Feet to meters converter

A unit still standing in a metric world

The foot survived as an official unit in the US and in a few specific fields worldwide even after most countries switched to meters. Aviation is the clearest example: pilots everywhere read altitude in feet, a convention that predates most countries' metric adoption and was never changed for consistency's sake.

Since 1959, the foot has had a fixed, exact metric definition (0.3048 m), so unlike some older imperial units, it is not an approximation.

Familiar distances in feet and meters

A quick way to estimate without a calculator

• Divide feet by 3.3 for a rough estimate. For 100 ft: 100 divided by 3.3 is about 30.3, close to the exact 30.48 meters.
• Dividing by 3 instead is faster but less accurate, overstating the meters by about 10 percent.

Common mistakes

• Rounding 0.3048 down to 0.3 for a precise job like a building drawing. That rounding alone puts a 100 foot wall almost half a meter short: 100 x 0.3 is 30, versus the exact 30.48 meters.
• Mixing up which shortcut goes which direction: multiply meters by 3.3 to reach feet, but multiply (or divide by about 3.3) feet to reach meters, the reverse operation.
• Assuming a "10 meter" distance and a "10 foot" distance are close. 10 meters is about 32.8 feet, more than 3 times as long as 10 feet.