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.

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

About the square meter

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.

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

Square Meter conversion chart

1 square meter expressed in every other area unit:

More Metric (SI) units

• square kilometer (area)
• hectare (area)
• square centimeter (area)
• square millimeter (area)
• are (area)
• meter (length)
• kilometer (length)
• centimeter (length)
• millimeter (length)
• micrometer (length)
• nanometer (length)
• picometer (length)
• decimeter (length)
• hectometer (length)
• decameter (length)
• kilogram (weight & mass)

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