North Dakota PLSS Converter — Section Township Range to GPS

North Dakota is surveyed entirely under the Fifth Principal Meridian, the same baseline used for much of the upper Midwest. The Fifth Principal Meridian and its associated baseline run through Arkansas and Missouri, but the survey lines extend northward through Minnesota and the Dakotas, reaching into the highest township numbers in the entire PLSS system. North Dakota's northernmost townships along the Canadian border carry numbers in the 160N range — among the highest in the continental United States.

The state's survey was conducted largely in the 1870s and 1880s, as the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed west and opened the Red River Valley to agricultural settlement. The flat glacial lake bed of the Red River Valley, the rolling Missouri Plateau, and the Badlands of the southwest were all surveyed with reasonable accuracy, though the highly irregular terrain of the Badlands introduced some government lots and correction lines in that region. Outside the Badlands, North Dakota's PLSS is among the most regular in the country — a nearly perfect grid of townships and sections that makes legal description interpretation straightforward.

North Dakota's economy is anchored by agriculture and, since the early 2000s, by oil production in the Bakken and Three Forks formations of the Williston Basin. The Bakken boom transformed North Dakota's oil production from modest to top-five nationally, and with it came an enormous demand for precise PLSS conversion — every well permit, spacing unit order, and oil and gas lease in the basin references section, township, and range under the Fifth Principal Meridian.