In this investigation, we propose a simple and effective lateral shearing interferometer based on a polarization grating. In the lateral shearing device, an incident beam is split into two beams by a polarization grating, and the returning beams can be laterally shifted after reflecting off a flat mirror and passing through the polarization grating again. These two beams are not only laterally shifted, but also their polarization states are orthogonal to each other as circular polarizations. With a single image obtained by a pixelated polarization CMOS camera, the proposed LSI can obtain the phase map corresponding to the x-sheared interferogram, and the other phase map can be calculated from another single image obtained by 90° rotation of the shearing device. Then, the original wavefront corresponding to the surface figure of the specimen can be reconstructed by wavefront reconstruction algorithms. In the experiments, various wavefronts generated by concave mirrors and a deformable mirror were measured and compared with those of a commercial Shack-Hartmann sensor.