Area Converter
Convert between square meters, square feet, acres, hectares, and more.
Quick reference
- 1 acre = 43,560 sq ft ≈ 0.405 hectares
- 1 hectare = 10,000 m² ≈ 2.47 acres
- 1 square foot ≈ 0.0929 m²
- 1 square meter ≈ 10.76 sq ft
- 1 square mile = 640 acres ≈ 2.59 km²
About this converter
Real estate listings, land parcels, and floor plans all use different area units depending on where you are and what's being measured, and this converter covers most of what you'll run into: metric area (square millimeters up through square kilometers, plus hectares) and imperial/US units (square feet, square yards, acres, square miles).
The acre is the odd one here. It didn't come from a clean geometric idea, it came from farming: originally the amount of land a team of oxen could plow in one day. It got standardized in England centuries ago as one furlong by one chain (660 feet by 66 feet, using a surveyor's measuring chain), which is how it ended up at exactly 43,560 square feet, and why 640 acres makes exactly one square mile.
Frequently asked questions
- How big is an acre, really?
- 43,560 square feet, roughly the size of an American football field if you leave off the end zones. It's an oddly specific-sounding number, but it comes from an old land-surveying unit, not anything geometric.
- Why does the US use acres instead of hectares?
- Same reason as feet and pounds: acres were already baked into land surveys, deeds, and the entire Jefferson-era grid system of township sections before metric measures had any foothold, and nobody's re-surveyed the whole country since.
- Is a hectare bigger than an acre?
- Yes, noticeably. A hectare is about 2.47 acres, so if you're comparing land listed in each, don't assume they're roughly equal.