Long Tons to Short Tons (ton (UK) to ton (US))

1 long ton equals 1.12 short tons exactly.

1 long ton = 1.12 short tons

How to convert long tons to short tons

To convert long tons to short tons, multiply the number of long tons by 1.12. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply short tons by 0.8928571429 (rounded).

short tons = long tons × 1.12

Example: 10 long tons = 11.2 short tons.

About these units

Long Ton (ton (UK))

Imperial (British)Current unit

2,240 pounds (1,016.05 kg), the imperial or UK ton. Also used for ship displacement.

Before the 15th century an English ton was 2,160 pounds, twenty hundredweight of 108 pounds. Nineteenth-century British definitions included 2,240, 2,352 and 2,400 pounds, though the legal ton was usually 2,240 lb, which is twenty hundredweight of 112 lb. Industry bent the rules: in the 17th and 18th century iron trade, workers were given a 2,240 lb ton of raw material but were expected to return a 2,400 lb ton of processed iron, allowing for waste, and some coal mines delivered long tons but paid miners for a shorter one, which the miners saw as unfair.

The long ton, about 1,016 kg, is within 2 percent of the metric tonne, which makes the two easy to mistake for each other. It is used in the UK, Ireland and most Commonwealth countries that followed the imperial system, although the tonne is now the legal trade unit in the UK, Canada and Australia. Ship displacement has traditionally been quoted in long tons, because a ship cannot be put on a scale and is instead measured by the weight of water it pushes aside. The 2,240 lb figure became the standard for ship design.

1 long ton = 1,016.046909 kilograms (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ton; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8 (mass conversions)

Short Ton (ton (US))

US customaryCurrent unit

2,000 pounds (907.18 kg). The ton used in the United States.

Wine casks lie behind every kind of ton. The word comes from tun, the term for the largest cask, and a tun of wine held roughly 2,000 pounds and took up about 60 cubic feet of cargo space. The short ton of 2,000 pounds keeps that round figure. It is used mainly in the United States and in some Canadian industries, while most of the world uses the tonne or, in the Commonwealth, the long ton.

The short ton is about 907 kg, roughly 10 percent less than a metric tonne, so the two should never be swapped when reading a statistic. The long and metric tons, by contrast, differ from each other by less than 2 percent. Weighing cargo on land is easy, but ships are traditionally described by displacement in long tons, so American shipping and naval documents can contain both kinds of ton at once. A freight bill may also use a measurement ton, which is a volume of 40 cubic feet. When writing for an international audience, spelling out short ton avoids confusion.

1 short ton = 907.18474 kilograms (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ton; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8 (mass conversions)

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