Area Converter
Convert area fast with our simple Area Converter. Enter a value, pick your units, and get the result instantly. Switch between acres, square feet (ft²), square centimeters (cm²), square miles (mi²), and many more metric and imperial area units. It’s ideal for land size, property listings, maps, room planning, and construction.
Share on Social Media:
This converter changes an area measurement between the thirteen units the tool supports: square metres, centimetres, kilometres, inches, feet, yards and miles, plus acres, hectares, ares, roods, circular mils and barns. Enter your figure, pick the unit it is in and the one you want, and the result appears immediately.
Area units are length units squared, and that single fact explains most of the surprises. Because the squaring applies to the conversion factor as well as the measurement, area factors are much larger than the length factors people carry in their heads.
Why do area conversions feel wrong?
Because the factor is squared and intuition is not. A yard is three feet, so people expect a square yard to be three square feet. It is nine. A metre is about 3.28 feet, so a square metre is 3.28² = 10.76 square feet, not 3.28.
The same applies going up: a kilometre is a thousand metres, but a square kilometre is a million square metres. If a converted area looks wrong by a suspiciously round factor, the usual cause is a length factor applied where a squared one belonged.
A worked example: floor space
A property is listed at 1,500 square feet and you want it in square metres. One square foot is 0.09290304 m² — that is 0.3048², the metre-to-foot factor squared.
- 1,500 × 0.09290304 = 139.35 m²
A reasonable three-bedroom house. Going the other way, a 90 m² apartment is 90 ÷ 0.09290304 = 969 square feet.
Land: acres, hectares, ares and roods
Land measurement has its own vocabulary and the units interlock in ways that are not obvious:
- Hectare — 10,000 m², a square 100 m on a side. The metric standard for land.
- Acre — 4,046.8564224 m² exactly. Historically the area a yoke of oxen could plough in a day.
- Are — 100 m². A hectare is a hundred ares, which is where the name comes from.
- Rood — a quarter of an acre, about 1,011.7 m². Still found in older UK and Irish deeds.
The conversion worth remembering: 1 hectare = 2.47105 acres. For rough work, a hectare is about two and a half acres, and an acre is about 0.4 hectares.
An acre is also, by definition, one furlong by one chain — 660 feet by 66 feet. That is why an acre is a specific area but not a specific shape, and why field boundaries described in acres tell you nothing about their dimensions.
How to use it
- Enter the area you have.
- Select its unit from the first list.
- Select the target unit from the second.
- Read the result. Very small units such as the barn are displayed in scientific notation.
The two specialist units
Two entries in the list are not land or building measurements at all.
A circular mil is the area of a circle one mil — one thousandth of an inch — in diameter. It is used for wire cross-sections in North American electrical work, and it exists because it makes conductor sizing arithmetic simple: the area in circular mils is just the diameter in mils squared, with no π to carry around.
A barn is 10-28 square metres, used in nuclear physics for cross-sections. The name is ironic — it is an absurdly small area, named because on a nuclear scale it counts as "as big as a barn door".
Frequently asked questions
How many square feet are in a square metre?
10.7639. The reciprocal, 0.0929 square metres per square foot, is the one to use when converting the other way.
How big is an acre really?
4,047 square metres, or about 0.4 hectares. A common comparison is a standard football pitch, which is a little larger than an acre — roughly 1.6 acres for a full-size pitch.
Is a hectare the same as a square hectometre?
Yes, exactly. A hectometre is 100 metres, so a square hectometre is 10,000 m², which is a hectare. The shorter name is simply what stuck.
Why is the acre such an odd number of square metres?
Because it was defined from the furlong and the chain, which are themselves defined from the yard. The exact figure of 4,046.8564224 m² falls out of the 1959 definition of the yard as exactly 0.9144 metres.
Can I convert land area to a perimeter or dimensions?
No. Area does not determine shape — a one-acre plot could be square, long and thin, or irregular. You need at least one dimension before the others can be worked out.
Related tools
- Length Converter — the same units before they are squared.
- Volume Converter — and after they are cubed.
- Pressure Converter — pressure is force divided by area, so the two go together.
- Percentage Calculator — for working out coverage and wastage allowances.