Feet to metres Converter

How many metres are in a foot?

One foot is 0.3048 metres. The full conversion is metres = feet × 0.3048, and going the other way you divide instead of multiply.

A few anchor values worth memorising: 0.3048 m to the foot, 3.048 m to ten, and 30.48 m to a hundred. The calculator above handles the rest, including the awkward decimals.

The reference table under the converter lists the values people look up most often, so for a common figure you can read the answer off directly rather than typing anything.

Worked examples

Three worked examples, each multiplying by 0.3048:

2.5 ft × 0.3048 = 0.762 m. 25 ft × 0.3048 = 7.62 m. 250 ft × 0.3048 = 76.2 m.

To reverse any of them, divide instead of multiplying — or use the swap button above, which does the same thing without the arithmetic. Reversing a converted value should return you to exactly what you started with; if it does not, something has been rounded too early.

Doing this conversion in your head

The exact factor is 0.3048, which nobody multiplies by in their head. It is very close to 3/10, so multiplying by 3 and dividing by 10 lands within 1.57% of the correct answer — accurate enough for anything short of engineering work.

Since the factor is less than one, the number always gets smaller: a foot is larger than a metre, so any quantity converts to fewer of them. A result larger than what you started with means the conversion went the wrong way.

That sanity check catches the majority of real conversion errors. Before trusting any converted figure, ask whether the direction of change makes sense — it takes a second and it is the single most effective safeguard there is.

When you need to convert feet to metres

The two units meet in a fairly predictable set of situations, and which one you are in tells you how much precision you actually need.

On the source side, feet measure human height, ceiling clearances, building storeys and altitude in aviation. On the target side, metres appear in room dimensions, fabric lengths, swimming pool distances and building specifications. The conversion is essentially a translation between those two worlds — most often because a figure produced in one context has to be understood, submitted or acted on in the other.

Where the converted figure will be cut, dosed, billed or filed, round once at the end rather than at each step. For a rough sense of scale, round freely.

None of this leaves your browser. The conversion is a few lines of arithmetic, so there is no server involved and nothing to store.

What a foot and a metre actually are

The foot (ft). Exactly 12 inches, and still the unit for human height and building storeys in the US and UK.

The metre (m). The SI base unit, defined since 1983 as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Since feet and metres both quantify length against a common defined standard, nothing is lost in translating between them. The only imprecision anywhere in this page is deliberate rounding for readability.

Common mistakes when converting feet to metres

Watch the direction. Because foot and metre are close enough in magnitude to look interchangeable at a glance, converting the wrong way is easy and rarely obvious from the result alone. Check that the number moved the way you expected before using it.

If you are converting many values, change the source unit in the dropdown rather than converting through an intermediate unit. Every extra hop is another rounding opportunity.