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Land leveling is one of the basic and costly phases in design and construction of irrigation and drainage projects. Nevertheless, methods, which have been proposed and used so far for land leveling, in addition to being time consuming, they do not provide the designer with the required accuracy. Accordingly, relatively high uncertainties arise in estimating the earthwork, which might adversely affect the project assessment. In this paper a new approach, based on employing triangular mesh was developed for land leveling in which the Newton-Raphson method was applied for determining the optimized planing level. The results of the proposed method were compared with those of the traditional methods, using two cases for which the analytical solutions exist. It was revealed that the proposed method drastically increased the accuracy of the planing level, area, and earthwork volume assessment. This would have close impact on the project cost as well as on the irrigation efficiencies.