Square Feet to Square Meters (ft² to m²)
1 square foot equals 0.09290304 square meters exactly.
How to convert square feet to square meters
To convert square feet to square meters, multiply the number of square feet by 0.09290304. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 10.76391042 (rounded).
square meters = square feet × 0.09290304
Example: 10 square feet = 0.9290304 square meters.
About these units
Square Foot (ft²)
Exactly 0.09290304 m². The standard unit for floor areas and real estate in the US, UK and India.
Feet came first, and they were not all the same length. As a body-based unit, the foot ranged historically between about 250 and 335 millimeters, with ancient Greek and Roman feet near 300 mm. In medieval England a statute foot was set at 10/11 of an older Belgic foot, and Charlemagne's attempt around 790 to standardize units largely failed. The square foot is simply that length squared, so its size changed along with the foot.
The 1959 international agreement fixed the foot at exactly 0.3048 meter, so one square foot is exactly 0.09290304 m², or 144 square inches. The United Kingdom adopted the new foot in 1964. Today the square foot is the usual way of listing property in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Hong Kong, although the measuring convention varies: agents may measure corner to corner, subtract unheated space, or add heated space that extends beyond the end-to-end measurement. The world's smallest park has been reported at 2.6 sq ft.
1 square foot = 0.09290304 square meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Square foot; Wikipedia: Foot (unit); NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Square Meter (m²)
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
- Square meters to square feet (reverse)
- Square feet to square kilometers
- Square feet to hectares
- Square feet to square inches
- Square feet to square yards
- Square feet to acres
- Square feet to square miles
- Square feet to square centimeters
- Square feet to square millimeters
- Square feet to tsubo
- Square feet to pyeong
- Square feet to rai (Thai)
- Square feet to barns
- Square kilometers to square meters
- Hectares to square meters
- Square inches to square meters
- Square yards to square meters
- Acres to square meters
- Square miles to square meters
- Square centimeters to square meters
- Square millimeters to square meters
- Tsubo to square meters
- Pyeong to square meters
- Rai (Thai) to square meters
- Barns to square meters
See all area units.