Lot Sizes Explained: 20×40, 1,000 m², Hectares — What to Buy

Ask about lot sizes Mexico and you'll get a list of numbers that mean little until you can picture them on the ground: 20×40, 20×30, 1,000 m², half a hectare, a full hectare. On the Oaxaca coast these are the sizes that actually show up in listings, and each one suits a different plan and a different budget. If you've been researching the 20x40 lot size in particular, you already know it's the one that appears most often. This guide explains what the numbers mean, what each size is genuinely good for, and how size changes what you pay per square meter.

Two conversions to keep in your head before we go further. A square meter is about 10.76 square feet, and a hectare is 10,000 m² — about 2.47 acres. Everything else in this article follows from those two facts. The price figures below are indicative ranges we see on the coast from Mazunte to Huatulco in 2026, not quotes; every lot is different, and exact asking prices are published on each listing we curate.

The sizes

The sizes you'll actually see

Walk any listing site on the coast and the same handful of sizes repeats. The most common is the 20×40 lot: twenty meters wide by forty meters deep, which comes to 800 square meters. It's the classic Mexican urban lot — the size towns were laid out in for decades — and it's still what most coastal listings mean when they say "lot" without qualifiers. In Mazunte and Zipolite, where the hills get steep fast, you'll see it less; in the flatter parts of Puerto Ángel, Santa Elena, and the Huatulco area, you'll see it constantly.

Slightly smaller is the 20×30, which comes to 600 m². It's common in tighter hillside developments and in the older village cores, where land was subdivided around footpaths rather than streets. You'll also meet the 15×30 (450 m²) in the oldest parts of town, and a steady number of 1,000 m² lots, usually advertised by area rather than by frontage. The 1,000 m² lot is the expat standard on this coast: big enough for a house, a garden, and a pool, small enough to maintain without hiring help.

Beyond those, sizes jump to the half-hectare (5,000 m²) and the full hectare (10,000 m²). These show up inland — around Ventanilla, Santa Elena, and the valleys behind Huatulco — and occasionally on the hillsides above the quieter coves like Salchi, where parcels were never cut into tidy rectangles. By-the-hectare land on the coast itself is rare; it's the rural option, and it behaves differently from a village lot, as we'll get to.

The numbers

20×40, 1,000 m², hectare: the numbers

Here are the same sizes as a table, with the imperial conversions most foreign buyers think in. One caution before you read it: a lot advertised as 20×40 is rarely a perfect rectangle once it's on a hillside, and the true area is whatever the survey says, not what the name suggests. Treat the table as the starting point, not the final word.

Lot	Area	In feet / acres	Typical use
20×40 m	800 m²	≈ 8,600 ft²	House with garden
20×30 m	600 m²	≈ 6,460 ft²	House or casita
15×30 m	450 m²	≈ 4,840 ft²	Compact house
1,000 m² lot	1,000 m²	≈ 10,760 ft² ≈ quarter-acre	House + garden + pool
1 hectare	10,000 m²	≈ 2.47 acres	Compound, farm, land bank

To picture the two most common sizes: a 20×40 lot is about 66 by 131 feet — roughly the footprint of a comfortable house and yard in the US. A 1,000 m² lot is a square about 33 meters (108 feet) per side, or a quarter-acre, which is the unit most North Americans actually think in. Once you're past those, you're no longer comparing lots; you're comparing parcels of land.

What fits

What each size is good for

The honest answer to "what size should I buy" is: the smallest lot that fits your plan, plus a little margin. That sounds obvious, but it's the opposite of how most first-time buyers think, and it matters more on a hillside than almost anywhere else.

A 20×40 (800 m²) is the right size for a house with a garden. You get a real yard, room for a carport and a cistern, and enough setback from the neighbors to feel private. It's the size most Mexican families build on, which means builders, materials, and layouts for it are all standard. If your plan is a single house, this is usually the sweet spot.

A 1,000 m² lot is the classic expat build: house, garden, pool, and a guest casita without feeling crowded. It's also the size that resells most easily on the coast, because it's what the next buyer will be looking for. If you see yourself renting part of the property or hosting friends for months at a time, this is the size that gives you room to do it. For a sense of what a given budget actually reaches at this size in different towns, our breakdown of what $50,000 buys on the Oaxaca coast goes town by town with real ranges.

