Feet to Meters Converter

Floor plans and listings written in feet usually mix in inches, like 9' 6". The converter takes a single number of feet, and the feet-and-inch marks themselves aren't read. The simplest fix is to type the inches as a fraction over 12, so 9' 6" becomes 9 6/12. If you prefer decimals, add the inches as a decimal of a foot from this table:

So 9' 6" is 9.5 ft, which converts to 2.8956 m. Typing 9.6 instead treats the 6 as tenths of a foot and gives 2.9261 m, about 3 cm too long. On a shelf or a worktop, that is the difference between a snug fit and a gap.

The factor 0.3048 is exactly 0.3 plus 1.6% of 0.3. That gives an exact two-step method:

1. Multiply the feet by 0.3.
2. Add 1.6% of that result.

For a 12.5 ft room: 12.5 × 0.3 = 3.75, and 1.6% of 3.75 is 0.06, giving 3.81 m, which matches the converter. If you stop after step one, you are always 1.6% short, which on 100 ft is 48 cm.

For room sizes and furniture, two decimals of a meter (whole centimeters) is plenty. For altitudes and long distances, round to whole meters: 35,000 ft is 10,668 m.

A 12 × 10 ft room has an area of 120 square feet. Putting 120 into this converter gives 36.576, which is a length in meters and means nothing as an area. The right answer is 11.15 square meters, because both sides shrink by 0.3048: convert each wall first (3.6576 m and 3.048 m) and multiply them.

The same applies to anything volumetric. Cubic feet need the factor three times over, so convert each dimension to meters and multiply.