Blog · 9 October 2026 · 5 minute read

QField: your own data on the map in your pocket

Picture the map app on your phone, with the blue dot showing where you are. Now picture the same thing, but with your sewer lines, your water mains and your own imagery on it. That is QField.

A map app that shows your data

An ordinary map app shows you streets and the names of nearby buildings. QField is a free app that opens a project you built in QGIS. You choose the imagery. You choose the layers. Then you walk the site and see where you are standing in relation to all of it.

Try it. Switch between the two maps, then drag the blue dot to walk around.

The imagery does not have to be the default. It can be NSW Government imagery, the same imagery you see in SIX Maps. On top of that you can load sewer, water, stormwater, electrical and telecommunications layers, or anything else you have as a file.

How accurate is the blue dot?

It depends on what is working out your position. A phone on its own is good to about 5 metres. That is fine for finding your way around a site and seeing roughly where a pipe runs.

A GNSS receiver on a survey pole is a different tool. The receiver sits on top, the tip of the pole touches the ground, and with a correction service it fixes that point to within a few centimetres. It also gives you the height, so you get a reduced level as well as a position. You could put the tip on the edge of a manhole lid and record exactly where that edge is.

The accuracy figures come from the QField documentation. Real results depend on the receiver, the correction service and how much sky you can see.

When you still need a surveyor

A receiver and an app do not make a survey. If the data has to be certified, for a boundary or for anything an engineering design will rely on formally, it needs to come from a registered surveyor. QField is for seeing, checking and recording. It works well next to a survey, and it does not replace one.

How far does the free plan go?

QField syncs through a service called QFieldCloud. The free Community plan includes 100 MB of storage, counted across all the projects on the account. That figure was correct when I checked the QFieldCloud pricing page in October 2026.

Line work is tiny. The sewer and water lines for a small site might be tens or hundreds of kilobytes. Saving layers as KMZ, which is a compressed format QField can open, makes them smaller again. Imagery is what uses the space.

The file names and sizes in that box are examples. Drag a file back to your computer to take it out again. On a phone you can also tap a file to move it.

This is why I set projects up on your own account and not mine. The storage is yours, the data stays with you, and one busy client cannot fill the space that another one needs.

Where I come in

I do not supply receivers or do the field capture for you. What I can do is build the QGIS project, set up your QFieldCloud account with you, load your imagery and services layers, and teach your team how to use it on site. If you already own a receiver, better still, because I can show your team how to connect it.