A hectare is a different category entirely. At that size you're buying privacy, a compound, or a rural project — a small farm, a retreat, a piece of land to hold for the long term. It can also be a mistake if what you actually want is a house near the beach, because a hectare inland doesn't put you closer to the water; it puts you further from services.

And bigger is not always better on a hillside. A steep 1,000 m² lot can hold less usable building area than a flat 600 m² one, and the cost of terracing, retaining walls, and longer access roads eats the advantage of the extra meters. On the Oaxaca coast, usable flat area is worth more per square meter than raw slope, and the price per square meter usually reflects it.

The price math

How size changes price per m²

Size changes price per square meter in a consistent way across the coast: the smaller the lot, the higher the price per m². It's the same logic as buying anything in bulk. A 200 m² hillside lot in a village can easily cost more per square meter than a 5,000 m² parcel ten minutes inland, even though the village lot is the one with the ocean view. You're paying for scarcity, for the view, and for the fact that small buildable lots in walkable towns are what most buyers want.

Call it the small-lot premium: anything under 400 m² in a town like Mazunte or Zipolite carries a per-meter price at the top of the local range, because so few come to market. The bulk discount works the other way — parcels of 5,000 m² and up trade at a fraction of the per-meter rate of village lots. On the coast right now, indicative hillside ranges run from roughly $35–75/m² in Mazunte to $40–90 in Zipolite's hillsides, with Puerto Escondido's premium zones higher still. Inland, parcels of 5,000 m² or more run closer to $5–25/m². Those are directional figures, not quotes.

The practical takeaway: if you only need 600 m², don't buy 5,000 m² because the per-meter price looks better. The discount is real, but you're also buying carrying costs, access upkeep, and years of decisions about land you may never use. Buy the size you need, and let the discount work for you when your plan actually needs the space. Our full price-per-m² report by town has the complete ranges for every town on the coast.

Reading a plano

Reading a plano and measuring reality

Every serious listing comes with a plano — the site plan, the map of the lot. It shows the shape, the dimensions, the street frontage, and usually the neighboring lots. Reading one is simple: find the frontage (the side that faces the street), check the depth, and multiply. The surprises live in what the plano can't show.

Slopes are the big one. A plano is drawn as if the lot were flat, and on the coast almost nothing is. A 20×40 on paper can be a 45-degree hillside in reality, with maybe a third of its area actually usable. Walk the lot before you commit, and if you can't walk it, have someone who lives nearby walk it for you and describe the grade honestly.

Setbacks matter too. Municipal rules — your uso de suelo, the permitted land use — and subdivision rules can require you to keep buildings a certain distance from the street and from your neighbors, which shrinks your buildable area further. Ask about setbacks before you fall in love with a footprint.

The other document to know is the deslinde, the survey that fixes the lot's boundaries on the ground. A plano shows the intended shape; a deslinde confirms where the corners actually are. If a lot has never had one, or the seller can't produce it, that's a due-diligence flag, not necessarily a dealbreaker. Check the boundaries against the fences, check the measurements against the plano, and check the title documents — escritura, acta de posesión, or ejido papers — before you put anything in writing. Our 17-point due diligence checklist walks through every check worth making before you commit.

Hectares

Buying by the hectare: the rural option

If your plan is privacy, a compound, a farm, or simply holding land for the long term, the hectare is your unit. Inland parcels of 5,000 m² and up run in the indicative range of $5–25/m² — meaning a full hectare can cost less than a village lot in Mazunte. That math is why people buy them, and it's honest math, with caveats.

The first caveat is title. Rural land comes in more varieties than coastal village lots. A clean escritura — the registered deed, recorded in the public registry — is the gold standard. An acta de posesión, a possession document that hasn't been registered, is cheaper and riskier. And ejido land, communally held agricultural land, has its own rules and its own path to private title. On rural parcels the price difference between these is large, and it's there for a reason. We label the title type on every lot we list, and we'd rather send you away than sell you a surprise.

The second caveat is access and water, which are the real value drivers on rural land. A hectare with an all-weather road and a well or reliable water source is worth multiples of a hectare that's only reachable in the dry season and dry for eight months of the year. Before you buy by the hectare, drive the access in the rainy season, ask about the water table, and check whether electricity reaches the property line. Those three answers will tell you more about the value than the price per square meter ever will.

None of this is complicated once the numbers are plain. Know the sizes, know what each one is good for, know that price per square meter falls as size grows — and measure reality on the ground before you commit. That's the whole of it, and it's a process that rewards patience.