Meters to Feet Converter

The meter is the base unit of length in the International System, defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

It measures room dimensions, fabric sold by the metre, athletic tracks, water depth and building heights. Scientific work uses meters and its decimal multiples, from nanometers to gigameters, almost everywhere outside everyday imperial trade.

The meter is exact by definition, so a conversion to feet uses the exact factor 0.3048 and a conversion to inches the exact factor 0.0254. Displayed answers stop at six decimals.

The mistake to avoid is adding or dropping zeros when moving between meters, centimeters and millimeters; each step is a factor of ten. Square and cubic meters take the square and cube of that step.

Meters sit between millimeters and centimeters below and kilometers above. Engineering drawings use millimeters, clothing uses centimeters, and regional travel uses kilometers, so a meter value filed under the wrong unit is off by a factor of ten or a thousand.

The foot is exactly 0.3048 meters, or twelve inches. United States survey work has used a separate survey foot, defined as 1200/3937 meters and equal to about 0.3048006 meters.

Aviation uses feet for altitude and flight levels worldwide, even in countries that measure road distance in kilometers. Building heights, room dimensions, timber and, in some places, body height are also quoted in feet.

The metric conversion is exact, since the foot is defined as 0.3048 meters, and the reverse is exact too. A displayed result is rounded to six decimal places at most, so a round trip can differ in the final digit.

The common slip is assuming a foot is close to a third of a meter when it is slightly longer, so rough mental division undershoots. Feet also belong to length, while square feet measure area and cubic feet measure volume.

The foot competes with the meter for height and building dimensions and with the inch for small spans. Because one meter is a little over three feet, treating a meter figure as feet overstates a dimension more than threefold.