Acres to Square Chains (ac to sq ch)

1 acre equals 10 square chains exactly.

1 acre = 10 square chains

How to convert acres to square chains

To convert acres to square chains, multiply the number of acres by 10. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square chains by 0.1.

square chains = acres × 10

Example: 10 acres = 100 square chains.

About these units

Acre (ac)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

43,560 square feet or exactly 4,046.8564224 m², about 40% of a hectare. Originally the area a yoke of oxen could plow in a day.

Ploughland gave the acre its name: it traces to Old Norse akr, meaning cultivated land, and is related to German Acker and Latin ager. In medieval England it was a farming measure, the land one man with a team of eight oxen could plough in a day. The traditional strip was 40 perches long and 4 perches wide, which is 660 by 66 feet, or ten square chains. The shape was never the point, and the article on the unit stresses that any area of 43,560 square feet is an acre.

An acre is 43,560 square feet, 4,840 square yards or 1/640 of a square mile, close to 0.4 hectare. For Americans, it is roughly 88 by 55 yards, about 90 percent of a football field without the end zones. The Weights and Measures Act 1878 fixed it at 4,840 square yards in Britain, where trade use ended in 1995. The 1959 international acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 m²; the US survey acre, about 4,046.872 m², differed slightly, and US survey units were retired after 2022.

1 acre = 4,046.856422 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Acre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Square Chain (sq ch)

US & ImperialTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

484 square yards (404.69 m²), one tenth of an acre. A surveying unit.

Surveyors rather than farmers gave this unit its shape. In 1620 the English clergyman and mathematician Edmund Gunter devised a measuring chain of 100 links that was 66 feet long, and by 1675 it was in wide use. A square chain, 66 feet by 66 feet, covers 4,356 square feet, or 484 square yards. The convenient result is that ten of them make exactly one acre, so a plot measured in chains could be turned into acres by moving a decimal point.

That arithmetic was the reason the US adopted the chain. A report by Thomas Jefferson in 1784 led to the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required the chain for surveying the public lands, and many American property lines still trace back to chain measurements. In metric terms a square chain is about 404.69 square meters. The linear chain remains in niche use, for example in railway milepost distances in Britain, in wildfire spread rates in the United States, and as the length of a cricket pitch.

1 square chain = 404.6856422 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Chain (unit); Wikipedia: Acre; Wikipedia: Rod (unit)

Related conversions

See all area units.