Convert Acres to Hectares

About converting Acres to Hectares

Acres (ac) and Hectares (ha) are both units of area, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Acres figure by 0.4047. Ten Acres comes to 4.0469 Hectares, and a hundred works out at 40.4686 Hectares.

Rule of thumb: going from Acres to Hectares divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 2.4711 Acres to make a single Hectare. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is an Acre?

The acre is the awkward number in the system, and the reason is that it was never a piece of geometry: it was the area a man with a single ox could plough in a day. That gave it a shape as well as a size — one furlong long by one chain wide, the furlong being the length of the furrow before the team was turned around. Formalised as 4,840 square yards, it never rounded off to anything tidy, and nobody minded, because it described a day’s work. It is still the standard unit for land in the US and for farmland and property in the UK and India.

What is a Hectare?

The hectare is the metric answer to the acre: a square 100 meters on a side, or 10,000 square meters. It is what farmland, forestry, plantation, conservation and deforestation figures are reported in almost everywhere outside the United States. A subtlety worth knowing is that the hectare is not actually an SI unit — like the liter, it is merely accepted for use alongside SI. The coherent unit for land really is the square meter, but nobody wants to state a country’s forest cover with that many zeroes, so the hectare was tolerated into permanence.

To put both in perspective: a football pitch is a bit over an acre, while a hectare is a square 100 meters on a side.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Hectares to Acres converter, or browse all Area converters.