Feet to inches Converter

How many inches are in a foot?

One foot is 12 inches. The full conversion is inches = feet × 12, and going the other way you divide instead of multiply.

A few anchor values worth memorising: 12 in to the foot, 120 in to ten, and 1,200 in to a hundred. The calculator above handles the rest, including the awkward decimals.

The reference table under the converter lists the values people look up most often, so for a common figure you can read the answer off directly rather than typing anything.

Worked examples

Three worked examples, each multiplying by 12:

2.5 ft × 12 = 30 in. 25 ft × 12 = 300 in. 250 ft × 12 = 3,000 in.

To reverse any of them, divide instead of multiplying — or use the swap button above, which does the same thing without the arithmetic. Reversing a converted value should return you to exactly what you started with; if it does not, something has been rounded too early.

Doing this conversion in your head

The factor here is 12, close enough to 12 that multiplying by 12 gives an answer within 0% of the exact figure. For everyday purposes that is the whole trick.

Since the factor is greater than one, the number always gets bigger: a foot is smaller than a inch, so any quantity converts to more of them. If your answer came out smaller, you have divided when you should have multiplied.

That sanity check catches the majority of real conversion errors. Before trusting any converted figure, ask whether the direction of change makes sense — it takes a second and it is the single most effective safeguard there is.

When you need to convert feet to inches

There are a handful of recurring contexts where a foot figure has to be restated in inches.

On the source side, feet measure human height, ceiling clearances, building storeys and altitude in aviation. On the target side, inches are screen diagonals, tyre and wheel sizes, US lumber and plumbing dimensions, and paper measurements. The conversion is essentially a translation between those two worlds — most often because a figure produced in one context has to be understood, submitted or acted on in the other.

Where the converted figure will be cut, dosed, billed or filed, round once at the end rather than at each step. For a rough sense of scale, round freely.

All of it happens in the page. There is no upload, no queue and no record of what you converted once the tab is closed.

What a foot and a inch actually are

The foot (ft). Exactly 12 inches, and still the unit for human height and building storeys in the US and UK.

The inch (in). Defined by international agreement in 1959 as exactly 25.4 millimetres.

Since feet and inches both quantify length against a common defined standard, nothing is lost in translating between them. The only imprecision anywhere in this page is deliberate rounding for readability.

Common mistakes when converting feet to inches

Heights written as 5'11" mix the two units: that is 5 feet plus 11 inches, or 71 inches in total. Typing "5.11" into a converter treats it as 5 feet and about 1.3 inches, which is nearly ten inches out. Convert the feet to inches first, then add.

If you are converting many values, change the source unit in the dropdown rather than converting through an intermediate unit. Every extra hop is another rounding opportunity.