Area Converter
Includes acres and hectares, the two units that dominate land measurement and confuse everyone who does not use them daily.
Why area conversions are not length conversions
Area factors are the square of the corresponding length factors, which catches people out constantly:
So a room twice as long and twice as wide has four times the area, not twice. This is also why doubling the size of a garden quadruples the amount of turf needed, and why a 20 % larger television has a 44 % larger screen area.
Acres and hectares
The acre is a medieval English unit: the area one man with one ox could plough in a day. It was standardised as one chain by one furlong — 22 yards by 220 yards — giving 4,840 square yards, or 4,046.86 m². The irregular number is the fossil of that agricultural origin.
The hectare was designed to replace it and is straightforwardly 100 m × 100 m = 10,000 m². One hectare is about 2.47 acres.
| Reference | Approximate area |
|---|---|
| A football pitch (FIFA) | 0.71 ha / 1.76 acres |
| An American football field | 0.54 ha / 1.32 acres |
| A tennis court | 261 m² / 0.065 acres |
| A typical UK garden | 150–200 m² |
| Central Park, New York | 341 ha / 843 acres |
The football pitch comparison is a useful sanity check when reading land areas in the news: roughly 1.4 pitches to the hectare.
Practical uses
- Property listings. UK and Irish listings often give floor area in square feet and land in acres; European listings use square metres and hectares. Converting is the only way to compare.
- Flooring and turf. Order by area plus a 5–10 % allowance for cuts and waste, more for patterned or diagonal laying.
- Paint and plaster. Coverage is always stated per square metre or square foot.
- Agriculture. Yields and application rates are per hectare in most of the world and per acre in the US, and mixing them up is a factor-of-2.47 error.
The “side of an equivalent square” row is a quick intuition check: 200 m² is a square just over 14 m on each side, which is easier to picture than the raw figure.
Frequently asked questions
How many square feet in a square metre?
10.7639. Going the other way, a square foot is 0.0929 m². The handy approximation is that a square metre is a bit under 11 square feet.
How big is an acre?
4,046.86 m², or about 4,840 square yards. As a square it is roughly 64 m on each side. It is about 40 % of a hectare and a little smaller than an American football field.
Why do property areas differ between listings?
Because measurement standards differ. Gross internal area, net internal area and gross external area can vary by 10 % or more on the same property, and conventions on whether balconies, garages and loft space count differ by country. Ask which standard was used.