Square Meters to Acres (m² to ac)
1 square meter equals 0.0002471053815 acres (rounded).
How to convert square meters to acres
To convert square meters to acres, multiply the number of square meters by 0.0002471053815. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply acres by 4,046.856422 (rounded).
acres = square meters × 0.0002471053815
Example: 10 square meters = 0.002471053815 acres.
About these units
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
Acre (ac)
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
Related conversions
- Acres to square meters (reverse)
- Square meters to square kilometers
- Square meters to hectares
- Square meters to square inches
- Square meters to square feet
- Square meters to square yards
- Square meters to square miles
- Square meters to square centimeters
- Square meters to square millimeters
- Square meters to tsubo
- Square meters to pyeong
- Square meters to rai (Thai)
- Square meters to barns
- Square kilometers to acres
- Hectares to acres
- Square inches to acres
- Square feet to acres
- Square yards to acres
- Square miles to acres
- Square centimeters to acres
- Square millimeters to acres
- Tsubo to acres
- Pyeong to acres
- Rai (Thai) to acres
- Barns to acres
See all area units.