The simple converter you'll actually want to bookmark
The math here is refreshingly simple. One foot equals exactly 0.3048 meters — not approximately, but exactly. That number isn't an accident of nature; it was deliberately chosen in 1959 when six English-speaking countries (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) sat down and formally agreed on how to connect their old imperial measurements to the metric system. They defined a yard as precisely 0.9144 meters, and since a foot is one-third of a yard, we get 0.3048.
So to go from feet to meters, you just multiply by 0.3048. Going the other way? Divide by 0.3048 — or if you prefer multiplication, use 3.28084. That's really all there is to it.
Every unit in this converter has a story — some stretch back thousands of years to Roman soldiers and English kings, while others were born from revolutionary France's ambition to measure the entire Earth. Here's a closer look at each one, where it came from, and how people actually use it today.
If you've ever bought a TV, checked your phone's screen size, or picked up a piece of lumber, you've thought in inches. The name comes from the Latin word uncia, meaning "one-twelfth" — because there are 12 of them in a foot. Way back when, people tried to pin the inch down as the width of a man's thumb, or the length of three barleycorns laid end to end (seriously). Thankfully, we've settled on something more reliable: one inch is now defined as exactly 25.4 millimeters. You'll run into inches constantly in the US and UK — screen sizes, paper dimensions (letter paper is 8.5 × 11″), pipe diameters, screw gauges, and just about anything in a hardware store. Carpenters and woodworkers still think in fractional inches (1/8, 1/16, 1/32), which can feel like a whole language of its own.
1 in = 2.54 cm = 0.0254 mThe star of this website. People have been measuring things in "feet" for a very long time — the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had their own versions, each one roughly based on the length of an actual human foot. The modern international foot was nailed down in 1959 at exactly 0.3048 meters, or 12 inches. It's the go-to unit for human height in the US and UK ("I'm five-ten"), room dimensions in real estate listings, ceiling heights, elevation in aviation (pilots worldwide report altitude in feet), and most building and construction work in imperial countries. There's also a slightly different "US survey foot" that land surveyors used for decades — it was officially retired in 2023, but you might still see it in older property records.
1 ft = 12 in = 0.3048 mThe yard has been kicking around since at least the 10th century in England. There's a fun legend that King Henry I defined it as the distance from the tip of his nose to his outstretched thumb — almost certainly not true, but it paints a picture. What we do know is that the yard was the measuring stick of trade and textiles for centuries. Today, one yard is defined as exactly 0.9144 meters (3 feet, or 36 inches). You'll hear it most often in American football (the field is 100 yards), golf (distances to the pin), and fabric stores. For most other purposes, people tend to reach for feet or meters instead — the yard sits in a bit of an awkward middle ground.
1 yd = 3 ft = 36 in = 0.9144 mThis one goes all the way back to the Roman legions. Mille passus — "a thousand paces" — referred to 1,000 double-steps of a marching soldier, which worked out to roughly 5,000 Roman feet. England finally settled things in 1593, when Parliament set the statute mile at 5,280 feet. The modern international mile comes out to exactly 1,609.344 meters. If you live in the US or UK, miles are everywhere: road signs, speed limits, car odometers, weather reports. Runners chase the legendary four-minute mile. But step outside those countries and the world runs on kilometers — which is why a converter like this comes in handy.
1 mi = 5,280 ft = 1,760 yd = 1,609.344 mThe centimeter is one-hundredth of a meter, and while scientists might prefer millimeters or meters for formal work, everyday life in most of the world runs on centimeters. Your height at the doctor's office in Germany or Japan? Centimeters. The dimensions on that IKEA shelf? Centimeters. A4 paper is 21.0 × 29.7 cm. The unit was born alongside the metric system during the French Revolution in the 1790s — part of an ambitious effort to replace the chaotic patchwork of local measurements with one rational, decimal-based system. It's one of those units that just feels natural at the human scale — big enough to be useful, small enough to be precise.
1 cm = 10 mm = 0.01 m = 0.3937 inThe meter is the backbone of the metric system and one of the seven SI base units. Its origin story is wonderfully ambitious: during the French Revolution, scientists set out to measure one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along a meridian through Paris, and that would be a meter. They actually did the surveying. Since 1983 the meter has been tied to the speed of light itself: one meter is the distance light travels in vacuum in exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second. That makes it one of the most precisely defined measurements in all of science. In practice, the meter is everywhere: building plans, track-and-field events (the 100m dash), maps, science labs, and daily conversation in the roughly 95% of the world that uses the metric system.
1 m = 100 cm = 3.2808 ft = 39.37 inA kilometer is simply 1,000 meters — the metric world's answer to the mile. If you've ever driven in Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America, you've navigated by kilometers. Speed limits, highway signs, GPS distances — it's all in km. One kilometer works out to roughly 0.6214 miles, or about a 10 to 12 minute walk at a comfortable pace. Runners register for 5K and 10K races (and the marathon is officially 42.195 km). It's the natural "human-scale" unit for distances too big to picture in meters but too small for something like the distance between cities — though it handles those just fine too.
1 km = 1,000 m = 3,280.84 ft = 0.6214 miWe built this because we were tired of the same experience every time we needed to convert feet to meters: land on a cluttered page, squint past a wall of ads, click a "Convert" button, wait for the page to reload, and hope the answer was actually right. It felt like something that should take two seconds was always taking twenty.
So we made the tool we actually wanted to use. Something fast — results show up the instant you type. Something clean — no pop-ups, no cookie banners taking up half the screen, no autoplay videos about kitchen renovations. And something that goes a little deeper when you need it to, with a feet-and-inches mode for real-world measurements (because nobody thinks of their height as 1.778 meters), a batch mode for when you've got a whole list to crunch, and support for seven different units so you're not hunting for a second converter five minutes later.
The conversion math is exact — not rounded, not approximated. We use the internationally agreed-upon factor of 0.3048, and you can crank the precision up to 8 decimal places if your work demands it. You can also share a specific conversion with a link, which is surprisingly useful when you're emailing a colleague or texting someone dimensions.
If this tool saved you a little time or frustration, that's the whole point. And if something could be better, we'd love to hear about it — good tools are built by listening to the people who use them.