Convert Hectares to Acres

About converting Hectares to Acres

Hectares (ha) and Acres (ac) are both units of area, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Hectares figure by 2.4711. Ten Hectares comes to 24.7105 Acres, and a hundred works out at 247.1054 Acres.

Rule of thumb: going from Hectares to Acres multiplies, so the figure always grows — one Hectare is already 2.4711 Acres. If your answer came out smaller, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

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.

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.

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

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