Area Converter

Area units are simply length units squared, but that squaring makes some conversions less intuitive than they look. An acre — a unit that predates the metric system, originally the area a team of oxen could plow in a day — works out to exactly 43,560 square feet, while a hectare is a clean 10,000 square meters, equal to roughly 2.47 acres.

This converter is most useful for real estate listings that mix square footage with acreage, agricultural or land-survey figures given in hectares, and comparing property or plot sizes across countries that default to different units.

Because area scales with the square of length, small rounding differences in a linear conversion get magnified once they're squared — so for large plots of land it's worth carrying a few extra decimal places rather than rounding early.