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Area Converter
Convert square metres, acres, hectares, square feet and more.
An acre was originally defined as the area a team of oxen could plough in a single day — a strip roughly one furlong long by one chain wide. It is a unit built around a workday, not a shape, which is why it does not divide neatly into anything metric.
A unit of labour, not geometry
That furlong-by-chain strip works out to 43,560 square feet, a number nobody would choose on purpose. The chain itself, 66 feet, was a surveying tool invented by Edmund Gunter in 1620 specifically because 10 square chains make exactly one acre and 80 chains make a mile — convenient for the surveyor, arbitrary for everyone else.
The hectare, by contrast, was defined in 1795 as precisely 10,000 square metres — a 100 m × 100 m square, part of the same rational, base-10 system that gave the world the metre. One hectare is about 2.471 acres, and that awkward conversion factor is the price of mixing a medieval farming unit with a Revolutionary French one.
Common area conversions
| Unit | In square metres | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 1 square foot | 0.0929 m² | Room and floor sizes, US/UK |
| 1 square yard | 0.8361 m² | Carpet, turf, fabric |
| 1 acre | 4,046.86 m² | Farmland, US/UK real estate |
| 1 hectare | 10,000 m² | Farmland and land registry, most of the world |
| 1 square kilometre | 1,000,000 m² | City and regional planning |
| 1 square mile | 2,589,988 m² | Large land areas, US/UK |
Why the unit changes depending on where you are
- The United States, United Kingdom and a handful of other countries still list farmland and real estate in acres.
- Most of the rest of the world — including the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy — measures farmland in hectares.
- Indoor space almost everywhere is quoted in square metres or square feet, never acres or hectares, since those units are far too large.
- Some countries carry their own historical units alongside the metric ones — the Indian bigha and the Vietnamese sao both still appear in local land records.
A quick mental shortcut
If you just need a rough figure rather than an exact one, a hectare is close to two and a half acres, and a football pitch is close to a hectare. That pairing gets you within shouting distance of most conversions without opening a calculator, though for a land purchase or a legal document you should always use the exact figure.
Area conversion questions
How many square metres are in an acre?
One acre is 4,046.86 square metres. It is worth memorising as roughly 4,050 for quick mental estimates, then using the exact figure for anything official like a property listing or land deed.
How do I convert acres to hectares?
Multiply the acre figure by 0.4047. Ten acres works out to about 4.05 hectares. Going the other way, multiply hectares by 2.471 to get acres.
Why does the US still use acres instead of hectares?
The US never completed metrication for land measurement, and its entire property and surveying system, including county-level land records going back over a century, is built on acres, feet and miles. Switching the underlying legal unit would mean re-surveying an enormous amount of recorded land.
Is a hectare bigger than an acre?
Yes, noticeably. One hectare equals about 2.47 acres, so a plot described in hectares covers roughly two and a half times the area of the same number in acres. Mixing the two up on a land purchase is an expensive mistake.
What is the difference between a square metre and a square yard?
A square metre is 1.196 square yards, so the two are close but not interchangeable. A room measured at 20 square yards is about 16.7 square metres, a difference significant enough to matter when ordering flooring or carpet.
