Feet to Centimeters Converter

Medical forms, visa applications, sports registrations and many apps ask for height in centimeters. If you know yours as feet and inches, the cleanest method skips decimal feet entirely:

1. Turn the height into inches: feet × 12, plus the extra inches.
2. Multiply by 2.54.

For 5 ft 8 in: 5 × 12 + 8 = 68 in, and 68 × 2.54 = 172.72 cm. Here is the same calculation for other heights, with the whole-centimeter figure most forms want:

The converter reads one decimal number of feet. Typing 5.4 for 5 ft 4 in is the most common mistake on this page: 5.4 ft means five and four tenths of a foot, and gives 164.59 cm, about 2 cm taller than the real 162.56.

The exact way to enter it is a mixed fraction with the inches over 12. Type 5 4/12 and you get 162.56 cm. A decimal works too if you keep enough digits: 5.3333 also gives 162.56 cm, but cutting it to 5.33 drops the result to 162.46 cm, a tenth of a centimeter off, which can flip the rounding on a form.

Feet-and-inch notation itself isn't understood. Typing 5'4 or 5 ft 4 gives no result, just a note that the number couldn't be read. Use the fraction, or convert the feet and the 4 inches separately and add them.

Every foot is 30.48 cm, so 30 cm per foot is a quick estimate that comes out a little low. A 6 ft height becomes 180 cm instead of 182.88 cm. Adding half a centimeter per foot fixes most of the gap: 180 + 3 = 183.

For the inches part, 2.5 cm per inch is close enough to sanity-check a result. If your conversion of 5 ft 8 in lands far from 150 + 20 = 170, recheck what you typed. The exact answer, 172.72 cm, is only a few centimeters away from that rough check.