Convert Kilometers to Miles

About converting Kilometers to Miles

Kilometers (km) and Miles (mi) are both units of length, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Kilometers figure by 0.6214. Ten Kilometers comes to 6.2137 Miles, and a hundred works out at 62.1371 Miles.

Rule of thumb: going from Kilometers to Miles divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 1.6093 Kilometers to make a single Mile. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

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.

What is a Mile?

The mile descends from the Roman mille passus — a thousand paces, each pace being two steps. Its modern length of exactly 1,609.344 meters looks arbitrary because it is: the figure was fixed by the 1959 international yard and pound agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meters and let the mile fall out of it at 1,760 yards. It remains the road-distance unit of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the unit runners think in for road races.

To put both in perspective: a kilometer is about a twelve-minute walk, while a mile takes most people fifteen to twenty minutes to walk.

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