Liters to Hectoliters (L to hL)

1 liter equals 0.01 hectoliters exactly.

1 liter = 0.01 hectoliters

How to convert liters to hectoliters

To convert liters to hectoliters, multiply the number of liters by 0.01. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply hectoliters by 100.

hectoliters = liters × 0.01

Example: 10 liters = 0.1 hectoliters.

Pints, quarts, gallons and fluid ounces differ between the US and the UK. Units are labeled 'US' or 'imperial' to avoid confusion.

About these units

Liter (L)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One cubic decimeter (1,000 cm³). The everyday metric unit of volume for drinks, fuel and cooking.

The liter was born in revolutionary France. In 1795 it was introduced as a republican unit and defined as one cubic decimeter, while the gram was tied to a cubic centimeter of water. The name comes from the older French litron, itself descended from a Byzantine Greek unit of weight, not volume. A small revision of the decimeter in 1798 left the first liter about 1.000974 of today's cubic decimeter, and in 1879 the international metric authorities adopted the liter with the symbol l.

The liter then took a strange detour. In 1901 it was redefined as the space taken up by one kilogram of pure water at its densest, which made it about 1.000028 cubic decimeters, and that muddled definition lasted until 1964, when it was restored to exactly one cubic decimeter. A capital L was added as an alternative symbol in 1979 because a lowercase l is easy to mistake for the digit 1, and NIST says L is the symbol to use in the United States. A liter of water is close to a kilogram, which is why a one-liter bottle feels like a kilo in the hand.

The liter is the reference unit for volume on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; NIST Guide to the SI, Chapter 5: units outside the SI

Hectoliter (hL)

Metric (SI)Current unit

100 liters. Used for wine, beer and milk production and for fishing quotas.

Large producers rarely count in single liters, so the hectoliter, 100 liters or 100 cubic decimeters, is the usual unit for beverage production and export figures. Milk, beer and wine statistics are quoted in it, and so are fishing catches and quotas. Since a cubic meter holds 1,000 liters, ten hectoliters make one cubic meter, and a hectoliter is one tenth of that larger SI volume.

Hecto- is the metric prefix for one hundred, giving the symbol hL. The unit is a practical middle step between the liter on a shop shelf and the cubic meter, and it avoids long strings of digits when production totals run to many thousands of liters. The figure used here is exactly 100 liters.

1 hectoliter = 100 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; Wikipedia: Cubic metre

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