Area Converters

How much floor or ground something covers — square meters, square feet, acres and hectares.

Converters

Choose a converter

• Square Meters to Square Feet m² → ft²
• Square Feet to Square Meters ft² → m²
• Acres to Square Feet ac → ft²
• Square Feet to Acres ft² → ac
• Hectares to Acres ha → ac
• Acres to Hectares ac → ha

Background

What area units measure

Area units measure how much surface something covers. Area factors are the length factor squared, which is why one square meter is about 10.76 square feet rather than about 3.28 — a point that trips people up on floor plans and land listings. Land is measured in bigger units: the acre, exactly 43,560 square feet, and the hectare, exactly 10,000 square meters.

Guide

Converting a room or a floor plan

Work out the area in one unit first, then convert it once. A room 4 m by 5 m is 20 m², which is about 215 ft². Converting each side to feet and multiplying gives the same answer only if you keep every decimal along the way.

The factor is the length factor squared. There are about 3.28 feet in a meter but about 10.76 square feet in a square meter, and using 3.28 on an area — the commonest mistake — puts the answer out by a factor of more than three.

For land, the acre and the hectare do the work. A hectare is about 2.47 acres, and an acre is about 0.405 hectares or 43,560 square feet. The acre here is the international acre; older US land records use the survey acre, about 4 parts per million larger.

Property listings measure floor area by local rules, which differ on whether walls, stairs and balconies count. A conversion changes the units, not the way the area was measured.

Reference

Area units on this site

Every converter here calculates through square meters, so a pair and its reverse always agree. The full list of factors and the standards behind them is on the methodology page.