Acres Calculator
Turn a plot's length and width — or its square footage — into acres, square feet, square meters and hectares, the units land is described in.
Land is described in acres; projects are measured in feet
Listings, deeds and zoning all speak acres, but the tape measure speaks feet — so a plot gets paced or taped in feet and then needs translating. Enter the length and width, or the square footage if a survey already gave it, and the plot comes back in acres with the square feet, square meters and hectares beside it.
1 acre = 43,560 sq ft = 4,046.86 sq meters = 0.4047 hectares · Acres = square feet ÷ 43,560
Example: a plot 200 × 220 ft is exactly 44,000 sq ft — 1.01 acres. A perfect acre is 43,560 sq ft: a square about 208.7 ft on a side, or the classic furlong-by-chain strip, 660 × 66 ft.
Where 43,560 comes from
The acre is a surveyor's fossil: one furlong (660 ft, the length of a furrow a team could plow without resting) by one chain (66 ft, the surveyor's measuring chain) — 660 × 66 = 43,560 sq ft. It survives because land records do. The hectare is its metric counterpart — a 100 × 100 meter square, 10,000 sq m — and one acre is 0.4047 of one, so a hectare is about 2.47 acres.
Rectangles are the easy case. For an irregular lot, split it into rectangles and triangles and add (the area calculator holds those shapes), or work from the surveyed square footage directly. Slopes measure long: a steep lot's taped surface is bigger than the flat acres the deed records, because deeds describe the map view, not the hillside.
Frequently asked questions
How big is an acre, in terms I can picture?
About 91% of an American football field's playing surface (a full field with end zones is 1.32 acres), or a square 208.7 ft on a side. A typical suburban lot of 60 × 120 ft is 7,200 sq ft — about a sixth of an acre.
How many acres is 10,000 sq ft?
0.23 acres — 10,000 ÷ 43,560 = 0.2296. Quarter-acre lots are 10,890 sq ft; half-acre lots are 21,780 sq ft.
Does the slope of the land change the acres?
The deed acres are the flat, map-view area. A hillside's actual surface is larger — at a 20% slope, about 2% larger. For fencing, seeding and materials, order against the surface you measured; for anything legal, the surveyed figure governs.
What is a hectare in acres?
2.471 acres. Hectares are the land unit across most of the metric world; acres persist in the US, and in informal use in the UK and Commonwealth farm country.
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