Metres to feet Converter

How many feet are in a metre?

One metre is 3.28084 feet. The full conversion is feet = metres × 3.280839895, and going the other way you divide instead of multiply.

A few anchor values worth memorising: 3.28084 ft to the metre, 32.808399 ft to ten, and 328.08399 ft 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 3.2808399:

2.5 m × 3.28084 = 8.2021 ft. 25 m × 3.28084 = 82.021 ft. 250 m × 3.28084 = 820.21 ft.

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 exact factor is 3.2808399, which nobody multiplies by in their head. It is very close to 23/7, so multiplying by 23 and dividing by 7 lands within 0.15% of the correct answer — accurate enough for anything short of engineering work.

Since the factor is greater than one, the number always gets bigger: a metre is smaller than a foot, 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 metres to feet

Most people arrive at this conversion from one of a few directions, each with its own tolerance for error.

On the source side, metres appear in room dimensions, fabric lengths, swimming pool distances and building specifications. On the target side, feet measure human height, ceiling clearances, building storeys and altitude in aviation. 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.

None of this leaves your browser. The conversion is a few lines of arithmetic, so there is no server involved and nothing to store.

What a metre and a foot actually are

The metre (m). The SI base unit, defined since 1983 as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

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

Since metres and feet 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 metres to feet

Watch the direction. Because metre and foot are close enough in magnitude to look interchangeable at a glance, converting the wrong way is easy and rarely obvious from the result alone. Check that the number moved the way you expected before using it.

When a converted number feeds into a further calculation, keep the full precision and round only at the very end. Rounding at each stage is how small errors become visible ones.