Acres to Square Feet

The acre is a medieval unit: roughly the land a team of oxen could plow in a day, standardized as a strip one furlong long and one chain wide. A furlong is 660 ft and a chain is 66 ft, and 660 × 66 = 43,560. The shape no longer matters, but the area stuck, which is why an acre square is an awkward 208.71 ft on each side.

Because the foot has been exactly 0.3048 m since 1959, the international acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 m². US land surveys used a survey foot that differed by two parts per million; since 2023 the US relies on the international foot for new work, and the difference is far below anything a lot size would show.

US suburban lots are often sold as fractions of an acre. An eighth of an acre is 5,445 sq ft, a quarter acre 10,890 sq ft and a half acre 21,780 sq ft. If a house has a 2,000 sq ft footprint including the garage, it covers less than a fifth of a quarter-acre lot.

An American football field without the end zones is 300 × 160 ft, or 48,000 sq ft, about 1.1 acres; with the end zones it is 57,600 sq ft, about 1.32 acres. To compare a lot with a metric listing, convert the square feet with square feet to square meters, or go straight to hectares with acres to hectares.

Zoning codes often state minimum lot sizes in square feet, such as 7,500 or 10,000 sq ft, while listings give acres. A 0.17-acre lot is 7,405 sq ft, just short of a 7,500 sq ft minimum, so check exact figures rather than rounded ones. Price per acre divided by 43,560 gives price per square foot of land: $250,000 per acre is about $5.74 per sq ft. Other land units, such as square miles, are in the unit converter.