Area Converter
Convert between square metres, square feet, acres, hectares, square miles and more. See every unit at once in the live comparison table, plus how your figure compares to a football pitch or tennis court.
How 1 m² compares to familiar reference spaces.
How to Convert an Area
Features
The Same Plot, Four Different Numbers
Describe one field as "0.4 hectares," "1 acre," "4,047 square metres," or "43,560 square feet" and you have made four correct statements about the exact same patch of ground. None of that is arbitrary. The hectare came out of the metric system built for maps and farm registries. The acre is older and messier — a medieval guess at how much a team of oxen could plough before dark. Square feet are just the length system stretched into two dimensions. Nobody sat down and designed this to be confusing; it is confusing because four different traditions solved the same problem centuries apart and none of them ever fully retired. This converter moves between all four — plus six more, from square millimetres up to square kilometres — the moment you type a number, which matters more than it sounds: pick the wrong one of those four numbers on a subsidy form or a contract and you have not made a rounding error, you have described a different amount of land entirely.
Where 0.3048 Stops Being Simple
A foot is 0.3048 metres. Most people, converting a square footage by hand, multiply by that number and move on — which is wrong by about 70%. Area does not scale by the linear factor, it scales by the square of it: 1 ft² is 0.3048² m², or 0.09290304 m², not 0.3048 m². Miss that step on a 2,000 ft² house and you would report roughly 610 m² instead of the correct 186 m². The same squaring shows up everywhere in this list — a square kilometre is a million square metres, not a thousand, because both the length and the width got multiplied by 1,000. It is the single most common reason a manual area conversion goes wrong, and it is also the exact reason this tool exists: type the number once, and the squaring happens correctly every time, without anyone needing to remember it.
A Paris Flat, an Iowa Cornfield, a Five-a-Side Pitch
Three people open this page for three completely different reasons, and it is worth picturing all three. Someone is looking at a 65 m² Paris listing and trying to work out whether that is bigger or smaller than the 700 ft² apartment they already live in — it turns out to be almost exactly the same place, which is not obvious until you convert it. Someone else has a farm that was surveyed decades ago at 12.5 acres, and an EU subsidy form in front of them that only accepts hectares — the answer, 5.06 ha, goes straight into the box instead of being estimated and possibly flagged. And a third person just wants to know what "3,500 square metres" actually feels like, which is exactly what the Area in Everyday Terms panel above is for — it turns that figure into roughly half a football pitch or eight tennis courts, rather than leaving it as an abstract number. Bring your own room dimensions along and the Length Converter will handle those too. There is a fourth kind of visitor worth mentioning, further down the size scale — an electronics engineer checking a PCB pad size in square millimetres, or a print shop confirming a label die-cut in square centimetres. Same table, same instant answer, just at the opposite end of the range from a cornfield.
Chains, Furlongs, and a Day's Ploughing
The acre's official size — 4,046.8564224 m², an oddly specific number for something with such a folksy origin story — comes from multiplying a furlong (220 yards, supposedly the distance oxen could plough before needing a rest) by a chain (22 yards, the width a team could comfortably work). Multiply those and you get 4,840 square yards, which converts to the figure this tool uses, derived from the exact 0.3048 m foot rather than any rounded approximation. That same arithmetic explains why a square mile is exactly 640 acres: US land surveys divided the country into one-square-mile "sections," and each section split neatly into 640 acre-sized homestead plots, which is why American land deeds still sometimes reference section and township numbers instead of coordinates. For scale, Central Park in Manhattan covers about 341 hectares — roughly 843 acres, or 3.41 km² — a useful mental anchor next time a number in this tool needs a gut check. None of that history changes the arithmetic, but it explains why the acre survived the metric system's arrival rather than quietly disappearing the way the furlong and chain mostly did — it got baked into land ownership records deep enough that re-surveying an entire country in hectares was never worth the disruption. Other countries kept their own local land units for the same reason: Japan still prices some residential land in tsubo (about 3.3 m², originally the space taken up by two tatami mats), and parts of South Asia still use the bigha, a unit whose exact size changes from state to state. This converter can't cover every regional unit ever used for land, but the acre, hectare, and square-mile relationships here explain the same underlying pattern anywhere it shows up.
Ten Units, One Table
Typing one figure converts it against all ten supported units at once, not just the pair selected in the From and To boxes — useful the moment you realise a listing might need reporting three different ways before the day is out. Three filter chips sit above that table for when ten rows is more than you need:
- Metric narrows it to km², m², cm², and mm² — the four everyone outside the US reaches for by default.
- Imperial & US isolates mi², yd², ft², and in² — the real-estate and construction set.
- Land & Agricultural shows only hectares and acres side by side, which is exactly the comparison the Iowa-cornfield scenario above needed and nothing else.
Precision is a separate control entirely — Auto keeps everyday numbers readable and only drops into scientific notation for genuinely extreme values, while the fixed 2, 4, 6, and 8 decimal-place options exist for the specific moment a planning form or land registry insists on an exact digit count rather than whatever looks tidy.
The Edges of the Map
A couple of things worth knowing before you rely on any of this. First, it is a unit converter, not a shape calculator — it will not work out the area of an L-shaped room or an irregular plot from boundary coordinates; that still means doing the length × width math separately, or getting a proper survey. Second, nothing typed here leaves the device it was typed on — there is no server call involved, so a private land parcel dimension or an unpublished floor plan stays exactly that. And third, for anything that ends up on a legal document — title deeds, planning applications, subsidy claims — treat the result as an accurate conversion of a number you already trust, not a replacement for the original survey or registry figure it came from. Four correct ways to describe the same field, back where this started, and now a fast way to move between all of them. If it is capacity rather than floor space you are after, that is a job for the Volume Converter instead.