Convert Feet to Kilometers

About converting Feet to Kilometers

Feet (ft) and Kilometers (km) are both units of length, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Feet figure by 0.0003048. Ten Feet comes to 0.003048 Kilometers, and a hundred works out at 0.03048 Kilometers.

Rule of thumb: going from Feet to Kilometers divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 3,280.84 Feet to make a single Kilometer. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Foot?

A foot is twelve inches, or exactly 0.3048 meters. The name is not a metaphor — it descends from body-based measurement, though a real foot is rather shorter than the unit. Despite the world largely going metric, the foot is stubbornly entrenched in two places worth knowing about: American building construction, where lumber and floor plans are dimensioned in feet and inches, and international aviation, where altitude is reported in feet almost everywhere on Earth regardless of what the country uses on the ground.

What is a Kilometer?

A kilometer is exactly 1,000 meters — the "kilo" prefix means a thousand, as it does everywhere in the metric system. It is the unit almost every country uses for road distances and speed limits, the main exceptions being the United States and the United Kingdom, which still post miles. Its convenience is that it sits at a human scale for travel: a brisk walk covers roughly a kilometer in ten to twelve minutes, which is why city planners talk about the "fifteen-minute" neighbourhood in these terms.

To put both in perspective: a typical room ceiling is about 8 feet high, while a kilometer is about a twelve-minute walk.

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