, and each maker derives it from an assumption it does not publish — a battery calculation on one shelf, a duty cycle on another. This page reports the figure, names the derivation its machine type usually uses, and never ranks two machines on it.
The questions that keep coming in
Why does my mow take twice as long as the calculation?
Because the calculation covers the straight passes and nothing else. Turning at each end, working around beds, emptying a catcher four or five times and doing the edges afterwards are the rest of the afternoon, and on a cluttered garden they are the larger half.
Does a catcher slow the job down?
It adds a stop every time it fills, and on long grass it fills quickly. Mulching removes the stops and costs nothing in time, which is the strongest practical argument for it on a large lawn.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026