Feet to Meters

Where the units come from

The foot is an ancient unit, present in essentially every culture, almost always derived from the length of a human foot. The English foot was standardized at various points in history; Henry I's standard "foot" was supposedly the length of his own foot. The 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement fixed the international foot at exactly 0.3048 meters, unifying slightly different US, UK, and Canadian definitions.

There's a wrinkle: in the United States, the "US survey foot" remained a slightly different definition — 1200/3937 meters, or about 0.3048006 meters — for land-survey work, to avoid redoing every historical survey record. As of 2023, the US survey foot has been officially deprecated. Modern US surveys use the international foot. The difference is about 2 parts per million, only relevant for large land parcels.

The meter was defined in 1799 in France as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris. It has been redefined four times since — by reference to a platinum-iridium bar, by reference to the wavelength of krypton-86 light, by reference to the speed of light multiplied by a specific time interval. The current definition (from 1983) is "the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second."

The conversion factor

meters = feet × 0.3048

Exact since 1959. For mental math, "feet × 0.3" is within 2% — quick and good enough for height, room dimensions, and most everyday measurements.

When you'd actually need this conversion

Human height is the most common use case for a US-to-metric audience. A 6-foot tall American is 1.83 meters tall in any other country's medical record, driver's license, or passport. Building measurements are next: commercial real estate in the US lists square footage; almost everywhere else, square meters.

Aviation uses feet for altitude almost universally — even in metric countries, aircraft altitudes are reported in feet (a 35,000 ft cruising altitude is 10,668 meters). Diving depths flip the other way: most dive tables and recreational dive plans worldwide use meters, even in the US, because dive science was developed in metric.

Sports use feet inconsistently. Track and field uses meters internationally. American football uses yards (3 feet each). Basketball hoops are 10 feet (3.05 m) by the NBA but rules in metric leagues often list them as 3 meters. Track elevation profiles in trail running typically use feet in the US, meters elsewhere.

Common mistakes

Mixing feet and inches in a single measurement is where errors creep in. A height of "5 feet 10 inches" needs to become 5.833 feet (10 ÷ 12 = 0.833) before you multiply by 0.3048, giving 1.78 meters. Doing the inches separately and adding can introduce rounding errors.

The US survey foot vs international foot issue catches people doing land surveys with mixed sources. The difference is tiny per foot but compounds over thousands of feet of property boundary. For modern work, use the international foot (0.3048 m exactly).