When to use this converter
Use it to compare a home listed in square feet with one listed in square meters, to understand farmland measured in acres or hectares, or to check the size of a lot. For measuring a room from its length and width, the square footage calculator does the multiplication for you.
Where the numbers come from
Area units are squares of length units, so they inherit their exactness: because a foot is exactly 0.3048 m, a square foot is exactly 0.09290304 m². The international acre is 43,560 square feet, and the hectare is a square 100 meters on each side. To convert the side lengths themselves, use the length converter.
Survey acres
Older US land records sometimes use the US survey foot, which makes the survey acre very slightly larger (about 4 parts per million) than the international acre used here. The US survey foot was officially retired at the end of 2022, but if you are working with legacy deeds, check which definition applies.
Worked examples
Homes: a 1,500 sq ft house is 1,500 × 0.09290304 ≈ 139.4 m², and an 80 m² apartment is about 861 sq ft. Listings rarely state exactly how they measure (interior, exterior or including balconies), so compare like with like. The square feet to square meters and square meters to square feet pages have quick tables.
Land: a quarter-acre lot is 10,890 sq ft, and a 40-acre parcel is about 16.19 hectares. A hectare is roughly 2.47 acres, so 100 hectares of farmland is about 247 acres. See acres to hectares, hectares to acres and acres to square feet.
Flooring: order material by area and then add a waste allowance (often 5–10%, more for diagonal patterns). Tile sold in square meters can be converted here, then compared with a room measured in square feet.
Remember that area scales with the square of length: doubling every side of a room multiplies its floor area by four, not two.