US Survey Miles to Meters (mi (US) to m)

1 US survey mile equals 1,609.347219 meters (rounded).

1 US survey mile = 1,609.347219 meters

How to convert US survey miles to meters

To convert US survey miles to meters, multiply the number of US survey miles by 1,609.347219. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0006213699495 (rounded).

meters = US survey miles × 1,609.347219

Example: 10 US survey miles = 16,093.47219 meters.

About these units

US Survey Mile (mi (US))

US land surveyHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

5,280 US survey feet (about 1,609.347 m). Slightly longer than the international mile, used in US land surveys until 2022.

Because it is built from 5,280 survey feet, this mile inherits the survey foot's tiny excess and comes to about 1,609.347 m, against exactly 1,609.344 m for the international mile. The gap is under 1/8 inch, or 3.2 mm, per mile, and one international mile equals 0.999998 survey miles. In US law the formal statute mile was the survey mile, though everyday usage treats the two as the same.

Over a single trip the difference vanishes, but State Plane Coordinate Systems can stretch across hundreds of miles, where a few millimetres per mile accumulate into something a surveyor must account for. For that reason surveyors kept the survey mile long after the international foot took over elsewhere. In October 2019 the National Geodetic Survey and NIST announced that the survey foot and mile would be retired from 1 January 2023, and NIST says the unit now survives only for historic and legacy data. Maps and deeds written before then still use it.

1 US survey mile = 1,609.347219 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Mile; NIST: U.S. survey foot

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Related conversions

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