Square Miles to Kanals (mi² to kanal)

1 square mile equals 5,120 kanals exactly.

1 square mile = 5,120 kanals

How to convert square miles to kanals

To convert square miles to kanals, multiply the number of square miles by 5,120. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kanals by 0.0001953125.

kanals = square miles × 5,120

Example: 10 square miles = 51,200 kanals.

About these units

Square Mile (mi²)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

640 acres or about 2.59 km². Used for the area of cities, states and countries in the US and UK.

A thousand Roman paces, mille passus, became the mile, and under Elizabeth I Parliament fixed the statute mile at eight furlongs, or 5,280 feet, in place of the older Roman-based value. The square mile inherits that length. Its most famous use came in the United States: the Land Ordinance of 1785 started the Public Land Survey System so that western land could be surveyed and sold to pay war debts, beginning with the Seven Ranges in eastern Ohio.

In that system a section is roughly one square mile, or 640 acres, and a township is 36 sections in a square six miles on a side. One square mile is nearly 2.59 million square meters. Chicago's Midway International Airport, at about 650 acres, covers roughly 1.02 square miles. Beware the phrase mile square: a region 20 miles square has 400 square miles, but so does a rectangle 10 by 40 miles. The US survey version of the mile was retired from 1 January 2023, but the international square mile remains the unit for cities, states and countries in the US and UK.

1 square mile = 2,589,988.11 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Square mile; Wikipedia: Public Land Survey System; Wikipedia: Mile

Kanal (kanal)

Indian subcontinentTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

20 marla or 5,445 square feet (505.86 m²). Used for property in Pakistan and north India.

Pakistani property listings give large plots in kanals, and the same word appears in Punjab and Haryana across the border. Under British rule the kanal was standardized as 20 marlas, which is 605 square yards or 5,445 square feet, about 505.857 square metres. That makes it exactly an eighth of an acre, so 8 kanals fill an acre, and a hectare holds about 19.77 kanals.

The kanal is the middle step in a ladder of Punjabi land units. Below it sit the marla and the sarsahi, and above it the bigha and the acre. The bigha itself is not constant: Wikipedia lists it as 4 kanals in Punjab but 5 kanals in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which shows how little land units agree between regions.

Elsewhere in India other local names fill the same role. In east India 1 kanal is given as 4 katha in the article's list, while in Punjab it is 5 biswa. The figure used here is the Raj-era 5,445 square feet. A kanal is about 0.05 hectare.

1 kanal = 505.8570528 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kanal (unit); Wikipedia: Marla (unit)

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