Area tells you how much surface something covers: the floor of a house, a parcel of farmland, a sheet of plywood, a country. Real-estate listings in the United States quote square feet and acres, while most of the world, along with science and engineering, uses square meters and hectares. This converter moves between all of them using exact international definitions, and it lists your area in every supported unit at once.
How to use the area converter
- Enter the area in Value. Decimals are fine.
- Pick the unit you have in From and the unit you want in To.
- Read the result on the tape. It also shows the side length of a square with the same area, which helps you picture the size.
- Scroll down for the same area in all 14 units, from square millimeters to townships.
Area conversion formula
Every area unit is defined as a number of square meters. Converting is one multiplication followed by one division:
The factors come straight from length definitions. Because 1 foot is exactly 0.3048 m, one square foot is 0.3048 × 0.3048 = 0.09290304 m², also exact. A square yard is 0.9144² = 0.83612736 m², and a square inch is 0.0254² = 6.4516 cm².
Worked example: a 1,500 sq ft house
A home listing gives 1,500 square feet of living space, and you want the figure in square meters:
1,500 ft² × 0.09290304 = 139.35456 m²
A square with that area would measure √139.35456 ≈ 11.80 m (38.73 ft) on each side.
Rounded for a listing, that is about 139 m². For a quick mental check, divide square feet by 10.76: 1,500 ÷ 10.76 ≈ 139.4.
Common area conversions
| From | To | Multiply by |
|---|---|---|
| square inches | square centimeters | 6.4516 (exact) |
| square feet | square meters | 0.09290304 (exact) |
| square meters | square feet | 10.76391 |
| square yards | square feet | 9 (exact) |
| acres | square feet | 43,560 (exact) |
| acres | hectares | 0.4046856 |
| hectares | acres | 2.471054 |
| square miles | acres | 640 (exact) |
| square kilometers | square miles | 0.3861022 |
US land measurement units
American land records still use a family of units inherited from English surveying, all of them now fixed in terms of the international foot:
- Acre — 43,560 ft², or 4,046.8564224 m². A square acre is about 208.7 ft on each side.
- Square rod (perch) — a square 16.5 ft on a side, 272.25 ft². There are 160 square rods in an acre.
- Rood — a quarter of an acre, 10,890 ft². Rarely seen outside old British deeds.
- Square mile (section) — 640 acres. The Public Land Survey System divides most land from Ohio westward into one-mile-square sections.
- Township — 36 sections, a block six miles on each side (23,040 acres).
The metric side is simpler. An are is 100 m², and a hectare is 100 ares, or 10,000 m². A square kilometer is 100 hectares.
Survey acres and international acres
Before 2023, many US land surveys used the US survey foot (1200/3937 m), which is longer than the international foot by about two parts per million. An acre measured in survey feet is 4,046.8726 m² instead of 4,046.8564 m², a difference of roughly 0.016 m². NIST and NOAA retired the survey foot at the end of 2022, but older deeds still reflect it. The gap only matters for very large tracts or legal descriptions.
Mistakes to avoid
- Squaring the factor. Length factors must be squared for area. A room 10 ft × 10 ft is 100 ft², which is 9.29 m², not 30.48 m².
- Mixing length and area units. “Square feet” and “feet squared” mean the same thing, but “10 feet square” usually describes a 10 ft × 10 ft square of 100 ft².
- Rounding too early. Keep full precision until the final step, especially when an acreage feeds a price per acre or a tax assessment.
To measure a room or lot before converting, try the square footage calculator. For single-direction conversions with a printable chart, use square feet to acres or square feet to square meters, and for distances the length converter.
Frequently asked questions
How many square feet are in an acre?
Exactly 43,560 square feet. The number comes from the old definition of an acre as a strip one furlong (660 ft) long and one chain (66 ft) wide, and 660 × 66 = 43,560.
How do I convert square feet to square meters?
Multiply by 0.09290304, which is exactly 0.3048 squared. A 200 sq ft bedroom is 200 × 0.09290304 = 18.58 m². To go back, multiply square meters by about 10.7639.
What is the difference between a hectare and an acre?
A hectare is 10,000 square meters, a square 100 m on each side. An acre is 4,046.86 m², so one hectare is about 2.471 acres and one acre is about 0.405 hectares.
Why can't I multiply by 3.28 to turn square meters into square feet?
Area has two dimensions, so the length factor has to be squared. One meter is 3.28084 feet, and 3.28084² ≈ 10.764, which means 1 m² is about 10.76 ft², not 3.28 ft².