Feet to Meters: Formula, Height Chart and Survey-Foot Warning

The short answer

1 foot = 0.3048 meters exactly. Multiply feet by 0.3048.

meters = feet × 0.3048
feet   = meters ÷ 0.3048  (= meters × 3.280839895)

6 ft × 0.3048 = 1.8288 m.

Feet and inches together

To convert a height like 5 ft 9 in, turn it into inches first:

total inches = (feet × 12) + inches
meters = total inches × 0.0254

5 ft 9 in = 69 in × 0.0254 = 1.7526 m.

Going the other way, take the whole feet, then multiply the remainder by 12:

1.80 m ÷ 0.3048 = 5.9055 ft → 5 ft, and 0.9055 × 12 = 10.9 in → 5 ft 11 in.

Height chart

The US survey foot

Until 2023 the United States maintained two feet: the international foot (0.3048 m exactly) and the US survey foot (1200/3937 m ≈ 0.30480061 m). The difference is two parts per million — trivial over a room, but 3.2 mm over a mile and metres across a State Plane coordinate grid.

NIST and NGS officially deprecated the survey foot at the end of 2022, but legal land descriptions, older State Plane data and many GIS datasets still carry it. If you are converting coordinates, check which foot the dataset declares before applying 0.3048.

Altitude and aviation

Aviation worldwide reports altitude in feet, even in metric countries (with exceptions such as China and, historically, Russia). Flight level 350 = 35,000 ft = 10,668 m. Elevation databases are usually metric, so terrain-clearance calculations mix the two — a well-known source of error, which is why standards require every altitude to be labelled with its unit.

Area and volume

Area and volume do not use 0.3048:

1 ft²  = 0.09290304 m²   (0.3048²)
1 ft³  = 0.028316846 m³  (0.3048³)
1 acre = 4046.856 m² = 0.4046856 hectares

A 2,000 ft² house is 185.8 m², not 610 m².

Key takeaways

• 1 ft = 0.3048 m exactly; 1 m = 3.280839895 ft
• Convert feet-and-inches to total inches first, then ×0.0254
• Watch for the deprecated US survey foot in land and GIS data
• Square the factor for area (0.0929) and cube it for volume (0.02832)