Rods to Kilometers (rd to km)

1 rod equals 0.0050292 kilometers exactly.

1 rod = 0.0050292 kilometers

How to convert rods to kilometers

To convert rods to kilometers, multiply the number of rods by 0.0050292. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 198.8387815 (rounded).

kilometers = rods × 0.0050292

Example: 10 rods = 0.050292 kilometers.

About these units

Rod (rd)

US & ImperialTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

16.5 feet or 5.5 yards (5.0292 m), also called a pole or perch. A quarter of a chain; a basic unit of English land measurement.

Three names, rod, pole and perch, all describe the same stick. Perch comes from the Roman pertica, a ten-foot measuring pole of about 2.96 m, while rod and pole name the physical staff that farmers and surveyors carried. A statute from around the thirteenth or fourteenth century defined the perch as five and a half ells. In the thirteenth century English perches ranged from 18 to 24 feet, and a parliamentary report of 1820 still found lengths between 16.5 and 25 feet in local use.

The version that won out is 16.5 feet, or 5.5 yards, exactly 5.0292 m, which is the figure used here. It is a quarter of a chain, 40 to a furlong and 320 to a mile, and 160 square rods make an acre. Ireland kept a longer perch of 21 feet. The rod faded from legal use in the UK with metrication from 1965, but allotments are still measured in square poles, canoeists count portages in rods, and pipeline easements and US property descriptions still use it.

1 rod = 5.0292 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Rod (unit); NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8 (length conversion factors)

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

Related conversions

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