Convert Kilometers to Nautical Miles

About converting Kilometers to Nautical Miles

Kilometers (km) and Nautical Miles (nmi) are both units of length, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Kilometers figure by 0.54. Ten Kilometers comes to 5.3996 Nautical Miles, and a hundred works out at 53.9957 Nautical Miles.

Rule of thumb: going from Kilometers to Nautical Miles divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 1.852 Kilometers to make a single Nautical 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 Nautical Mile?

A nautical mile is exactly 1,852 meters, and unlike every other unit here it was chosen to mean something geographically: it is one minute of latitude, one sixtieth of a degree. That is enormously convenient at sea and in the air, because a navigator can read distance straight off a chart’s latitude scale with dividers and no arithmetic. It is also the parent of the knot — one nautical mile per hour — which is why ships and aircraft report speed in knots rather than km/h.

To put both in perspective: a kilometer is about a twelve-minute walk, while a nautical mile is one minute of latitude on any chart.

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