Square Centimeters to Square Meters (cm² to m²)

1 square centimeter equals 0.0001 square meters exactly.

1 square centimeter = 0.0001 square meters

How to convert square centimeters to square meters

To convert square centimeters to square meters, multiply the number of square centimeters by 0.0001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 10,000.

square meters = square centimeters × 0.0001

Example: 10 square centimeters = 0.001 square meters.

About these units

Square Centimeter (cm²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

A square one centimeter on a side; 1/10,000 of a square meter.

Physicists, rather than surveyors, put the centimeter at the center of a measuring system. Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed absolute units based on length, mass and time in 1832, choosing the millimeter, and in 1873 a British Association committee including James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. In that CGS system the square centimeter turns up inside derived units, such as the stokes of kinematic viscosity, defined as one square centimeter per second.

A square centimeter is one ten-thousandth of a square meter, so 10,000 of them fill a square meter. It is a natural size for small flat things: a square inch is exactly 6.4516 cm², and a square foot is exactly 929.0304 cm². Because the CGS system defined force and pressure with the centimeter, the dyne per square centimeter became its unit of pressure, called the barye, which equals 0.1 pascal. SI practice prefers the square meter for large areas and the square millimeter for very small ones.

1 square centimeter = 0.0001 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Square centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Square Meter (m²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of area: a square one meter on each side. Used for floor areas and property sizes in most of the world.

Squaring the meter was built into the metric system from the start. The French law of 18 Germinal, Year III (7 April 1795) defined the are, the land unit that gave the hectare its name, as exactly 100 square meters, so the square meter was already the foundation of metric land measure. Nobody is credited with inventing it as a separate unit. It is simply the area of a square one meter on each side, and any SI prefix that works for the meter works for it, with the prefix squared along with the unit.

That squaring catches people out: a square kilometer is one million square meters, not one thousand. Since 1983 the meter has been defined through the speed of light, so the square meter is tied to a constant of nature as well as to the second. A hectare, about the area of Trafalgar Square in London, is 10,000 square meters. In everyday terms one square meter is about 10.76 square feet. Unicode has a compatibility character for it, but the recommended way to write it is the plain superscript two: m².

The square meter is the reference unit for area on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Square metre; Wikipedia: Are (unit); NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition

Related conversions

See all area units.